Faculty Staffing Patterns: Breadth and Flexibility in Professional Physical Therapy Programs

Innovative Higher Education - Overall trends of academic staffing in the US have indicated declines in tenure, increased use of contingent faculty, and stratification of teaching and research...     

Attributional (explanatory) thinking about failure in new achievement settings

Attributional (explanatory) thinking involves the appraisal of factors that contribute to performance and is instrumental to motivation and goal striving. Little is understood, however, concerning attributional thinking when multiple causes are involved in the transition to new achievement settings. Our study examined such complex attributional thinking in the transition from high school to university, a shift from familiar to novel learning environments, in the context of Weiner’s attribution theory (1972, 1985, 1995, 2006). At the start of the academic year, students rated the extent to which each of six common attributions contributed to poor performance to ascertain their relative importance to each other. A fixed order of attributions was reported as contributing to poor performance that was identical across five independent cohorts of first-year students (effort, test difficulty, strategy, professor quality, ability, luck, respectively). Cluster analysis revealed that students differed in combining these attributions into clusters suggesting diminished or enhanced control over poor performance. These differences in attribution clusters were associated with cognitive and affective outcomes at the start of Term 1, and with course grades and GPA at the end of Term 2. Student differences in complex attributional thinking are discussed in terms of transitions to new achievement settings.     

Sustainability education in a botanical garden promotes environmental knowledge,attitudes and willingness to act

Abstract

Creating behavior change to mobilize transitions toward sustainability is a significant challenge of our time. Inspired by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s Farmer Field School, we developed a novel community-based education program to engage people in local sustainability topics. In the Sustainable Communities Field School (Field School) program, advertised as team building tours, participants from local organizations are guided by instructors through University of British Columbia Botanical Garden, while receiving verbal and experiential education on topics of food systems and choices, biodiversity conservation, water conservation, and waste reduction. We found that after the Field School program, participants were significantly more knowledgeable about environmental issues, more connected to nature, showed greater intentions and willingness to engage in sustainability actions compared to garden visitors from the general public who did not go through the program. The results suggest that interactive sustainability education in a botanical garden setting can be a useful education model to mobilize public engagement on sustainability.     

An Unlikely Collaboration: How Academic and Special Libraries Can Help Each Other Survive

This column uses the occasion of James Matarazzo and Toby Pearlstein receiving the 2016 John Cotton Dana Award from the Special Libraries Association to reflect on their unique partnership, which has lasted decades and resulted in a wealth of research results and tools for corporate librarians. Despite the tools available to them to measure and demonstrate their value, however, special libraries continue to face closures, downsizing, and increasing pressure to do more with less. Today, special libraries are not alone in feeling this pressure, as even the academic libraries that have been so central to campus life find their place questioned. As Matarazzo and Pearlstein formed the unlikely yet lasting partnership of scholar and practitioner, perhaps academic libraries and non-academic special libraries can join forces to effectively leverage their collective experience and knowledge in demonstrating their worth to stakeholders.     

Self-Efficacy,Dropout Status,and the Role of In-School Experiences Among Urban,Young Adult School-Leavers and Non-leavers

The Urban Review - High school non-completion remains a stubborn reality in urban communities where low-income people of color are concentrated, putting young adults at risk for long-term economic...     

Teachers’ experiences with a state-mandated kindergarten readiness assessment

This study used an embedded mixed method design to examine teachers’ experiences with a state-mandated kindergarten readiness assessment during its inaugural year. Participants were 143 kindergarten teachers from one county in a Midwestern state. In general, teachers did not perceive the Kindergarten Readiness Assessment as useful for one of its intended purposes of guiding instruction. Our findings did not indicate an adversity to assessment in general. Rather, perceptions that the new KRA was less useful for practice seemed to stem from administration issues, problems with the content assessed by the KRA, and participants’ misunderstandings regarding the purpose of the KRA. Furthermore, participants reported that the KRA took away valuable time needed to help students adjust to their first time in formal schooling and needed to create a classroom community. Implications for creating and implementing kindergarten readiness and other assessments as well as preparing teachers to use readiness assessments are discussed.     

Theorising simulation in higher education: difficulty for learners as an emergent phenomenon†

Despite the widespread interest in using and researching simulation in higher education, little discussion has yet to address a key pedagogical concern: difficulty. A ‘sociomaterial’ view of learning, explained in this paper, goes beyond cognitive considerations to highlight dimensions of material, situational, representational and relational difficulty confronted by students in experiential learning activities such as simulation. In this paper we explore these dimensions of difficulty through three contrasting scenarios of simulation education. The scenarios are drawn from studies conducted in three international contexts: Australia, Sweden and the UK, which illustrate diverse approaches to simulation and associated differences in the forms of difficulty being produced. For educators using simulation, the key implications are the importance of noting and understanding (1) the effects on students of interaction among multiple forms of difficulty; (2) the emergent and unpredictable nature of difficulty; and (3) the need to teach students strategies for managing emergent difficulty.