Hardwired for News: Affective Intelligence and Political Attention

Research on citizens’ inattentiveness to political news has built a theoretical base for understanding political judgment in the American electorate. The research, however, has a strong cognitive orientation with surprisingly little attention to the dynamic interaction between emotional and attentional factors. To broaden our understanding of these potential emotional influences, we assessed levels of enthusiasm, anger/aversion, and anxiety in response to brief summaries of 50 news stories of diverse character and provenance selected to be representative of quotidian news. The analysis reveals dramatic variation across news stories and across subjects responding to the same story on all 3 emotional dimensions. We also examine an unexpected inverse correlation between education and level of emotional response to news.     

Encountering the Ethics of Engaged Scholarship

This commentary offers reflections on the preceding articles and frames ethics of community engagment by (organizational) communication scholars in terms of broader issues about the enterprises of applied research. The brief essay considers how we approach and position ethics (writ large) in our work and then offers the following dialectics for consideration: openness versus protection, privilege versus equality, distance versus empathy, listening versus advising, and representation versus intervention.     

Revitalization of the shared commons: education for sustainability and marginalized cultures

Education for sustainability provides a vision for revitalizing the environmental commons while preserving cultural traditions and human rights. What happens if the environmental commons is shared by two politically disparate and conflicting cultures? As in many shared common lands, what happens if one culture is dominant and represents a more affluent society with more resources and educational opportunities? In the case of the Tal and Alkaher study (Cult Stud Sci Edu, 2009), asymmetric power differences between the dominant Israeli society and the minority Arab population yielded different environmental narratives and perceptions of students involved in learning about a mediated conflict in national park land. Similarly, marginalized indigenous cultures in Malawi, Africa share common lands with the dominant European landowners but have distinctly different environmental narratives. Although indigenous ways of living with nature contribute to the sustainability of the environment and culture, African funds of knowledge are conspicuously absent from the Eurocentric school science curriculum. In contrast, examples of experiential learning and recent curriculum development efforts in sustainability science in Malawi are inclusive of indigenous knowledge and practices and are essential for revitalizing the shared commons.     

Predicting LD on the basis of motivation, metacognition, and psychopathology: an ROC analysis

We examined how strongly motivation, metacognition, and psychopathology acted as predictors of learning disabilities (LD). The results from five studies suggested that level of motivation (as shown through self-efficacy, motivational force, task avoidance, goal commitment, or self-concept) was highly accurate in classifying students with or at risk for LD. Metacognition and psychopathology were also strong predictors. Classification accuracy using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves ranged between 77% and 96%. These rates were much higher than the chance-level (i.e., 50%-55%) rates sometimes yielded by cognitive indices. Linear discriminant function (LDF) analysis substantiated classification accuracy. These results suggest that motivation, metacognition, and psychopathology are strong predictors of LD. Understanding the influence of these characteristics may help researchers and practitioners more accurately screen and treat students with LD.     

Education,technology, and the ‘new’ knowledge economy: views from Bongoland

The concept of bridging the digital divide between Africa and the rest of the world draws symbolically on nineteenth century diffusion theories of linear progress and twentieth‐century theories of modernization and development. This paper examines information and communication technology (ICT) policies and public‐access postings on http://www.bongoland.net. Bongoland evokes a quality of life that is hectic, frustrating, and slightly crazy. Where the language of policies envisions that technology will improve life in Bongoland, users’ postings suggest that technology reinforces regional hierarchies. This essay argues that, despite the disarticulation of past and present at narrative levels in policy, the past and the present emerge as related in Bongonians’ online postings.     

