Quetelet and Parachuting Cats: Data Lessons for Libraries

As champions of information literacy, libraries and information professionals encourage users to assess the accuracy, trustworthiness, and relevance of information. The rationale behind current efforts to demonstrate library value based on empirical evidence is consistent with this professional stance. Yet, national library advocacy and research efforts routinely promote inaccurate, insubstantial, or irrelevant data to support claims made on behalf of libraries. This practice works at cross-purposes with the aim of making as strong a case about library effectiveness as possible. When we ignore the basic requirements for gathering sound evidence, the quality of our advocacy arguments suffer. This article analyzes two advocacy efforts that have been undermined by inattention to the rules of empirical evidence.     

A Rationale for Public Library Civics Instruction

Statistics bear out the dire need for civic education and engagement within our nation’s libraries, those free and “equalizing” institutions that traditionally afforded opportunities assisting in the development of civically astute individuals. Per our founding principles, libraries and librarians remain responsible for instituting programming that assists in the development of capable citizens who actively participate in political life, hence ensuring the perpetuation and positive evolvement of our governmental system and its resulting law. Public and school libraries must return to a targeted emphasis on the provision of services that develop critical thinking opportunities steeped in civic intent and purpose. Examples include civic-oriented instruction, debate, communication, service and public policy facilitation, and forum building.     

The Keys to STEM: Australian Year 7 Students’ Attitudes and Intentions Towards Science,Mathematics and Technology Courses

Research in Science Education - Educational researchers have long noted the apparent link between positive student attitudes and a student’s desire to continue their study of particular...     

The role of instructional variables in conceptual change in high school physics topics

This study was conducted to determine the effect of three variables on conceptual change in physics. Ninth and 10th-grade students who, despite instruction, still held nonscientific intuitive ideas about the motion of objects participated in viewing a demonstration, engaged in student-to-student discussion, and/or read a refutational text about Newton's laws of motion. Students (N = 310) were randomly assigned within classes to eight groups representing combinations of the three activities and participated in pretesting, instruction, and posttesting. Posttest results revealed that reading the refutational text helped students change their intuitive ideas to scientific ones, while seeing a demonstration affected how students interacted with group and text on some measures. Discussing ideas in a group did not lead to significant learning of scientific notions but, rather, caused students to be less influenced by either the demonstration or the text.     

“Stop! You didn't read who wrote It!”: The concept of author

Virginia Lowe has lectured in both children's and English literature at several Australian teachers' colleges and is currently a school librarian. She has published a monograph,Adult Book Child, and several articles on books and young children.     

Interest-enhancing approaches to mathematics curriculum design: Illustrations and personalization

Two common interest-enhancement approaches in mathematics curriculum design are illustrations and personalization of problems to students’ interests. The objective of these experiments is to test a variety of illustrations and personalization approaches. In the illustrations experiment, students (n?=?265) were randomly assigned to lessons with story problems containing decorative illustrations, contextual illustrations, diagrammatic illustrations, misleading illustrations, or no illustrations (only text [control condition]). Students’ problem-solving performance and attitudes were not affected by illustration condition, but learning was better in the control compared with contextual illustrations. In the personalization experiment, students (n?=?223) were randomly assigned to story problems that were either personalized based on: a survey of their interests, their choice of interest topics, a randomly assigned interest topic, or the original nonpersonalized story problem (control). The findings indicated there were benefits for choice personalization both for performance in the problem set as well as on a later learning assessment.     

More than chalkboards: classroom spaces and collaborative learning attitudes

Learning Environments Research - The well-known benefits of collaborative learning have prompted the development of active learning classrooms that are designed to facilitate peer interaction....     

一位美国老教师的生活与工作美国老师给编辑部的一封来信(三)

Virginia Hurt Bailey(美国) 阅读课第二部分是专题阅读。在这段时间里,学生阅读学术文章,读后用自己的话进行复述。阅读课的第三部分是文学精粹选读。10点40分-10点50分是课间休息。星期二和星期三,在这段时间里,我要在操场上值班,以防学生在活动时出问题。     

Effect of the implicit combinatorial model on combinatorial reasoning in secondary school pupils

Elementary combinatorial problems may be classified into three different combinatorial models (selection, partition and distribution). The main goal of this research was to determine the effect of the implicit combinatorial model on pupils' combinatorial reasoning before and after instruction. When building the questionnaire, we also considered the combinatorial operation and the nature of elements as task variables. The analysis of variance of the answers from 720 14–15 year-old pupils showed the influence of the implicit combinatorial model on problem difficulty and the interaction of all the factors with instruction. Qualitative analysis also revealed the dependence of error types on task variables. Consequently, the implicit combinatorial model should be considered as a didactic variable in organising elementary combinatorics teaching.     

The Linguistic Mass/Count Distinction as an Indicator of Referent Categorization in Monolingual and Bilingual Children

This study examines the acquisition of the linguistic mass/count distinction in English by bilingual (Spanish-English) children. The goal of the study is to explore whether bilingual children, like their monolingual peers, can draw information from the linguistic context in which a new noun id presented to determine whether the new word refers to an object or a substance. Results indicate that at 7 years of age, even bilinguals who are strong in English do not yet draw such inferences. By 9 years of age, however, bilinguals who are strong in English have response patterns similar to those of their monolingual peers but bilinguals who have lower English abilities still lag behind their monolingual peers in drawing such inferences.