Academic graduate work in academic librarianship: Historicizing ACRL's terminal degree statement

Prior to ACRL's 1975 terminal degree statement, library literature dexterously debated the benefits that graduate study in academic disciplines brought to librarianship. Since the issuance of the statement this debate has faded. This article reassesses six decades of literature to indicate that the statement is historical and unsound.     

Taking leaps of faith: Evaluation criteria and resource commitments for early-stage inventions

Successfully developed academic inventions have the potential to spawn new technological domains, form the basis of thriving business ventures, and improve the well-being of society. However, evaluating whether an early-stage scientific invention truly has such potential is extremely difficult, and financially backing such inventions is highly risky. And yet, organizations and their evaluators still back some of these inventions with resources for further development. We investigate this puzzle to pinpoint how and why evaluators decide to offer resource commitments at early stages, despite the red flags raised using standard evaluation criteria. Many academic inventions need these initial resources to dispel concerns regarding their commercial feasibility, so evaluators need to take a leap of faith with their support to prematurely avoid eliminating high-potential opportunities. We tested our theory using text analysis on nearly 700 invention evaluation reports written by a university’s technology transfer experts. Our results revealed that evaluators backed inventions based on their feasibility (overcoming doubt and assessing maturity) and desirability (background familiarity and scientific complexity). Using the context of the research laboratory, our study insights can be applied to many management situations in which early-stage opportunities are assessed for resource commitments under high uncertainty.     

Female Administrators: A Crack in the Glass Ceiling

This experimental study investigates the effects of gender of the evaluator, gender of the applicant, and gender of the reference source at the screening stage of the selection process. Specifically, male and female principals were asked to evaluate re´sume´s and reference letters of hypothetical male and female applicants for the focal position of assistant principal. In the context of selection of an assistant principal, the authors hypothesized that male principals would prefer male applicants and female principals would prefer female applicants. This hypothesis was based on the sex similarity-attraction paradigm. The sex similarity-attraction paradigm suggests that same-sex applicants will be regarded as more similar than opposite-sex applicants (Gallois, Callan & Palmer, 1992) and that applicants who are perceived as similar will be evaluated favorably (Cardy & Dobbins, 1986). Finally, although the authors anticipated that sex similarity-attraction would support an interaction effect between gender of applicant and gender of rater, as strengthened by gender of the reference letter source, the findings did not support this interaction. In fact, the main effect for gender of applicant indicates that hypothetical female administrator candidates are evaluated significantly higher than hypothetical male administrator candidates. This is contrary to about half of past selection research that suggested female applicants are given lower evaluations than male applicants. Thus, these results may be an indication that the evaluations of female applicants for administrative positions are improving to the extent that female applicants were more likely to be offered employment interviews than male applicants.     

Effects of teacher gender and principal gender on ratings of teacher performance

The Ohio State University     

An analysis of factors related to the attitudes of regular classroom teachers toward mainstreaming mildly handicapped children

A model of factors was developed in order to examine variables that might be associated with the attitudes of regular classroom teachers toward mainstreaming mildly handicapped children. Using multiple linear regression analyses, the following variables were found to be significant predictors of a positive attitude toward mainstreaming: team-teaching, years of teaching experience (negative correlation), course in diagnosing learning and behavior problems, availability of resource teacher, previous special education teaching experience, number of courses taken in special education, number of students in classroom (25–27), and inservice program experience related to exceptional children. An examination of these predictors suggests that they may be used to select those regular educators who are likely candidates for implementing mainstreaming programs and that school systems can inhance their mainstreaming efforts by arranging the integration settings to conform with these predictors of positive attitude.     

Readable letter size and visibility for overhead projection transparencies

Conclusions The results of this investigation would indicate that the smallersize letters (elite and pica) should be avoided in the preparation of projectuals—certainly for viewing distances beyond 20 feet. Further investigation could be, and probably should be, conducted at distances less than 20 feet to determine if anything significant would be lost by employing these smaller sizes for the closer distances. The smaller sizes are likely to be sufficient for distances of 20 feet or less. At further distances where larger-size letters are needed, probably the most feasible approach would be to use the primer type¹available in many schools. It is quite interesting to note that four of the five grades found the 6/32 inch primer size type with serif to be more readable than the 6/32 inch bulletin type without serif. Many casual observers would erroneously suggest that the simple bulletin type would be less confusing and thus more readable. Needless to say, this observation may be a phenomenon of the sample and might not similarly be observed in a replication of the study. The largest size, that which was commercially recommended (8/32 inch), did not appear necessary; the 6/32 inch elite type (primer size) was statistically equal to the larger size in four of the five grades, while in the remaining grade, the primer size actually surpassed the commercially recommended size. The three largest sizes showed approximately equal, minimal change from closer to further viewing distances. In future studies, initial measures should be made of the visual acuity of the subjects to control this possible source of variation. Additional attention also needs to be paid to the characteristics of specific letters which make them more difficult to read, regardless of size.