Personalizing Library Service to Improve Scholarly Communication

This presentation summarized the results from primary research conducted by Profera and Jefferson that aimed to understand what libraries are doing to reach library end users. The authors aimed to explore the relationship between the physical and virtual library space and if this has an impact on student and faculty use of library resources. The study also sought to understand the extent to which libraries are already conducting marketing efforts, the success they have had in doing so, and how publishers can help to enhance the library/end user experience.     

Guiding Principles for a Research Schools Network: Successes and Challenges

Building on J. Dewey's (1907) original work with the laboratory school, the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Texas–Arlington is expanding the original concept to include partners throughout a school system and the community in order to support and advance learning in multiple learning environments. The goal is to establish a network of schools, administrators, teachers, graduate students, and policymakers; not necessarily everyone, but a critical mass of vested partners working collaboratively in what we call a Research Schools Network (RSN). The Network uses the new field of Mind, Brain and Education (MBE) to develop a theoretical and practical foundation for addressing educational challenges in the community. This article explores how the college has partnered with Arlington Independent School District (AISD), neighboring universities, the business community, and our state representative to develop and define new paradigms that not only promote MBE as an academic field, but also inform and are informed by the community it seeks to serve.     

Methodological Issues in Ethnic and Racial Identity Research With Ethnic Minority Populations: Theoretical Precision,Measurement Issues,and Research Designs

This article takes stock of research methods employed in the study of racial and ethnic identity with ethnic minority populations. The article is presented in three parts. The first section reviews theories, conceptualizations, and measurement of ethnic and racial identity (ERI) development. The second section reviews theories, conceptualizations, and measurement of ERI content. The final section reviews key methodological and analytic principles that are important to consider for both ERI development and content. The article concludes with suggestions for future research addressing key methodological limitations when studying ERI.     

Planning Instruction to Meet the Intent of the Next Generation Science Standards

The National Research Council’s Framework for K-12 Science Education and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States in Next Generation Science Standards: For states, by states. The National Academies Press, Washington, 2013) move teaching away from covering many isolated facts to a focus on a smaller number of disciplinary core ideas (DCIs) and crosscutting concepts that can be used to explain phenomena and solve problems by engaging in science and engineering practices. The NGSS present standards as knowledge-in-use by expressing them as performance expectations (PEs) that integrate all three dimensions from the Framework for K-12 Science Education. This integration of core ideas, practices, and crosscutting concepts is referred to as three-dimensional learning (NRC in Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. The National Academies Press, Washington, 2014). PEs state what students can be assessed on at the end of grade level for K-5 and at the end of grade band for 6–8 and 9–12. PEs do not specify how instruction should be developed nor do they serve as objectives for individual lessons. To support students in developing proficiency in the PEs, the elements of the DCIs will need to be blended with various practices and crosscutting concepts. In this paper, we examine how to design instruction to support students in meeting a cluster or “bundle” of PEs and how to blend the three dimensions to develop lesson level PEs that can be used for guiding instruction. We provide a ten-step process and an example of that process that teachers and curriculum designers can use to design lessons that meet the intent of the Next Generation of Science Standards.     

Preparing students for future learning with Teachable Agents

One valuable goal of instructional technologies in K-12 education is to prepare students for future learning. Two classroom studies examined whether Teachable Agents (TA) achieves this goal. TA is an instructional technology that draws on the social metaphor of teaching a computer agent to help students learn. Students teach their agent by creating concept maps. Artificial intelligence enables TA to use the concept maps to answer questions, thereby providing interactivity, a model of thinking, and feedback. Elementary schoolchildren learning science with TA exhibited “added-value” learning that did not adversely affect the “basic-value” they gained from their regular curriculum, despite trade-offs in instructional time. Moreover, TA prepared students to learn new science content from their regular lessons, even when they were no longer using the software.     

Examining direct and indirect effects of classroom procedural justice on online students’ willingness to talk

Interest in understanding what constitutes effective instruction online continues to grow as more universities adopt mediated formats for teaching. However, engaging students in productive, content-related conversation in online courses remains challenging. Several variables may influence student willingness to talk in online classes – procedural justice, affect towards the instructor, and perceived cognitive learning – each with probable direct and indirect effects on student inclinations for communicating in the classroom. This study proposes a model predicting student willingness to talk in online classes. Results indicate initial support for the proposed model, and practical implications for instructors teaching online courses are suggested.