A model for using a concept inventory as a tool for students' assessment and faculty professional development

This essay describes how the use of a concept inventory has enhanced professional development and curriculum reform efforts of a faculty teaching community. The Host Pathogen Interactions (HPI) teaching team is composed of research and teaching faculty with expertise in HPI who share the goal of improving the learning experience of students in nine linked undergraduate microbiology courses. To support evidence-based curriculum reform, we administered our HPI Concept Inventory as a pre- and postsurvey to approximately 400 students each year since 2006. The resulting data include student scores as well as their open-ended explanations for distractor choices. The data have enabled us to address curriculum reform goals of 1) reconciling student learning with our expectations, 2) correlating student learning with background variables, 3) understanding student learning across institutions, 4) measuring the effect of teaching techniques on student learning, and 5) demonstrating how our courses collectively form a learning progression. The analysis of the concept inventory data has anchored and deepened the team's discussions of student learning. Reading and discussing students' responses revealed the gap between our understanding and the students' understanding. We provide evidence to support the concept inventory as a tool for assessing student understanding of HPI concepts and faculty development.     

Revisiting the 1990 special issue on minority children: an editorial perspective 15 years later

The 2006 Special Issue on Race, Ethnicity, and Culture in Child Development occurs 15 years after the 1990 Special Issue on Minority Children and marks roughly 50 years since the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. This issue provides an assessment of how researchers have represented development of America's diverse youth. This commentary provides a perspective of the progress and needs inferred from the 1990 special issue. A consistent theme is the necessity to link research and developmental theorizing with the intentions of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, as the relevant integration is often left to legal scholars, Whiteness studies theorists, and a few child-development-focused researchers (e.g., Cross, 1991; Spencer, 2005).     

Why are they not accessing it? User barriers to clinical information access

The Medical Library Association''s InSight Initiative provides an open and collaborative environment for library and industry partners to discuss vexing problems and find solutions to better serve their users. The initiative''s fifth summit, continuing work from the previous summit, focused on understanding how users discover and access information in the clinical environment. During the summit, participants were divided into working groups and encouraged to create a tangible product as a result of their discussions. At the end of the summit, participants established a framework for understanding users'' pain points, discussed possible solutions to those points, and received feedback on their work from an End User Advisory Board comprising physicians, clinical researchers, and clinical faculty in biomedicine. In addition to the pain point framework, participants are developing MLA InSight Initiative Learning content with modules to educate librarians and publishers about critical aspects of user behavior. The 2020 Insight Initiative Fall Forum will serve as a virtual home for constructive dialogue between health sciences librarians and publishers on improving discovery and access to information.     

The Pictorial Representation of Gender and Physical Activity Level in Caldecott Medal Winning Children's Literature (1940-1999): A Relational Analysis of Physical Culture

The pictorial representation of physical activity and gender over three time periods is investigated in Caldecott Medal winning children's literature. Relational analysis and recent national position documents on physical activity are used to frame an interdependent relationship between current levels of physical activity among children and the various institutionalized forms of physical culture with which they interact. Fifty-seven Caldecott Medal winning books were analyzed. Frequency counts were recoded for each book in four categories: (1) females engaged in sedentary roles, (2) females engaged in active roles, (3) males engaged in sedentary roles and (4) males engaged in active roles. A 2 (gender) 2 2(activity level) 2 3 (time period) factorial ANOVA adjusted for nonormally distributed data was used to test frequency of pictorial representation. Results indicate the illustrations in Caldecott Medal literature are a poor media for communicating a physically active lifestyle to children while at the same time have consistently underrepresented females. Males were significantly more likely to be portrayed than females (p < 0.05) and, regardless of gender, sedentary roles were significantly more likely to be portrayed than active roles (p < 0.05). This condition did not change significantly over the three time periods tested (1940-1959, 1960-1979 and 1980-1999). With recent national position documents identifying young people as largely inactive and unfit researchers and practitioners are (1) encouraged to rethink the seemingly innocent relationship between picture books and the trend of inactivity currently seen in the United States and (2) develop skills related to critical media literacy as part of a pedagogy for new times.     

Primary Teachers’ Recommendations for the Development of a Teacher-Oriented Movement Assessment Tool for 4–7 Years Children

To inform the development of a teacher-oriented movement assessment tool, this study aimed to explore primary school teachers’ perceptions of assessing fundamental movement skills (FMS) within Physical Education (PE) lessons. Thirty-nine primary school teachers of PE, located in the United Kingdom, participated in an individual or group in-depth interview. Findings signify that teachers perceive a need for a movement assessment tool that is simple for them to use, quick to administer and provides valuable feedback to guide future teaching and learning. This is vital as teachers indicated a lack of appropriate resources and a shortage of curriculum time restricts their use of assessment within PE. A movement assessment tool that was integrated on a digital technology platform could increase teachers’ understanding of assessing FMS and enhance children’s learning of FMS.     

What is modelled during observational learning?

In this article, we examine the question of what information is processed during observational learning by evaluating a variety of methods, theories, and empirical data. Initially, we review work involving neuroimaging techniques and infant imitation. We then evaluate data from behavioural experiments involving adults, wherein a variety of attempts have been made to isolate the critical or minimal information constraining the acquisition of coordination. This body of research has included comparisons between video and point-light displays, manipulations to the amount and type of information presented in the display, the collection of point-of-gaze data, and manipulations to the task context in terms of outcome goals. We conclude that observational learning is governed by specific features of the model's action (i.e. motions of the end effector) and the task (i.e. outcome constraints) and, in contrast with traditional theoretical modelling, more global aspects of a model (i.e. the relative motions within and between joints) do not appear to be the primary method for constraining action execution.