Family feelings

Rachel Theilheimer teaches early childhood education at Borough of Manhattan Community College in New York City.     

How Do Profoundly Deaf Children Learn to Read?

Reading requires two related, but separable, capabilities: (1) familiarity with a language, and (2) understanding the mapping between that language and the printed word (Chamberlain & Mayberry, 2000; Hoover & Gough, 1990). Children who are profoundly deaf are disadvantaged on both counts. Not surprisingly, then, reading is difficult for profoundly deaf children. But some deaf children do manage to read fluently. How? Are they simply the smartest of the crop, or do they have some strategy, or circumstance, that facilitates linking the written code with language? A priori one might guess that knowing American Sign Language (ASL) would interfere with learning to read English simply because ASL does not map in any systematic way onto English. However, recent research has suggested that individuals with good signing skills are not worse, and may even be better, readers than individuals with poor signing skills (Chamberlain & Mayberry, 2000). Thus, knowing a language (even if it is not the language captured in print) appears to facilitate learning to read. Nonetheless, skill in signing does not guarantee skill in reading—reading must be taught. The next frontier for reading research in deaf education is to understand how deaf readers map their knowledge of sign language onto print, and how instruction can best be used to turn signers into readers.     

An introduction to independent learning skills for incoming medical students

A partnership was initiated between educators of the College of Medicine and the McGoogan Library at the University of Nebraska Medical Center to establish a new educational component for incoming medical students. The objective was to encourage the development of the students' independent information seeking skills. A three-day seminar was introduced in which the process of seeking information was emphasized rather than the final product. Cooperative development of the seminar resulted in a fresh approach to educating medical students at the College of Medicine and the emergence of an ongoing instructional link between the library faculty and educators in the College of Medicine.     

Job ads,jobs, and researchers: Searching for valid sources

Research on librarians' roles and responsibilities often takes the form of content analysis of job advertisements found in aggregators such as print journals and websites. Whether these ads help us better understand librarianship depends on how representative the source data is for each study—the line going from jobs, to job ads, then to job ad sources. Print sources dominate even in studies published after 2000. This study examines where reasonably representative job advertisements for academic libraries may be found by starting at the origin: the institutions themselves. It finds that commonly used print sources provide only a small fraction of available positions (the majority of which are those in doctoral institutions), and even the most comprehensive aggregator misses nearly half of the available positions. Taking job ad samples directly from institutions is time-consuming but provides more representative data. Smaller colleges pose a particular challenge for finding ads as few of them have openings at any one time and few of their ads appear in national aggregators.     

为学生营造舒适的学习共享空间——以美国印第安纳州普渡大学印第安纳波利斯分校图书馆为例

对印第安纳州普渡大学印第安纳波利斯分校(IUPUI)图书馆非计算机区和非图书馆区域的系统观察表明,图书馆在个人和小组学习区域选择中有重要作用,图书馆是学生首选的学习场所。研究表明,图书馆座位的设置、空间使用情况包括笔记本电脑的使用需求及性别偏好等都是图书馆设计应该考虑的重要问题。