The content and form of reader-generated questions: implications for teaching questioning strategies

Two classes in Developmental Reading were trained in question-formulation and were then required to ask any number and type of questions based on four texts. Three inter-raters coded the questions for their content and form. The results of the study showed the dominance of recognition or retrieval questions, suggesting the students’ proficiency in reading for details and conversely, a deficiency in critical reading. In terms of form, although 57% of the questions were coherent and grammatical, this fact alone may not indicate a high English Language proficiency. There were also many instances of the direct copying of phrases from the original text, pointing to the students’ lack of confidence or ability in summarizing and paraphrasing.     

Rural underpinnings for resiliency and linkages (rural): A safe schools/healthy students project

Rural Underpinnings for Resiliency and Linkages (RURAL) is an example of a Safe Schools/Healthy Students (SS/HS) project. RURAL provides services to children and families in a rural Kansas county. The county's rates of juvenile alcohol and illicit drug use are higher than state averages. The RURAL project was designed to enhance existing partnerships among three school districts, the local community mental health center, law enforcement, the regional prevention center, and Fort Hays State University. A significant number of evidence‐based strategies were implemented in the schools and community in a short period of time. Using a public health approach to increase school safety and promote healthy behaviors, RURAL introduced strategies designed to provide universal prevention for the school population, early intervention for at‐risk children and families, and intensive services for those with the greatest needs. Services were provided to students (preschool–young adults) and their families. School psychologists held key roles in the development, implementation, and management of the project. Preliminary evaluation findings are presented, and the importance of local process and outcome evaluation is discussed. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Psychol Schs 40: 531–547, 2003.     

Navigating the academic borderlands as multiracial and trans* faculty members

ABSTRACT

Postsecondary institutions remain bastions of oppression, threat and harm for faculty who hold minoritized identities. While some scholars have explored the ways in which monoracial faculty of color and LGBT faculty members navigate an academy that is steeped in racism, genderism, sexism and other systems of oppression, there remains a paucity of scholarship focused on the experiences of multiracial faculty and nonbinary trans* faculty. Given the need to focus on faculty who hold liminal identities in relation to hegemonic identitarian illogic, we used Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderlands theory and an auto-ethnographic analysis to explore our academic experiences as faculty members whose identities place us betwixt-and-between socially constructed monolithic identity categories.     

Across the great divide: bridging the gap between understanding of toddlers' and older children's thinking

Research on very young children's cognitive development differs greatly from research on cognitive development in older children. The differences include the questions that are asked, the methods that are used to address them, the measures that are employed to provide relevant evidence, and the level of detail at which children's knowledge is represented. The research approaches are so different that they create an impression that infants' and toddlers' thinking differs qualitatively from that of preschoolers and older children. This impression, however, may reflect differences in research approaches rather than differences in children's thinking. In the present study, we attempted to bridge this gap by applying to toddlers a type of process analysis that has proved fruitful in studies of older children. Overlapping waves theory, trial-by-trial strategy assessments, and microgenetic methods were used to analyze 1.5- and 2.5-year-olds' problem solving and learning. The results demonstrated that changes in toddlers' strategies could be assessed reliably on a trial-by-trial basis, that the changes followed the basic form predicted by the overlapping waves model, and that analyses of toddlers' strategies could tell us a great deal about both qualitative and quantitative aspects of their learning. A componential analysis of learning that previously had been applied to older children also proved useful for understanding toddlers' learning. The analysis specified that cognitive change frequently involves five components: acquisition of new strategies; strengthening of the strategies in their original context; improved mapping of strategies onto novel problems; increasingly refined choices among variants of the strategies; and increasingly skillful execution of the strategies. Independent measures of these components indicated that strategic development in toddlers involves improvements in all five components. Analyses of individual differences in learning showed that the effects of distal variables, such as age and sex, could be partially explained in terms of their influence on mastery of the components, but that the distal variables exercised additional direct effects as well. The process of learning in toddlers closely resembled that of older children in other ways as well. Like older children, toddlers use multiple strategies over the course of learning; their choices among strategies are quite adaptive from early on; their choices become progressively more adaptive as they gain experience with the task; they switch strategies not only from trial to trial but within a single trial; their transfer of learning from one problem to the next is primarily influenced by structural relations between problems but also is influenced by superficial features; they show utilization deficiencies early in learning that they gradually overcome; and they show individual differences in learning that fall into a few qualitatively distinct categories. Perhaps most striking, the 1.5- and 2.5-year-olds emerged as active learners, who continued to work out the lessons of previous instruction in the absence of further instruction. That is, they integrated the lessons of their own problem-solving efforts with the previous instruction in ways that magnified the initial effects of the instruction. Overall, the findings indicated that the gap can be bridged; that theories, methods, measures, and representations of knowledge typically used with older children can improve our understanding of toddlers' problem solving and learning as well.     

