Leveraging community sport organizations to promote community capacity: Strategic outcomes,challenges, and theoretical considerations

Community sport organizations (CSOs) provide valuable contexts for promoting community development. These initiatives are most effective when they involve local stakeholders in the process of development. A key first step to achieving this objective is building community capacity, defined as local stakeholders’ skills, knowledge, and resources that may be leveraged for change. Interestingly, despite this conceptual importance, few researchers have focused on capacity building in the sport context. This has limited the theoretical advancement of community capacity theory as it relates to CSOs and community development. Using a qualitative case study approach, the authors analyze the outcomes and challenges of implementing community capacity building strategies in an American CSO, and draw on the empirical data to contribute to this theoretical conversation. Interviews, participant observation, and document analysis were used to generate data, and deductive techniques were used for thematic analysis. The results highlight the outcomes of the capacity building strategies and challenges associated with implementation. In addition, the conclusion focuses on theoretical contributions to community capacity theory, namely the role of sport in facilitating inter-community relations across social groups and the link with process models of organizational capacity.     

An Investigative,Cooperative Learning Approach to the General Microbiology Laboratory

Investigative- and cooperative-based learning strategies have been used effectively in a variety of classrooms to enhance student learning and engagement. In the General Microbiology laboratory for juniors and seniors at James Madison University, these strategies were combined to make a semester-long, investigative, cooperative learning experience involving culture and identification of microbial isolates that the students obtained from various environments. To assess whether this strategy was successful, students were asked to complete a survey at the beginning and at the end of the semester regarding their comfort level with a variety of topics. For most of the topics queried, the students reported that their comfort had increased significantly during the semester. Furthermore, this group of students thought that the quality of this investigative lab experience was much better than that of any of their previous lab experiences.     

Supporting Teachers’ Use of Technology in Science Instruction Through Professional Development: A Literature Review

Professional development is critical in supporting teachers’ use of technological tools in classrooms. This review of empirical research synthesizes the effective elements of professional development programs that support science teachers in learning about technology integration. Studies are examined that explore how professional development supports technology use within inquiry-based and traditional science instruction. Implications for future research are discussed in four areas: understanding and building on teachers’ beliefs about science and technology; supporting teacher learning by supporting teachers’ examination of students’ work; using technology to support teacher communities and social networks; and sustaining teachers’ learning beyond formal professional development programs.

You betcha it's random: riffle shuffling in cards games – when is enough,enough?

When playing card games, how many times should a deck be shuffled in order to achieve randomness? This article shows how card shuffling can be used as a classroom exercise to reinforce construction and interpretation of confidence intervals.     

Evaluating Continuing Resources: Perspectives and Methods from Science Librarians

Five science librarians share their experiences with the evaluation of continuing resources at an academic university and discuss implications caused by the evaluation process. Four of the authors were new to collection evaluations at the time of the Serial Evaluation Project. These new librarians faced many challenges, both personally and professionally, in dealing with the cancellation process. Although the differences in approaches to collection analysis are discussed somewhat, they are not a focus of the article.     

Investigating the influence of student–teacher Facebook interaction in Thailand

ABSTRACT

In Thailand, older individuals or ‘Phu Yai’ are people with higher social status and power as compared to younger people or ‘Phu Noi’ (Komolsevin &; Knutson, 2010). In the realm of education, teachers are considered Phu Yai while students are considered Phu Noi. This concept reinforces Hofstede’s (1991) major finding on Thailand being categorized as a high power-distance culture. The current study examines students’ perspective of the effect of student–teacher Facebook interactions on intercultural communication concepts such as power distance and submission to authority within the Thai student–teacher relationship. Questionnaires were administered to 353 students (N?=?353) at a large international university in Thailand. The study found that social media use between Thai students and teachers influence how students view the face-to-face power dynamics between them and their teachers. Specifically, the more students and teachers interact on Facebook, the lower students perceive the power distance between them and their teachers.     

Personas: Stepping Into the Shoes of the Library User

Personas are researched-based user archetypes which can help uncover gaps, highlight new opportunities, and inform the functionality of a space, resource, or service. Personas are a useful tool for organizations, such as libraries, which are interested in improving the user experience, since they tap into users' expectations, behaviors, and attitudes. This column will explain what personas are, the advantages and disadvantages of using personas, and where personas are used. A list of resources for exploring and creating personas is also provided.     

Engaging MSW Students in Faculty Research: Students’ Perspectives of Involvement in a Program Evaluation

Engaging social work students in research is challenging, in part, because of the way research is taught in the classroom and the need for learners to effectively develop connections between the “abstract world” of research concepts with the “real world” of professional experiences. This article describes the experiences of graduate social work students involved in a process and outcome evaluation of a community-based program. Analysis of student learning outcomes and the team-based model used to engage students in the evaluation are provided to put forth a paradigm of teaching social work research through direct, supervised, and collaborative engagement.