Giving credit where credit is due: Evaluating experiential learning in the liberal arts

Portfolio assessment has become a standard mechanism for the evaluation of prior learning for experienced students. The assessment of such learning in terms of the traditional liberal arts disciplines raises basic questions about the relationship of liberal learning to lived experience and about liberal learning outcomes. An informal survey of portfolio narratives receiving faculty approval for credit at various post-secondary institutions indicates a wide range of declarative, analytical, and interpretive assertions recognized as learning in these disciplines.I wish to thank the following institutions: Sinclair Community College, Clark University, the University of Alabama, and Indiana University who were kind enough to share materials on record while preserving the confidentiality through the removal of names, dates, etc.     

Australian core Catholic youth,Catholic schools and religious education

This paper reports on research on the attitudes of a differentiated sample of students to Catholic schools in general and religious education in particular. Core Catholic youth are described, following Fulton et al. (2000 Fulton, J., Abela, A., Borowik, I., Dowling, T., Marler, P. and Tomasi, L. 2000. Young Catholics at the New Millennium; the Religion and Morality of Young Adults in Western Countries, Dublin: University College Press.  [Google Scholar]: Young Catholics at the New Millennium, Dublin, University College Press), as individuals who have an existing connection with the parish community. Some results that emerge from 58 in‐depth interviews with 14‐ and 15‐year‐old core Catholics are that they value their time in Catholic schools, feel that they are in a safe environment and are not well networked with others of a similar background. Attitudes to religious education by core Catholic youth are described as weak positive. Religious education is not unpopular but is not seen as a discipline that helps resolve some of the difficulties that they experience as young Catholics. These difficulties relate to trying to reconcile what they see as the conflict between the scientific and religious view of creation and many supernatural religious claims.     

What We Know,What We Still Need to Know: Teaching Adolescents to Write

The purpose of this study was to uncover any differences in the early reading and spelling processes of children learning to read in a first language (L1) and children learning to read in a second language (L2). The reading and spelling development of native Dutch-speaking children and minority children in the first two grades of elementary school were compared. The children were given a number of tasks to test their vocabulary knowledge and the efficiency of their word decoding (including grapheme knowledge and word blending), word spelling (including cipher knowledge and phonemic segmentation), and reading comprehension processes. Analyses of variance were used to test for differences between the L1 and L2 learners. LISREL analyses were used to explore the components underlying the reading and spelling processes in the 2 groups of children. The results showed that the minority children kept up with the native Dutch-speaking children on word blending and word decoding tasks. On word spelling and reading comprehension, however, the minority children were found to be less efficient than their monolingual Dutch peers. The structural models for word decoding and word spelling were highly comparable for the 2 groups. For reading comprehension, vocabulary knowledge was found to have more of an impact on the L2 learners than on the L1 learners. This finding suggests that children learning to read in an L2 should be helped to build their lexical knowledge and that reading instruction should be matched to this knowledge.     

Supporting Content-Based Feedback in On-Line Writing Evaluation with LSA

This paper describes tests of an automated essay grader and critic that uses Latent Semantic Analysis. Several methods which score the quality of the content in essays are described and tested. These methods are compared against human scores for the essays and the results show that LSA can score as accurately as the humans. Finally, we describe the implementation of the essay grader/critic in an undergraduate course. The outcome showed that students could write and revise their essays on-line, resulting in improved essays. Implications are discussed for the use of the technology in undergraduate courses and how it can provide an effective approach to incorporating more writing both in and outside of the classroom.     

领导力

Your success as a manager can be determined by how you interact with people.The role of a manager as a leader is an important part of these interactions.Leadership involves influencing colleagues so that they follow a given direction or goal.