Criminal Justice Education: Are We Missing One-third of the Crime Triangle?

Theoretical explanations, systemic response, and policy work on offenders and specific crime types are the backbone of criminal justice curricula in the United States. However, a similar breadth and depth of education on crime victims appear to be lacking in traditional criminal justice curricula, despite voluminous research on victims of crime. In this exploratory study, the authors conducted a content analysis of 679 programs from the Academy of Criminal Justice (ACJS) website directory. Departmental and course-level variables were included in the analysis. Results indicate that while more than half of the programs have faculty with expressed interests in victimization, only 11% of programs studied required coursework on crime victims and/or victimization. Implications of the results are discussed.     

A Good Job Is Hard to Find … Until Students Know What They Do Best

Why don't more students use the career center? Shane J. Lopez argues that the traditional career center has not kept up with students’ needs. He suggests that they reimagine themselves as places where students identify and nurture their strengths in order to find fulfilling work and create fulfilling lives.     

Simplifying Causal Complexity: How Interactions Between Modes of Causal Induction and Information Availability Lead to Heuristic‐Driven Reasoning

This article considers a set of well‐researched default assumptions that people make in reasoning about complex causality and argues that, in part, they result from the forms of causal induction that we engage in and the type of information available in complex environments. It considers how information often falls outside our attentional frame such that covariation falls short, mechanisms can be nonobvious, and the testimony that others offer is typically subject to the same constraints as our own perceptions. It underscores the importance of multiple modes of causal induction used in support of one another when discerning and teaching about causal complexity. It considers the importance of higher order reflection on the nature of causality that recognizes the challenging features of complex causality and how it interacts with human causal cognition.     

A Behind‐the‐Scenes Guide to School‐Based Research

Schools are an important context for both basic and applied scientific research. Unlike the laboratory, however, the physical and social conditions of schools are not under the exclusive control of scientists. In this article, we liken collecting data in schools to putting on a theatrical production. We begin by describing the large cast of characters whose collaborative efforts make school‐based research possible. Next, we address the critics, including the university Institutional Review Board (IRB) and school administrators, whose feedback often improves the final study design. We then turn our attention to set building, stage directions, and rehearsals—key steps in the iterative process of refining study procedures. We end with a discussion of the day of data collection itself and activities that take place after the curtain drops. Throughout, we make recommendations based on our recent experience collecting data at several high schools.     

A retrospective look at replacing face‐to‐face embryology instruction with online lectures in a human anatomy course

Embryology is integrated into the Clinically Oriented Anatomy course at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center School of Medicine. Before 2008, the same instructor presented embryology in 13 face‐to‐face lectures distributed by organ systems throughout the course. For the 2008 and 2009 offerings of the course, a hybrid embryology instruction model with four face‐to‐face classes that supplemented online recorded lectures was used. One instructor delivered the lectures face‐to‐face in 2007 and by online videos in 2008–2009, while a second instructor provided the supplemental face‐to‐face classes in 2008–2009. The same embryology learning objectives and selected examination questions were used for each of the three years. This allowed direct comparison of learning outcomes, as measured by examination performance, for students receiving only face‐to‐face embryology instruction versus the hybrid approach. Comparison of the face‐to‐face lectures to the hybrid approach showed no difference in overall class performance on embryology questions that were used all three years. Moreover, there was no differential effect of the delivery method on the examination scores for bottom quartile students. Students completed an end‐of‐course survey to assess their opinions. They rated the two forms of delivery similarly on a six‐point Likert scale and reported that face‐to‐face lectures have the advantage of allowing them to interact with the instructor, whereas online lectures could be paused, replayed, and viewed at any time. These experiences suggest the need for well‐designed prospective studies to determine whether online lectures can be used to enhance the efficacy of embryology instruction. Anat Sci Educ 7: 234–241. © 2013 American Association of Anatomists.     

Fictitious Academic Expertise and Processing Resources

A previous study showed that pairs of students interacting in a second language produced more words when they were assigned a fictitious expert position in a specific competence dimension than when they were assigned a nonexpert position. It has also been shown that the usual level of expertise has an impact on the assigned fictitious expertise effect. The present study was designed to determine whether the processing capacity allotted to the current task could partly determine performance. A given position of expertise may demand a large or small attentional capacity. Two experiments were conducted using a dual-task paradigm. As expected, the different expertise positions led to different reaction times on the secondary task. The second experiment showed that the impact of assigning a position of expertise to students depends on their usual academic standing. This study supports the idea that in interactive situations, performance variations as a function of the expertise position can be partially explained by differences in the processing resources allocated to the task. Implications for teaching are discussed.