Rethinking the introduction of particle theory: A substance‐based framework

In response to extensive research exposing students' poor understanding of the particle theory of matter, this article argues that the conceptual framework within which the theory is introduced could be a limiting factor. The standard school particle model is characterized as operating within a “solids, liquids, and gases” framework. Drawing on an analysis of scientific ideas on matter and research into students' understanding, issues arising from the framework are identified which could contribute towards students' well known difficulties. The analysis leads to the proposal for a particle model based within the framework of the concept of a substance. Results from two exploratory studies using the substance‐based particle model with children (ages 9–10) in two contrasting elementary schools in England are then reported. After a short teaching intervention with a class in each school, individual interviews were held with a sample of 12 students from each class. Data were collected on students' understanding of substances coexisting in different room temperature states and phenomena involving changes of state and mixing. The results gave useful feedback on the specification of the model and its teaching. Overall the students' engagement with the particle ideas was encouraging and suggests a larger scale testing of the substance‐based model is merited. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47:130–150, 2010     

Self‐determined blended learning: a case study of blended learning design

Higher education has been actively encouraged to find more effective and flexible delivery models to provide all students with access to quality learning experiences yet also meet institutional imperatives for efficiency and accountability. Blended learning, commonly defined as an integration of traditional face‐to‐face and online approaches to instruction (Garrison & Kanuka, 2004 Garrison, D.R. and Kanuka, H. 2004. Blended learning: Uncovering its transformative potential in higher education. Internet and Higher Education, 7(2): 95–105.  [Google Scholar]; Graham, 2006 Graham, C.R. 2006. “Blended learning systems: Definition, current trends and future directions”. In Handbook of blended learning: Global perspectives, local designs, Edited by: Bonk, C.J. and Graham, C.R. San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer.  [Google Scholar]; Macdonald, 2008 Macdonald, J. 2008. Blended learning and online tutoring , (2nd ed.), Hampshire, UK: Gower.  [Google Scholar]), is now proposed as one solution that addresses both student learning and higher education organisational needs. Successful blended learning, however, is more than a simple integration of information and communication technologies with face‐to‐face approaches. This paper proposes, describes and evaluates a pedagogical approach to blended learning focused on learners and learning. First, we interrogate the literature related to blended learning to show how various constructions of blended learning may be driven by teacher‐centric or learner‐centric conceptions. Next, planning a learner‐centric blended learning design for a core unit in a first year higher education course is described. The design is then evaluated using a mixed methodology in which the students’ voices illuminate their experiences of blended learning unit design with regards to engagement, learning and self‐determination.     

Examining the grading practices of teachers

Despite the recommendations of some measurement specialists, teachers do not always assign grades based on achievement only. The primary purpose of this study is to clarify the meaning of grades, and to examine some of the factors teachers consider when assigning final grades with a focus on borderline cases. The sample consisted of 516 American public school teachers, selected via stratified random sample in a major metropolitan school district in the Southeast. A 53-item survey using Guttman’s mapping sentences, previously piloted in a separate school district, was created and distributed. Teachers were provided with scenarios that described student ability, achievement, behavior, and effort and the teacher was asked to assign both a numerical and letter grade. A four-way between-subjects ANOVA was conducted with the student characteristics ability, achievement, behavior, and effort as independent variables and final grade as the dependent variable. Findings demonstrate that teachers abided by the official grading policy of the participating school district assigning grades based primarily on achievement under most circumstances, however, in some borderline cases teachers report considering non-achievement factors. Implications for pre-service and in-service professional development are discussed.     

Are RAN deficits in university students with dyslexia due to defective lexical access,impaired anchoring,or slow articulation?

The purpose of this study was to examine different hypotheses in relation to RAN deficits in dyslexia. Thirty university students with dyslexia and 32 chronological-age controls were assessed on RAN Digits and Colors as well as on two versions of RAN Letters and Objects (one with five items repeated 16 times and one with 20 items repeated four times). In addition, participants were tested on discrete letter and object naming, phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, and speed of processing, and the RAN Letters and Objects total times were partitioned into pause times and articulation times. Results showed first that the dyslexia group was slower than the control group on all RAN tasks and the differences remained significant after controlling for discrete naming time. Second, both groups were slower in the large item set condition (20 ×?4) than in the small set condition (5 ×?16). Third, the dyslexia group was slower than the control group in both the pause and the articulation times. Although none of the processing skills was sufficient on its own to eliminate group differences in RAN Letters components, phonological awareness, and orthographic processing were sufficient on their own to eliminate group differences in the RAN Objects pause time. Taken together, our findings suggest that the deficits in RAN are not due to impaired anchoring, but rather due to subtle impairments in lexical access (specific to alphanumeric RAN), serial processing, and articulation.