Interactive Kiosk at the Texas Tech University Libraries

The academic library, given its often privileged position on campus, is the information source that can include directional as well as general campus facts among the myriad of print and e-resources for reference. Also, an academic library's audiences can be quite varied and include prospective students or parents seeking more general knowledge of the building and the campus. Many times this need for information drives patrons to the library service desks. Sometimes, especially during the high-demand seasons of new student orientation and beginning of the fall semesters, the desk is so busy that many patrons will leave because they don't have the time to wait. To address this immediate need for information, Texas Tech University Libraries developed an interactive kiosk to provide general information for frequently asked questions in a more efficient, creative, and interactive way. The kiosk provides a fun method of satisfying a patron's information needs without the requirement of a staff member or the need to wait in line for help. The kiosk is available as long as the Library is open and provides a variety of useful answers to general questions, as well as facts about the Library.     

Understanding How the Arts Can Enhance Learning

Understanding how the arts can enhance learning has long been discussed and debated among educators, students, parents, artists, art historians, and philosophers. Many anecdotal examples reference the value and benefits of the arts in a range of fields and learning domains. Emerging methodologies in the brain sciences have added new perspectives and research‐based approaches to better understand the role the arts might play in learning. Psychologists, cognitive scientists, and now neuroscientists are approaching this topic by exploring memory, sensory systems, and other biological measures. The interdisciplinary and potentially interdependence of these fields to work together to identify the neurological mechanisms involved in the arts may offer educators, parents, and child care providers with important information about how we learning takes place. By bringing together uncommon and divergent thinking from a wide range of disciplines, there is an opportunity to change the way we teach, parent, and serve children using the arts to help enhance learning. This issue of Mind, Brain, and Education celebrates the range of approaches that are emerging to shed light and insight in this field.     

Supervision and evaluation: The Wyoming perspective

The intent of this study was to assess the perceptions and actions of Wyoming principals concerning their role in supervising and evaluating teachers. A survey was sent to all 286 principals in the state of Wyoming, of which, 143 returned surveys, a response rate of 50%. Findings suggested that principals utilized supervisory behaviors more often than evaluative behaviors. Elementary principals perceived their evaluative practices as significantly more prevalent than secondary principals. Furthermore, principals indicated that their greatest frustrations in supervising teachers were time, the evaluation instrument, and teachers’ unwillingness to change. Additionally, findings suggested that Wyoming principals utilized classroom walkthroughs because they provided a snapshot of teaching and provided a medium for providing feedback. In regards to developmental supervision, principals indicated that novice teachers received much more supervision than veteran teachers. However, their reported use of differentiated supervision only applied to teacher autonomy concerning professional development goals. Principals reported that teachers had little input concerning the methods by which they were supervised. Finally, a majority of the Wyoming principals felt that improvement plans were effective at changing mediocre teaching behaviors, but 40% were speculative that such plans truly remediated poor teachers.     

Exploring anomalies in Indigenous student engagement: findings from a national Australian survey of undergraduates

Increases in participation by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in higher education across Australia continue to be promising. However, it is also known that Indigenous students' attrition, retention and completion rates remain areas of concern. In this paper, we report our findings from an analysis of Indigenous student responses to the 2009 Australasian Survey of Student Engagement. Overall, Indigenous Australian students express positive responses in relation to engagement, but are more likely than non-Indigenous students to be planning to depart. We explore this somewhat unexpected anomaly, whilst also suggesting that much more needs to be known about our Indigenous students, including, for example, whom they may interact with at university; where they turn for support; and why they may decide to leave. Our findings strongly indicate that better national and institutional data are needed to address the current gaps in knowledge relating to Indigenous student populations in Australia and around the world.? In this paper, the term ‘Indigenous’ refers to Australian students who are of self-declared Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander background, while ‘non-Indigenous’ refers to all other Australians.     

Teaching ‘community engagement’ in engineering education for international development: Integration of an interdisciplinary social work curriculum

This article reviews the literature on challenges faced by engineering faculty in educating their students on community-engaged, sustainable technical solutions in developing countries. We review a number of approaches to increasing teaching modules on social and community components of international development education, from adding capstone courses and educational track seminars to integrating content from other disciplines, particularly the social sciences. After summarising recent pedagogical strategies to increase content on community-focused development, we present a case study of how one engineering programme incorporates social work students and faculty to infuse strategies for community engagement in designing and implementing student-led global engineering development projects. We outline how this interdisciplinary pedagogical approach teaches students from the two disciplines to work together in addressing power balances, economic and social issues and overall sustainability of international development projects.     

Strategies that promote historical reasoning and contextualization: a pilot intervention with urban high school students

Reading and Writing - The purpose of this study was to compare the effectiveness of two types of historical problem-solving instruction with advanced urban high school students’...