Co-thought gestures: Supporting students to successfully navigate map tasks

This study considers the role and nature of co-thought gestures when students process map-based mathematics tasks. These gestures are typically spontaneously produced silent gestures which do not accompany speech and are represented by small movements of the hands or arms often directed toward an artefact. The study analysed 43 students (aged 10–12 years) over a 3-year period as they solved map tasks that required spatial reasoning. The map tasks were representative of those typically found in mathematics classrooms for this age group and required route finding and coordinate knowledge. The results indicated that co-thought gestures were used to navigate the problem space and monitor movements within the spatial challenges of the respective map tasks. Gesturing was most influential when students encountered unfamiliar tasks or when they found the tasks spatially demanding. From a teaching and learning perspective, explicit co-thought gesturing highlights cognitive challenges students are experiencing since students tended to not use gesturing in tasks where the spatial demands were low.     

Three Reasons Samples Become Separated From Their Populations in Communication Research

There are three reasons why probability samples often become separated from their putative populations in mass communication research. First, researchers sometimes believe populations must surely exist when in fact they do not exist. Yet they relentlessly pursue these phantom populations rather than heed classic warning signs that something is wrong. Second, researchers often struggle with underpowered samples. Rather than render those samples using more appropriate qualitative methods, they plow ahead using misapplied statistical methods and thus never inferentially connect to a population. Third, researchers frequently and incorrectly use random assignment rather than random selection as a sample method. This, in turn, can leave a sample unconnected to a population if the population can be drawn only through random selection. As obvious as these three errors are, researchers nonetheless stumble into them regularly. We examine why that is and what researchers can do to avoid these errors.     

Rethinking Library Service to Distance Education Students: Analyzing the Embedded Librarian Model

Since fall 2009, reference librarians at The George Washington University's Himmelfarb Health Sciences Library have been embedded in online classes through Blackboard within the School of Nursing and School of Medicine and Health Sciences. The authors sought to determine the types of questions asked of the librarian, with the goal of informing future interactions with distance education classes to help develop a standard “protocol” for working with this population of students. Eighty-two questions were categorized and qualitatively analyzed. The findings have prompted librarians to explore tools such as Elluminate Live!, a tool that allows librarians to provide synchronous instruction within the Blackboard environment.     

Negotiating Cross-cultural Misunderstandings in Collaborative Therapeutic Conversations

In this article we discuss how clients who have immigrated to Canada and Canadian counsellors negotiate cross-cultural misunderstandings as opportunities to transcend reified assumptions about cultures. Cultural differences as well as discrepancies in translation need to be worked out for counsellors and clients to arrive at shared understandings useful for clients. Arriving at shared understandings requires conversational partners to recognize and overcome how cultural differences may influence personal interpretation of each other’s actions. Misunderstandings, in this sense, highlight affiliative or disaffiliative choices to speakers. We suggest that counsellors can benefit from inviting clients’ initiatives and preferences to inform how relationships develop.