Participant Change During an EPDA Institute: Personality,Attitudinal, and Learning Dimensions

This article reports a study of personality, attitude, and cognitive changes in experienced pupil personnel workers who participated in a retraining experience at an EPDA Institute. The subjects were from Detroit Metropolitan Area schools that have a large percentage of disadvantaged pupils. The program offered an interdisciplinary approach since its designers believe that traditional approaches are inadequate for disadvantaged youth. Measures were taken of cognitive, attitudinal, and personality need changes in the subjects over two summers and a part-time academic year. Significant overall content learnings were found, while the most drastic attitudinal changes took place in understanding. The subjects differed from entering counselor trainees and demonstrated more understanding responses than students enrolled in administration.     

Coaching Students in Research Skills: A difficult task for teachers

The new Dutch curriculum for the upper levels of secondary education requires students to use research skills. Students have to conduct a number of small research projects, culminating in the writing of a research paper as a formal part of the new examinations. Although the literature offers abundant advice on how to write a good research paper, comparatively little research seems to have been done on this subject as it relates to the classroom. This article describes some results of a study which examines the problems encountered by students when carrying out research projects and which looks into the difficulties teachers face when coaching students in research skills. These obstacles are particularly apparent in the initial stages of the research process. Problem finding is revealed to be an underdeveloped skill in education. Although teachers score much better than students on a test of research skills, finding an effective way to channel these superior skills into coaching methods that benefit students remains problematic. It is evident that procedural knowledge cannot be seen separately from declarative knowledge. Working together in interdisciplinary teams might help teachers overcome some of these problems.     

The Local Company Project: Involving Local Companies in Undergraduate Environmental Engineering Education

Technology is changing rapidly and industry needs to adapt continuously. Based on demands expressed by industry, Brunei University in the U.K. has developed a new and challenging undergraduate engineering programme. The programme is designed to address the two major concerns revealed by collaborating companies concerning the education and training of university engineering graduates. Firstly, there is a great need for environmentally aware engineers to help industry to cope with the increasing environmental pressures. Secondly, all engineers need to possess transferable skills, be capable of lifelong learning and of using a flexible approach to problem-solving. Personal as well as professional maturity are seen as the keys to success as a professional engineer. The new programme called Special Environmental Engineering (SEE) employs project-based learning in the educational process. This paper summarizes lessons learned from project-based learning using the SEE Local Company Project as an example.     

A COMMENT ON McCAULEY AND COLBERG'S CONCEPTION OF CROSS-CULTURAL TRANSPORTABILITY OF TESTS

Recently McCauley and Colberg described a theory of transportability, an approach to devising test items for cross-cultural comparative research that are free from unwanted cultural effects. They also provided data to demonstrate the feasibility of their approach. In this comment it is argued that the transportability notion resembles earlier cross-cultural work and does not add new insights into the vexed problem of cross-cultural comparison. It is also stated that McCauley and Colberg's statistical checks do not preclude the possibility of bias.     

Practising what we preach: working together to further scientific collaboration

The recent shift in Internet usage – from content being simply consumed by users, to content that users create, interact with, and share – has challenged traditional publishing values and processes. This has, in turn, brought opportunities to explore and experiment with new technologies in the publishing industry. Elsevier's social bookmarking and collaboration tool for researchers, 2collab, was launched in November 2007 to address this shift. This article reviews how 2collab was built in close partnership with researchers, and how traditional processes had to be adapted to facilitate this. It outlines the current use of social applications among scientists and shows that nearly 50% of researchers anticipate that social tools like 2collab will have at least some impact on all areas of their research in the next five years.