Transfer Between Community Colleges and 4-Year Colleges: The All-American Game

ABSTRACT

In this article, the authors introduce a novel way, using the metaphor of a baseball game, to evaluate and measure community college student progress for those whose stated goal is to transfer to a 4-year institution and, ultimately, earn a bachelor's degree. The proposed framework of “the Transfer Game” is an outgrowth of the Transfer and Retention of Urban Community College Students (TRUCCS) project, which is a longitudinal study of 5,000 community college students from the 9-campuses of the Los Angeles Community College District. The goal of the project is to explain how the “all-American game” provides a method to measure, comprehend, and visualize student progression, and identify the factors that predict both success and barriers. The framework provides a scholarly comparison of the all-American game of baseball to the All-American invention of the community college.     

Decision-oriented frameworks for management information systems design

Despite the rapid growth in the use of computers in organizations, few of the resulting systems have had a significant impact on the way in which management makes decisions. Frameworks are needed which aid in understanding the structure of management information systems, toward providing focus and improving the effectiveness of systems efforts.This paper surveys recent conceptual and empirical work related to development of decision-oriented frameworks for management information systems design, particularly as related to the improving the management of organizations.     

The public mission of universities in South Africa: community engagement and the teaching and researching roles of faculty members

Tertiary Education and Management - Community engagement as a public mission of higher education is widely accepted in South Africa. This is articulated in White Paper 3 on the transformation of...     

Processing procedural documents: A cognitive model for following written directions

This paper reviews empirical literature on how people use documents to perform tasks. We examine studies that have been published under the topics of: following written directions, reading maps, following instructions, using job performance aids, and processing procedural texts. Documents that contain a procedure, such as a set of directions, require transformation of information. Such transformation frequently requires converting a procedure represented verbally in a text into a procedure represented behaviorally in a performance. To accomplish this transformation, we propose that students must: (a) form a conceptual model of the performance; (b) encode procedures from the document; (c) engage in self-testing; and (d) conduct self-corrections to repair mistakes. We further propose that these operations are performed most efficiently with distinctive information resources. An overview of the task is likely to be most effective in facilitating conceptual model formation. Procedural information that emphasizes temporal characteristics of the performance will facilitate the encoding of procedures. A representation of the outcome (usually graphic) improves self-testing, and the comparison of the outcome with progress in the workspace leads to most effective self-correction. This process-resource interaction minimizes the number and complexity of transformations required to process procedural documents.     

Rose Blanche in Translation

This comparative study focuses on three editions of Rose Blanche, Roberto Innocenti's picturebook portrayal of a young girl who discovers a Nazi concentration camp on the outskirts of her German city. The original text, written in French by Christophe Gallaz to accompany Innocenti's illustrations, was translated into English and published in the United States; this text is compared with the British text, rewritten by Ian McEwan, and the German text, translated by Abraham Teuter. An examination of differences in the three texts demonstrates some of the ways in which cultural, aesthetic, national, ideological, pedagogical, and economic issues influence the translation of a children's book.     

The rhythmic structure of mother-infant interaction in term and preterm infants

The purpose of this study was to quantify social interaction rhythms in 3- and 5-month-old term and preterm infants and their mothers. Infant-mother dyads were videotaped in a 3-min face-to-face paradigm. For each second of the interaction, separate scores were assigned to infant and mother indicating levels of affective involvement, creating 2 180-sec time series. Spectral and cross-spectral techniques were used to quantify periodicities in each member of the dyad and to estimate the synchrony or coherence of interactional rhythms between each infant and mother. Results showed the existence of periodicities in the behavior of each infant and mother at 3 and 5 months, with most subjects showing spectral peaks between .022 and .10 Hz. Increases from 3 to 5 months in behavioral periodicities were found for infants and mothers as well as for the coherence between infant-mother dyads. Term dyads showed higher coherence than preterm dyads at both 3 and 5 months. Term infants more often led the interaction at both ages. These results were taken as evidence that behavioral periodicities, which may be biologically based, underlie early mother-infant interaction and provide a temporal structure for the organization of cognitive and affective experience. Differences in synchrony between term and preterm infants may explain later reported differences in language between these groups.     

Anatomy — The patient's or the book's?

An attempt to replace a tradition of theoretical rote memorization by objective oriented learning is described. The experiment reported concerns teaching of basic medical sciences in the context of clinical application.Both students and teachers were enthusiastic about the approach employed. In practice both groups experienced difficulty in meeting some of the demands of an independent learning system. The problems encountered were concerned with the difficulty of breaking old learning habits and with the simultaneous existence of traditional and experimental teaching systems in the same curriculum. These problems are discussed. The argument against the traditional approach and in favour of that of the experiment, is presented.