Regional Campus Learning Commons: Assessing to Meet Student Needs

ABSTRACT

At the University of Connecticut, Learning Commons were created at each of the five regional campuses as was reported in the Journal of Library Administration (Dryden & Roseman, 2010). This article will discuss the further evolution of the commons at each campus, based on a variety of assessment methods that were undertaken. These included technology surveys, online space assessment surveys, focus groups, marketing surveys, and virtual focus groups. This article shares assessment models which may be useful for the evaluation of learning commons at other academic libraries.     

Reported Argumentativeness and Verbal Aggressiveness Levels: The Influence of Type of Argument

Arguments in interpersonal relationships can be divided into two types: public issue arguments and personal issue arguments. This study examines the ability of type of argument, trait argumentativeness and verbal aggressiveness, and gender to predict reported argumentativeness and verbal aggressiveness levels related to a particular argument episode. Reported argumentativeness levels were higher in the public argument condition, and reported verbal aggressiveness levels were higher in the personal argument condition. Trait argumentativeness predicted reported argumentativeness levels better in the public argument condition than the personal argument condition, suggesting that type of argument may serve as a moderator for the relationship between trait argumentativeness levels and argument-specific argumentativeness levels. Implications for using these two scales to examine interpersonal argument are discussed.     

Teaching MSW Social Work Practice in a Blended Online Learning Environment

Blended learning is a newly emerging trend in higher education and is defined as the purposeful integration of synchronous and asynchronous learning to provide educational activities that maximize the benefits of each. This paper describes the development of a graduate social work foundation-year practice class in a blended online environment in which both asynchronous and synchronous activities transpire online. The course's underlying pedagogical principles are illustrated, and the perceptions of instructional faculty are reported in key areas, including engagement and participation, activities, and the challenges of technology, socialization, etiquette, and nonverbal cues.     

Loquacity and quantity of constructs as predictors of social perspective‐taking

Over the past decade, considerable attention has been devoted to cognitive complexity in the human communication literature. However, the extent to which loquacity, or simple amount of verbal response to stimuli, rather than cognitive processes, has been measured by indices supposed to measure complexity is questionable. One issue that emerges from this controversy concerns whether partialing out the variance in variables, such as social perspective‐taking, due to loquacity would lead to a low amount of shared variance between complexity and such variables. In the present study, cognitive complexity scores based on the Role Category Questionnaire correlated significantly with social perspective‐taking scores. However, the results of a multiple regression analysis indicated that cognitive complexity scores did not contribute significantly to the prediction when loquacity was entered as the first variable in the equation.     

Conditions influencing rural and town women's participation in the labor force : Some important considerations

This paper suggests that changes in the basic conditions of subsistence of Bangladeshi families, particularly increasing destitution and landlessness, are prime factors in forcing increasing numbers of rural and urban women into the wage sector of the economy. It has been found that as an initial step towards women's control over their own lives, participation in the labor force may be considered an advance for women in comparison to previous forms of labor. It is suggested, however, that the patterning of wage labor in less developed capitalist countries, to the extent that it follows Western trends, has every possibility of duplicating in Bangladesh the structures of women's exploitation and differential income earning opportunities hindering women's development in other countries, It is also suggested that traditional forms of social control legitimating and governing the subordination of women in Bangladesh are being undermined by worsening socio-economic conditions. It has been found that the traditional system controlling women's subordination, which is known as purdah, may be losing saliency for increasing numbers of rural families. This leads one to conclude that the development and extension of a wage economy brings new forms of social control involving contradictory results, exploitation, and dependence on the one hand, and changing conditions of independence and control on the other.