When Teaching Interferes With Learning: Balancing Accountability With the Unique Needs of Every Child

This article highlights the practices of administrators and master teachers who are trying to balance the needs for accountability, prescribed curriculum, and learning standards with a broader view of education that gives equal importance to skills not so easily quantified by standardized tests. The author makes a case for the use of careful observation of children, and documentation and analysis of project-based activities as a way to create a more complete picture of a child's skills while at the same time, supporting the innate desire to learn with which all children start life.     

Online Plagiarism Training Falls Short in Biology Classrooms

Online plagiarism tutorials are increasingly popular in higher education, as faculty and staff try to curb the plagiarism epidemic. Yet no research has validated the efficacy of such tools in minimizing plagiarism in the sciences. Our study compared three plagiarism-avoidance training regimens (i.e., no training, online tutorial, or homework assignment) and their impacts on students’ ability to accurately discriminate plagiarism from text that is properly quoted, paraphrased, and attributed. Using pre- and postsurveys of 173 undergraduate students in three general ecology courses, we found that students given the homework assignment had far greater success in identifying plagiarism or the lack thereof compared with students given no training. In general, students trained with the homework assignment more successfully identified plagiarism than did students trained with the online tutorial. We also found that the summative assessment associated with the plagiarism-avoidance training formats (i.e., homework grade and online tutorial assessment score) did not correlate with student improvement on surveys through time.     

A Spanish Soldier Becomes Mr Universe

A Spanish soldier has battled his way to the top of the beauty charts having been crowned Mr Universe. But Ruben Lopez vowed not to let the title of hottest man in the world go to his head, instead intending to stand by his troops and stay in military.     

Activities You Should Avoid This Summer

Everybody knows that the colleges care about more than GPAs and standardized testing.They look at curriculum strength,e s s a y s,t e a c h e r r e c s（推荐信）a n d,i n particular,extracurriculars.It is no secret that the admissions committees are very concerned about what you do with your spare time-be it volunteering with lepers（麻风病）in India or interning as a flying artist with Cirque du Soleil（太阳马戏团）.     

Library Space Assessment: User Learning Behaviors in the Library

As an essential department at a higher education institution and an informal learning space, little is known about how academic libraries contribute to student learning on campus. The Olin Library sought to learn the role of library space in our users' learning. We surveyed users about their learning behaviors in a specific space prior to a scheduled renovation and then in the same space after. We wanted to determine how the renovation changed users' perceptions of their learning behaviors in that space.     

A re-united pair: The conservation,technical study,and ethical decisions involved in exhibiting two terracotta orante statues from Canosa

The collection of the Worcester Art Museum includes two rare Magna Graecia terracotta funerary statues from Canosa, Italy dating to the third century BCE. Each depicts a female figure in prayer or lament known as an orante. The orantes were purchased by the museum in 1927, but shortly thereafter were separated. One was left in storage for nearly seven decades and the other was sold, and ultimately entered a private collection halfway around the world. The orantes were recently reunited under serendipitous circumstances and, after more than 80 years, will finally be placed on display at the Museum. As part of a comprehensive treatment, a technical study was carried out to identify the materials and methods used in their manufacture and in previous restoration campaigns. Materials were characterized by cross-section analysis, spot tests, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), neutron activation analysis (NAA), thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), thermoluminescence (TL) dating, and reflectance transformation imaging (RTI). The analytical findings helped inform the conservation treatments, which included structural work, surface cleaning using a Nd:YAG laser, and esthetic reintegration.     

Not an outgroup, not yet an ingroup: Immigrants in the Stereotype Content Model

Stereotype research depicts the generic immigrant as incompetent and untrustworthy. The current research expands this image, specifying key information dimensions (e.g. nationality, socioeconomic status) about immigrants. To see how perceivers differentiate among particular immigrant groups, we extend a model of intergroup perception, the Stereotype Content Model (SCM; Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, 2002. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 878–902), to immigrant subgroups. The SCM predicts that perception centers on competence and warmth, and relates to targets’ perceived status and competition within society. Specified by nationality, race, ethnicity, and class, images of immigrants differ by both competence and warmth, with most groups receiving ambivalent (low–high or high–low) stereotypes rather than the uniform low–low for the generic immigrant. As predicted, ambivalent stereotypes reflect target nationality combined with socioeconomic status, supporting the SCM's ambivalent stereotypes and social structural hypotheses, as well as better defining immigrant stereotypes and their contingencies.     

Assessing Standards in the “Real” Kindergarten Classroom

The importance of using standards as key components in the curriculum is documented in both popular and professional literature. One aspect of integrating standards into the curriculum is the role of assessment. The focus of this paper is to prepare early childhood teachers to assess children's knowledge of the standards within the routines and centers provided in the kindergarten learning environment. Teachers can use this information to develop authentic assessment strategies which typically occurs in a child's learning during center and group time.