Mentoring of Women Faculty: The Role of Organizational Politics and Culture

This article reports on a key finding of a phenomenological study on the mentoring experiences of women faculty. The study revealed the political climate of the organization as an essential attribute of this experience. Women faculty identified organizational culture and gender issues that affected the mentoring they received. This study suggests the need for human resource and organization development initiatives to facilitate the provision of academic mentoring for women faculty—individually, departmentally, and culturally—as a means to foster transformation and change in academic institutions.Sharon K. Gibson is an Assistant Professor of organization learning and development at the University of St. Thomas. She received her Ph.D. in adult education from the University of Minnesota. She holds an M.S.W. degree and graduate certificate in labor and industrial relations from the University of Michigan and a B.S. from Cornell University. Her research interests focus on developmental relationships including mentoring and coaching, strategic human resource and organization development, and adult learning.     

Between Policy and Practice: Archival Descriptions,Digital Returns and a Place for Coalescing Narratives

ABSTRACT

The Strathfieldsaye Estate collection at the University of Melbourne Archives is discussed in relation to recognising, protecting and reclaiming Koori (First Peoples of southeast Australia) heritage. The settler collection includes early 1900s photographs of Koori people within two distinct albums – a family album that includes a series of studio portraits of Koori adults and children, and an album depicting Koori families on Ramahyuck Aboriginal Mission Station. In the past, these albums have been defined by, and limited to, traditional archiving practices excluding Koori interpretation, authorship and social context. Restoring Koori ownership and authorship of intangible heritage plays a large part in consolidating ancestor photographs with Koori perspectives of identity and culture.     

An examination of the effectiveness of a sexual ethics curriculum

This article presents early evaluation data on the effectiveness of an ethics-based sex education program, the Sexual Ethics for a Caring Society Curriculum (SECS-C), which strives to develop adolescents’ thinking about sex so that they might act ethically in relation to other people and reflect ethically upon sexual messages and events in the world around them. Unlike typical evidence-based curricula that measure prevention goals from a health perspective, effectiveness was measured in terms of attitude change. Seventy-nine 9th graders from 7 diverse classrooms at a charter school received 8 lessons from the curriculum. Pre and post measures assessed belief in rape myths (the Illinois Rape Myth Acceptance Scale) and bystanderism (the Bystander Attitude Scale, Revised (BAS-R)). The students showed improvements with regard to rape myth attitudes but not with regard to their beliefs in the likelihood of intervening in troublesome sexual situations.     

Competency beliefs,positive affect,and gender stereotypes of elementary students and their parents about science versus other school subjects

Iowa students and parents completed related attitude and belief questionnaires about school subjects. Grade K–3 students received simpler questionnaires than did Grade 4–6 students or parents. Among Grade 4–6 children, girls perceived higher competence in reading than did boys, but boys perceived higher competence in physical science. All children perceived physical science competence lower than reading or math competence. Parents perceived boys as more competent in science. Girls like reading more than boys did; boys and girls did not differ in liking of science. Grade 4–6 children also expected lower grades in and attached lower importance to physical science than to reading. Parents perceived science as more important for boys and expected higher performance of boys. Jobs related to math or science were seen as more male dominated. These results provided a more comprehensive picture of attitudes and beliefs about science in the elementary school than had existed and suggested that attitudinal gender differences related to physical science begin to develop by the earliest elementary school years. Policy implications are that intervention programs designed to promote gender equity should be extended to the early elementary school years and also should address parental attitudes. Additional implications for policy and research are discussed. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 36: 719–747, 1999     

New Metrics for Employee Development

Organizations are increasingly concerned about human resource accountability and have turned to HR metrics as an economical way to assess results from human resource activities. Unfortunately, many existing development metrics have limited utility. In this article, we review and discuss existing metrics for employee development. Then, we present five new development metrics and that can provide a core set of metrics for any type of organization. These metrics will provide new perspectives that older metrics do not, and lead to better human resource development decisions.     

Effectiveness of Spanish intervention for first-grade English language learners at risk for reading difficulties

The effectiveness of an explicit, systematic reading intervention for first-grade students whose home language was Spanish and who were at risk for reading difficulties was examined. Participants were 69 students in 20 classrooms in 7 schools from 3 districts who initially did not pass the screening in Spanish and were randomly assigned within schools to a treatment or comparison group; after 7 months, 64 students remained in the study. The intervention matched the language of instruction of their core reading program (Spanish). Treatment groups of 3 to 5 students met daily for 50 min and were provided systematic and explicit instruction in oral language and reading by trained bilingual intervention teachers. Comparison students received the school's standard intervention for struggling readers. Observations during core reading instruction provided information about the reading instruction and language use of the teachers. There were no differences between the treatment and comparison groups in either Spanish or English on any measures at pretest, but there were significant posttest differences in favor of the treatment group for the following outcomes in Spanish: Letter-Sound Identification (d = 0.72), Phonological Awareness composite (d = 0.73), Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery-Revised Oral Language composite (d = 0.35), Word Attack (d = 0.85), Passage Comprehension (d = 0.55), and two measures of reading fluency (d = 0.58-0.75).