Nature watch

Marine turtles are known to migrate several thousands of kilometres between their feeding and breeding grounds. These migrations have been studied by the application of metal tags on flippers, with intense monitoring at nesting sites, and opportunistic recovery in offshore waters, providing information on turtle movements. Often, several thousands of tags have been applied with very low levels of recapture. Satellite telemetry is a high-tech, and expensive, method to track turtles during their migration across the open ocean. Molecular genetic techniques have offered ways to track turtles both through space and time. The comparison of genetic haplotypes from different regions makes it possible to study population structure, test theories of natal homing, and even assign feeding populations to nesting sites and vice versa. The study of these haplotypes has also made it possible to look at relationships between species and populations, and study evolutionary biogeography or phylogeography of these animals.     

Phonemic analysis and reading development: some current issues

The first paper published in the Journal of Research in Reading on the topic of phonological awareness ( Schreuder & van Bon, 1989 ) appeared some fifteen years after the seminal paper by Liberman, Shankweiler, Fischer and Carter (1974) , which had demonstrated that there was a relationship between spoken word segmentation ability and reading acquisition. That the field had moved on in those fifteen years is evident in the sophistication of the questions addressed by Schreuder and van Bon. I present here a brief summary of Schreuder and van Bon's paper, and explore how some of the issues they discuss have been developed over the subsequent fifteen years.     

Electronic Course Surveys: Does automating feedback and reporting give better results?

This paper discusses an electronic course survey system designed to support evaluation of a modular programme in management taught through distance education. The scale and communication issues raised by distance education, when compounded by a complex rolling modular programme, make conventional evaluation complicated, slow and expensive. To overcome these problems, an automated evaluation process was introduced, partly based on web-based surveying, but significantly emphasising the reporting process and allowing performance indicators and complex analyses to be embedded in high quality word-processed reports, that can be quickly and easily generated after each presentation of a module. The paper discusses the system and the impact that it has had on the evaluation process, before looking to future opportunities for developments in this field, and discussing some of the implications - both expected and unanticipated - that have come out of using automation in the evaluation process.     

A comparison of freshmen and seniors on general and specific essay tests of critical thinking

There is much interest in the impact of college on critical thinking ability. Freshmen and seniors at a mideastern university were given either a general instruction or multiple specific instructions for critically evaluating one of two articles. All critiques were in essay form. Seniors provided more appropriate criticisms to both kinds of instructions for both articles. However, the absolute level of performance of seniors reflected major deficiencies in applying critical evaluation skills. It was concluded that while college seems to be having an impact, greater emphasis is needed on more directly teaching critical thinking skills in the classroom.