One Hundred Strong: A Colloquium on Transforming Natural History Museums in the Twenty‐first Century

In February 2012, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) convened 100 colleagues from 43 organizations to initiate a collaborative learning research agenda focused on examining important areas for innovation to better serve twenty‐first‐century audiences. The conference organizers anticipated that scientists, educators, exhibit professionals, and other members of the natural history community would identify and prioritize research questions about what, how, why, when, and where people learn about natural history. We prepared to engage in a conversation about how natural history museums could change what they do. The participants' overwhelming passion for their work, and for natural history museums and their transformative potential for society, quickly turned the conversation toward how natural history museums should change what they are. The result was an emergent learning research agenda situated within a broader vision for natural history museums.     

LibQUAL Revisited: Further Analysis of Qualitative and Quantitative Survey Results at the University of Mississippi

This paper updates an earlier 2010 longitudinal study of LibQUAL qualitative and quantitative data from the University of Mississippi libraries with an additional year of LibQUAL data, collated with other library-collected data such as gate-count numbers. In doing so, it identifies several results that are not satisfactorily analyzed by LibQUAL, and it concludes that a more specialized local survey may be helpful to supplement or supplant LibQUAL.     

Consumer attitudes towards mobile marketing in the smart phone era

This exploratory online questionnaire-based study confirms the findings from earlier studies in the pre-smart phone era regarding consumers’ negative attitudes towards mobile marketing communications. This study shows that these attitudes persist despite increasing frequency of use and increased functionality of mobile phones in the smart phone era. Consumers perceive their mobile device to be for personal communication, and prefer to be able to exercise control over their interaction with organisations. Findings suggest that acceptance can be enhanced by permission marketing, trust-building, creating a sense of being in control, and useful and entertaining website content. Accordingly, pull technologies seem to hold particular promise for mobile marketing communications. This study, therefore, proceeds to explore use of and attitudes towards an important pull technology, QR codes. QR codes, two-dimensional bar codes, can be scanned to provide access to websites, information and applications. Despite their potential, uptake is low. Users in this study who had scanned a QR code had used them to access a variety of different content on different types of items and in different locations. The most frequently accessed type of content was information on a web site, the two most common locations for a scanned QR code were a newspaper or magazine advert, or outdoor advert or poster, and the two most common locations at which scanning was performed were in the street and at home. Ease of use, utility and incentives are drivers to continued use whilst lack of knowledge about how-to scan or of the benefits of QR codes may hinder adoption. Recommendations are offered for practice and for further research.     

Understanding Youth Obesity and Media Use: Implications for Future Intervention Programs

Nearly six years have passed since the Physical Activity and Health: A Report of the Surgeon General (USDHHS, 1996) described the health and fitnesa status of Amrica's yarth. The Sugeon Guxd's Call to Action to prevent and Decrease Overweight and Obesity (USDHHS, 2001) provides a camprehensive review of research on the epidemiology, health risks, and prevalence of obesity in all segments of the poplation. Increasinngly, children and adolescents are turning to sedentary kisure-time activities. Media use has been linked to decread physical activity levels, incearsed BMI, and increased high-enugy food intake. This review of litnature pravides a comprehensive examination of the influence media use has on youth adiposity, dietary habits. and physical activity. Current and future intervention programs to decrease sedentary behavior in children are also highlighted. Reducing media use (including television, videaape viewing, nonacademic computer use, and video game playing) in youth cau address leisure-time sedentary behaviors. Future intervention program, using run interdisciplinary appach, need to decrease leisure-time sedentary behaviors while promoting active lifestyles.     

First Principles of Attitudinal Change: a Review of Principles,Methods and Strategies

Knowing how to effectively design attitudinal change instruction for various learning settings is essential for instructional designers. However, the research on instructional design for attitudinal change instruction has been relatively dispersed and lacks cohesion, despite its increasing importance. The purposes of this paper are to 1) reignite the scholarly conversation on designing attitudinal change instruction, and 2) provide directions for future research. Using Merrill’s first principles of instruction as a guide and framework, we review the existing research to identify and discuss the principles for designing attitudinal change instruction.     

Some difficulties in informal assessment in mathematics

In this theoretical paper the informal assessment practices of two experienced teachers are used as cases for generating questions about future developments in formative assessment practice. Both teachers maintain a consistent formative assessment focus on the development of their students as enquirers, and one of them supplements this with explicit self‐assessment activities. However, there are subject‐specific gaps in the ways in which they assess and describe their students and these are not addressed in widely promulgated advice about formative assessment. Questions are raised about how teachers might be supported to develop their assessment of subject‐specific behaviour.     

Motivations for entering and pathways of progression of disabled students in further education

Issues concerning the relevance of the human and social capital theories in further education and particularly in the inclusion of disabled people are highlighted. Data are drawn from an ongoing ethnographic study into the experiences of disabled students in two further education colleges. Extracts from 12 focus group discussions with 70 students as well as fieldnotes from observation of courses and other college activities are used to map out the pathways by which the participants entered and progressed through the college and the courses they undertook. Also explored is the significance of the college experience in the student's lives and the extent it has succeeded in enhancing their degree of social inclusion.     

More than a picture: helping undergraduates learn to communicate through scientific images

Images are powerful means of communicating scientific results; a strong image can underscore an experimental result more effectively than any words, whereas a poor image can readily undermine a result or conclusion. Developmental biologists rely extensively on images to compare normal versus abnormal development and communicate their results. Most undergraduate lab science courses do not actively teach students skills to communicate effectively through images. To meet this need, we developed a series of image portfolio assignments and imaging workshops in our Developmental Biology course to encourage students to develop communication skills using images. The improvements in their images over the course of the semester were striking, and on anonymous course evaluations, 73% of students listed imaging skills as the most important skill or concept they learned in the course. The image literacy skills acquired through simple lab assignments and in-class workshops appeared to stimulate confidence in the student's own evaluations of current scientific literature to assess research conclusions. In this essay, we discuss our experiences and methodology teaching undergraduates the basic criteria involved in generating images that communicate scientific content and provide a road map for integrating this curriculum into any upper-level biology laboratory course.     

Educating for inquisitiveness: A case against exemplarism for intellectual character education

ABSTRACT

One natural application of Linda Zagzebski’s exemplarist moral theory (EMT) is found in the context of moral and intellectual character education. Zagzebski discusses this application in her recent book, commenting that ‘exemplars can serve as a guide for moral training’ (p. 129) and endorsing ‘the learning of virtue by imitation’ (p. 129). This theme has been pursued compellingly by authors working at the intersection of virtue ethics and education, contributing to an emerging case for exemplarist-based approaches to character education. I focus on intellectual character education and draw attention to an interesting case in which exemplarism in the classroom may be seen to inhibit, rather than promote, the development of intellectually virtuous character. This is the case of virtuous inquisitiveness.