Faculty orientations toward institutional goals: A broken front with implications for planned change

The formulation of institutional goals in higher education often involves input from various campus constituencies including faculty. The faculty's viewpoint is typically treated as though it were a uniform perception. The research reported here tested the uniform nature of the faculty's goal orientations. Statistical comparisons were conducted on mean ratings of five discipline groups of 207 faculty from a major public university on the scales of the Institutional Goals Inventory. Although discipline groups shared common viewpoints on the importance of academic instruction, intellectual pursuits, and research, major differences among groups were found for goals involving university service, off-campus instruction, accountability, intercollegiate athletics, and humanistic values. Institutional planners desiring a change in one of these latter areas should expect different levels of faculty support and resistance from different discipline groups.     

Job burnout and the school psychologist

School psychologists participating in a workshop on burnout completed Freudenberger's Burnout Questionnaire (1980), identified major job-related stressors, and responded to a list of suggested supervisory, individual, and organizational strategies for prevention. Slightly less than half of the participants appeared on the questionnaire to have burnout problems. Age, years of experience, and sex were not significantly related to the burnout score. Major identified stressors included excessive caseloads, lack of time, and lack of support or appreciation. Reactions to the strategies were positive and hopeful. Implications for training were drawn.     

Power Lines: The Rhetoric of Maps as Social Change in the Post–Cold War Landscape

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of state socialism in Eastern and Central Europe, cartographers were faced with choices on how the new post–Cold War political landscape would be mapped. One such group called the Pluto Project had been producing atlases since 1981 with a progressive point of view about the nature of state power in the Cold War. This essay examines two of the Pluto Project's atlases as they function to identify a radical cartographic style that animates the social control of space by subverting traditional cartographic forms and defying scientific expectations and standards.     

The role of model building in problem solving and conceptual change

This study examines the effects of the activity of building systems models for school-based problems on problem solving and on conceptual change in elementary science classes. During a unit on the water cycle in an Asian elementary school, students constructed systems models of the water cycle. We found that representing ill-structured problems as system models improves problem solving as well as creating beneficial conceptual change related to the topic.     

Optical Pulsars and Black Arrows: Discoveries as Occasioned Productions

The current article represents a methodological proposal. It seeks to address the question of how one might recognize a discovery as a discovery without knowing in advance what is available to be discovered. We propose a solution and demonstrate it using data from a study previously reported by J. Roschelle (1992) Roschelle, J. 1992. Learning by collaborating: Convergent conceptual change. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 2: 235–276. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]. Roschelle investigated 2 students' developing understandings of certain abstract features of Newtonian mechanics while working within a computer-based microworld, the Envisioning Machine. We employ an approach we term discovery as occasioned production to reexamine his data. Such an approach proceeds stepwise from the identification of some matter discovered, working backward to see just where that matter entered the conversation and then, finally, tracing from that point forward to illuminate how the proposal for a possible discovery was ultimately transformed into a discovery achieved. The notion of “evident vagueness,” borrowed from H. Garfinkel, M. Lynch, and D. Livingston's (1981) Garfinkel, H., Lynch, M. and Livingston, D. 1981. The work of discovering science construed with materials from the optically discovered pulsar. Philosophy of Social Science, 11: 131–158. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] account of the discovery of an optical pulsar, emerges as an important feature of our analysis. Following H. Garfinkel (2002) Garfinkel, H. 2002. Ethnomethodology's program: Working out Durkheim's aphorism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield..  [Google Scholar], we present our findings as a “tutorial problem” and offer a suggestion for how a program of practice studies in the learning sciences might be pursued.