Knowledge management and intellectual capital: an empirical examination of current practice in Australia

This paper reports the findings from a survey conducted in Australia to explore current practices relating to knowledge management (KM) and intellectual capital (IC). A systematic approach in the form of the intellectual capital web guided the research. Findings revealed that KM was perceived to be more about developing knowledge culture than about managing organisational processes and structure. IC was perceived to be more about human capital than about customer capital and organisational capital. It can therefore be concluded that human capital holds the greatest importance for KM and IC. However, when facilitators for knowledge creation and knowledge sharing were rated, organisation structure was perceived to be more important than organisational culture and information technology. For KM practices, participants indicated that more attention was paid to training and developing employees and less to measurement and reward and incentive issues. The importance of aligning the management of IC and KM was perceived to be more important than the difficulty of doing so.     

“This is Really Frying My Brain!”: How Affect Supports Inquiry in an Online Learning Environment

Research in Science Education -     

Interdisciplinarity and Bibliography in Rhetoric of Health and Medicine

This essay examines the current state of rhetoric of health and medicine as a subfield strongly dependent on interdisciplinary contributions. While some of the field's research comes from scholars trained in rhetorical history and theory, much of it consists of “rhetorical” commentary by nonrhetoricians in disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, history, and cultural criticism. The author examines questions of the relation of rhetorical research to discourse research in other fields, and considers what might count, especially in graduate student training, as rhetorical study of health and medicine.     

Public and Private Higher Education Institutions--Joint or Separate Evaluation and Ranking: The Polish Perspective

Since 1989, Polish higher education has been characterized by the emergence of a private sector of higher education as well as by the development of procedures and institutions for the evaluation and accreditation of higher education institutions and programmes in both sectors. Currently, the two sectors are evaluated separately by separate institutions. The authors call for the convergence of the two higher education sectors. Not only would evaluations of Polish higher education institutions thus be made more accurate and comprehensive, but the two sectors would learn from one another, and the private institutions and their students would become eligible to receive state grants.     

Reciprocal Bilingualism as a Challenge and Opportunity: The Case of Cyprus

Cyprus, the third largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, has never been monolingual. For over four hundred years the two main languages of the island have been Turkish and Greek. Turkish-Cypriots and Greek-Cypriots met each other in the streets, but seldom in the schools. The Greek language had a place in the Turkish-Cypriots' educational system during some periods in history, but the Greek-Cypriots have never given the Turkish language a place in their school system. Until recent years, the majority of Turkish-Cypriots have had communicative competence in Greek. In contrast, there have been very few Greek-Cypriots who had communicative competence in Turkish. The history of Cyprus clearly shows that lack of policies for bilingualism on the island has weakened the good relationship between the two folk groups. The fact that the learning of the global language English is happening to the detriment of the learning of Greek among Turkish-Cypriots makes the integration of the two main cultural groups of Cypriots more difficult. Using the island's historical background, especially the intercommunal dispute during the last four decades as a basis, the author argues for a closer relationship between the economic, social, cultural, including bilingual and educational policy of the two parts of Cyprus. He sees this as the best peace policy for the island.     

The triad-iodine deficiency,hyperlipidaemia, high coronary risk— in a ‘maternal-neonate’ population of rural Africa

In order to see the pattern of changes in differential serum lipid and lipoprotein fractions as a risk marker of coronary complication in paired ‘maternal—neonate’ blood samples in an iodine deficient zone, 26 pregnant women and their corresponding new born infants at term delivery from the iodine deficient Bassa region of Plateau state, Nigeria were assessed and the results were compared with those seen in a similar 44 group of women and their newborns assessed in non lodine deficient region of Jos. The serum thyroid function and lipid and lipoprotein profiles were determined by ‘ELISA’ and ‘enzymatic’ methods respectively. Urinary iodide excretion level was also measured in 14 pregnant women in Bassa, 23 pregnant women in Jos and 16 non pregnant control from Jos. Results indicate that the pregnant women assessed in Bassa were iodine deficient (P<0.01) and their thyroid status was strikingly reduced as reflected by a drop in serum level of T4/TBG ratio (P<0.01) and a rise in TSH (P<0.005) in comparison to that seen in Jos. There was marked hypertriglyceridaemia and total hypercholesterolaemia (P<0.005), with differential significant rise in LDL cholestotol fraction (P<0.005) in the women assessed in Bassa as compared to Jos. The HDL cholesterol however dropped less significantly in the group (P<0.05) with a concurrent marked rise (P<0.001) in the serum ratio of LDL cholesterol/HDL cholesterol, total cholesterol/HDL cholesterol and triglycerides/HDL cholesterol in the lodine deficient group. A similar pattern of changes were seen in the corresponding neonates in the Bassa group as compared to Jos group. It is concluded that the pregnant women and their newborn offsprings living in a longstanding environmental iodine deficiency run a higher risk of developing coronary complications than those living in non endemic region. It is striking that such newborns surrounded by a continued state of lodine deficient may at a later adult-period of life develop marked risk of coronary complication and other features of hyperlipidaemias associated with varying thyroid insufficiency and accompanied iodine deficiency disorders. Prophylaxis measures as intervention has been highlighted.