Copyright and Intellectual Property: What You Need to Know

In this session of the NASIG and Society of Scholarly Publishing joint program, a panel of lawyers conversed on topics related to the creation of copyright policy that impact both librarians and publishers. The topics chosen were selected to highlight areas of possible controversy between librarians and publishers. Dialogue centered on the concepts of international first sale, fair use, licensing and mass digitization, library exceptions, possible revisions to sections of the U.S. Copyright Act, and the relationships between accessibility issues and copyright. Through conversational style discussions the panelists conveyed to the audience that achieving balance in copyright law is challenging and the process often creates constructive tension among the rights of stakeholders.     

Conceptualizing impact in academic development: finding a way through

This paper explores the notion of impact in the context of academic development programs and considers how it can be described and understood. We argue that impact has a range of meanings and academic development programs such as graduate certificates have a broad group of stakeholders and hence the impact is different for each group depending on how the program aims and objectives are defined and understood. In finding a way through the difficulties of evaluating impact in academic development we point to the importance of clearly conceptualizing the notion of impact, a careful identification of the assumptions underpinning any program and an understanding of who academic development will benefit and how. We suggest that impact in academic development cannot be understood without taking account of the range of possible impacts and the difficulty of attributing simple cause and effect to a complex environment.     

Understanding inclusive STEM high schools as opportunity structures for underrepresented students: Critical components

Inclusive STEM high schools (ISHSs) can be viewed as opportunity structures for students underrepresented in STEM. By opportunity structures, we mean an education that provides not only access to high quality STEM curriculum and instruction or “opportunity to learn,” but also the capacity to create learning environments where students can build STEM social capital and the dispositions, knowledge, skills, and networks to be successful in STEM college majors and careers. This is a cross‐case analysis of case studies that describe the design and implementation of eight “exemplar” ISHSs. Beginning with 10 hypothesized critical components, we found evidence for all 10, but present in unique patterns of prominence, depending on the school context. Further inductive analysis located an additional four emergent critical components that complete the picture of how these successful ISHSs were able to achieve their goals. Importantly, across schools, four components stood out as foundational: a flexible and autonomous administrative structure; a college‐preparatory, STEM‐focused curriculum for all; well‐prepared STEM teachers and professionalized teaching staffs; and supports for students in underrepresented groups. Although many of the critical components found in the ISHSs are also found in the school reform literature, these schools also had characteristics unique to STEM education. This paper is important in understanding STEM high schools as opportunity structures and as a school reform alternative that can help solve equity and social mobility gaps in STEM.     

Preference effects on acquisition and retention of concurrent discriminations by rhesus monkeys

Ten rhesus monkeys were trained on five tasks, each of which consisted of eight concurrently presented object discrimination problems. Sequences of presentation were devised to allow one, two, or three new tasks to intervene between acquisition and retention tests or to provide a 30-day period of no testing. Equivalent and proficient performances were obtained in all retention tests, and no relationship was observed between retention and the initial preference characteristics of various objects. Object pReferences did produce significant influences upon acquisition, but these effects were not as pronounced in early tasks as in later ones. An additional retention test provided support for the contention that monkeys do not necessarily process information about specific object pair discriminations. Rather, they appeared to retain a list of previously rewarded objects even when object pairings were different from those provided during acquisition. Concurrent discriminations involving many distinct objects were resistant to interference and independent of preference characteristics over long retention periods.     

Designing an Interactive Web-based Tutorial for Health Sciences Students: A Collaborative Library Project

This column describes the creation of an online interactive tutorial for health sciences students in a general library at a large, urban university. The project was a collaborative effort among the health sciences subject librarian, the library’s web programmer, an assessment and user services librarian, and an instructional support specialist. The column details the initial exploration, design, web programming, student usability study, and subsequent upgrades to the tutorial. Implementation of the tutorial is discussed as well as sampled student input. The effort resulted in the design of improved and more versatile open access coding available for any library to use.     

PolicyMap: Mapping Social Determinants of Health

PolicyMap is a mapping resource from The Reinvestment Fund that offers access to a range of demographic and health-related data, including chronic disease incidence, health care provider locations, food access, mass transit, and other social determinates of health. This column features a sample search and describes the types of outputs available with PolicyMap.     

On the cultural validity of science assessments

We propose the concept of cultural validity as a form of test validity in science assessment. The conceptual relevance of cultural validity is supported by evidence that culture and society shape an individual's mind and thinking. To attain cultural validity, the process of assessment development must consider how the sociocultural context in which students live influences the ways in which they make sense of science items and the ways in which they solve them. These sociocultural influences include the values, beliefs, experiences, communication patterns, teaching and learning styles, and epistemologies inherent in the students' cultural backgrounds, as well as the socioeconomic conditions prevailing in their cultural groups. We contend that current approaches to handling student diversity in assessment (e.g., adapting or translating tests, providing assessment accommodations, estimating test cultural bias) are limited and lack sociocultural perspective. We find that attaining cultural validity may conflict with current basic principles and assumptions in testing, such as item independence and standardization. We discuss the ways in which adopting cultural validity as a criterion for test validity makes it necessary to shift assessment paradigms and adopt new procedures for assessment development. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 38: 553–573, 2001