ATR-FTIR as a tool for assessing potential for chemical ageing in Spandex/Lycra®/elastane-based fabric collections

The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia houses the world's most significant and comprehensive collection of Speedo swimwear and accessories. The museum has identified a problem with the long-term storage of certain Spandex/Lycra^® items where the elastane fibre has degraded leading to oil formation. Attenuated total reflection Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR) determined that most of these garments were manufactured using nylon-elastane fibres, and the elastane component comprises polyetherurethane or polyesterurethane polymers. Certain polyesterurethanes are known to be vulnerable to hydrolysis, and this was confirmed for a subset of the collection using two chemical testing protocols, and a thermal testing protocol that reproduced the oil formation. A polyetherurethane garment in the collection was unchanged by these tests. The oil from the thermal testing was confirmed as a breakdown product of the polyester component of the elastane fibre, using ATR-FTIR spectroscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, and time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry. The study demonstrates the value of ATR-FTIR for minimally invasive identification of elastane fabrics that may require specialized storage in a humidity-controlled environment.     

21st Century Anthropology Scholarship: A Citation Analysis

Abstract

A 2017 citation study looked at four scholarly anthropology journals in order to evaluate current research trends. This study examined the following journals: Current Anthropology, the American Anthropologist, the American Ethnologist, and the Journal of Anthropological Research. The results showed an average of 89.9 citations per article, which is a large increase over previous studies. The breakdown by the largest two categories showed 48.1% citations to total books, compared to 41.2% for scholarly journals. All other source types of citations comprised only 10.7% of total citations. These results were compared to a 2005 study by William Robinson and Paul Posten of the same four journals from 1999.     

English Teachers--Born or Made: A longitudinal study on the socialisation of English teachers

Much has been made in recent years of the different views teachers of English hold of their subject, but little work has been done on how these views are formed, or indeed how they may change over time. This paper, based on a longitudinal study conducted over two years, tracks one cohort of student English teachers, through their one-year post graduate course, at one department of education, into their first year of teaching. The research also provides detailed case studies from two other institutions.     

Food Safety Education Using Music Parodies

ABSTRACT:  Musical parodies of contemporary songs with their lyrics altered to address current food safety issues were incorporated into a variety of food safety educational programs and the effectiveness of the music was evaluated by semiquantitative and qualitative measures. Audiences receiving the music-enriched curricula included school foodservice supervisors, school foodservice managers, culinary arts instructors, culinary arts students, Family and Consumer Sciences teachers, and youth aged 8 to 12 y and studies were conducted in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Delaware. Among school foodservice supervisors, school foodservice managers, and culinary arts students, most participants were able to recall the main points of each song that was introduced in the curriculum. The culinary arts students were less likely to recall the main points of each song than were the other 2 groups, possibly because of the lack of prior knowledge of food safety practices as well as a lack of preference for the style of songs used. Family and Consumer Sciences teachers were enthusiastic about the use of the music but also identified potential barriers to the successful use of the music, due to the potential lack of appropriate audiovisual equipment, a lack of skills in using such equipment, and time constraints for the use of music in curricula due to the strong emphasis on end of year testing. Participants in the summer youth groups demonstrated significant increases between pre- and posttest examinations of safe food handling behaviors and most were able to quote lines or phrases from the songs.     

The Early Reading Research: The impact of instructional psychology

The Early Reading Research (ERR), is a six-year research project investigating the most effective approaches to: improving reading standards; ensuring that every child can reach age and skill appropriate targets in reading; and, preventing the occurrence of reading difficulties. This article reviews the educational and psychological research into teaching reading and relates recent findings to theories and research emerging from instructional psychology, which underpins the 'framework for teaching reading' used within the ERR. Two studies are then summarised which evaluated the impact of the ERR reading framework. Study 1 involved a two-year experimental study where the progress of children following the ERR framework during reception and Year 1, was compared to that of children taught to read through their usual classroom methods. Study 2 involved a one-year study where the progress of a sample of children within the ERR was compared to children following the National Literacy Project. The article concludes by highlighting some implications of the ERR for educational psychologists (EPs), the field of special education and the National Literacy Strategy.     

Power, Language, and Literacy in The Great Gilly Hopkins

To compensate for her feelings of anger and helplessness over her mother’s abandonment and subsequent displacements, the foster child Gilly Hopkins seeks power and agency through the primary means at her disposal: through the use of language and fairy tales. She constructs a Cinderella fantasy of an idealized mother who will rescue her. She also resonates strongly with the Rumpelstiltskin story, as it is a story about the power of language, and highlights a dynamic of exploitation that seems familiar to her. Through relationships with William Ernest, Trotter, Mr. Randolph, and Miss Harris, Gillie learns, however, to move beyond the habit of exploiting others as objects, and to experience the beauty of language for its own sake. Her emotional and psychological development can be charted through her changing relationship to the imaginative and expressive potentialities of language. Most importantly, literacy becomes not a basis for illusory control and manipulative power, but for the kind of human relationships that make possible the building of a self. Language becomes a rich inner resource, not simply a means for power over others.

Integrating Quantitative Literacy into Technical Writing Instruction

The authors argue that skills in quantitative literacy (QL) and quantitative reasoning (QR) augment students’ communicative effectiveness. This article offers a pedagogical framework and model for how QR can be productively interwoven with the rhetorical know-how of technical writing pedagogy. The authors describe their course redesign, present preliminary assessment data, and conclude by highlighting some implications not only for student learning, but also for the QL movement itself.     

Touching the screen: issues related to the use of touchscreen technology in early childhood education

This paper reports on a research project that investigated the use of touchscreens by children in early childhood and junior primary settings by introducing touchscreens in five classrooms in Melbourne. Several methods to obtain information about how children interacted with the touchscreens were used including observation, journals and field notes, and interviews. The research identified five key themes, relating to developmental issues, input device preference, technical issues, individual differences in children's use of the touchscreen and issues of collaboration.