THE FUTURE OF TWO‐YEAR COLLEGES: AN ADMINISTRATOR'S‐EYE VIEW

Individuals in eight different types of administrative positions in two‐year colleges were asked to rate the importance of a variety of external and internal issues in the next five years. The purpose of the study reported here was first to identify those internal and external issues that administrators viewed as being of high importance. A second purpose was to assess the degree of consensus among differing types of administrative positions. The third objective was to identify differences between public and independent two‐year college, between men and women, and minority and white administrators perceptions of issues identified as being most important. There was a high degree of agreement across administrative groups as to the importance of five external issues; and when asked to indicate the two most critical issues, administrators were almost unanimous in their assessment. There is less agreement on the two critical internal issues. Some differences by gender and racial/ethnic group were noted, but the differences were not as great as might have been expected.     

Direct Behavioral Consultation in Head Start to Increase Teacher Use of Praise and Effective Instruction Delivery

Chronic disruptive behaviors during early childhood are associated with many poor developmental outcomes including, but not limited to, school dropout and conduct disorder during adolescence. Much is known regarding effective intervention procedures for disruptive classroom behaviors by preschool children. Unfortunately, evidence-based intervention procedures may not be implemented with integrity in applied settings. Direct behavioral consultation may increase teacher intervention integrity because of direct training procedures used with teachers and students during routine classroom activities. This study evaluated a nondisruptive direct training method for increasing Head Start teachers' use of praise and effective instruction delivery. Results indicated that the direct training procedure implemented during routine instructional activities resulted in increased use of praise and effective instruction delivery that maintained following training. Additionally, increased use of praise and effective instruction delivery resulted in reductions in children's disruptive classroom behavior.     

Treatment Fidelity Challenges in a Five-State Consultation Study

Consultation is a promising approach to creating change in early childhood programs, from innovations in instructional strategies to the enhancement of global program quality. Studies of consultation effectiveness have been hampered by limited reports of implementation fidelity related to consultation procedures. This article describes the challenges of supporting and measuring implementation fidelity in a 5-state study in which community consultants followed a collaborative consultation model to enhance global quality in childcare programs. The authors consider the limitations of using a randomized experimental design to study the effectiveness of consultation and share lessons learned in their efforts to enhance treatment fidelity without compromising the basic tenets of the model or the rigorous design.     

Pedagogy in the multimodal classroom: an analysis of the challenges and opportunities for teachers

Contemporary commentary notes that students are frequently ahead of their teachers in their ability to manipulate and be creative with the internet, digital programs, and mobile technology. In this context it is important to ask, ‘What knowledge do teachers need to teach in the contemporary context where texts are elaborately multimodal, constructed not just of print but of image, sound, and movement?’ This paper proposes some signposts to assist teachers with navigating in this environment. Using teachers’ and researchers’ reflections on practices in a diverse range of settings, both primary and secondary, the analysis explicates the challenges that teachers face in this multimodal context and elucidates some ways they can effectively operate within it. In particular, it argues that it is teachers’ expertise as analysts and critics of texts that needs to guide their planning and teaching in this ‘new’ text world.     

What They Said (She Said) I Said: Attribution and Expertise in Digital Circulation

Theorists of discourse have long recognised the complexities of attributing reported speech in textual circulation. Yet rarely does one follow words from an original speech event through their many re-entextualisations, and it has proved particularly difficult to capture such circulations between oral events, print, and online media. This article captures such movements by following the mediatised – and politicised – afterlife of a speech event that would normally be classified, in academia, as ‘a talk’. It begins with a talk on Russia, given by the author-anthropologist of this paper, that was (mis)reported in Russian by a Voice of America (VOA) journalist, then traces the resulting text's subsequent movement from the VOA website into the Russian fieldsite that the oral talk described. It explores how the tone and substance of debates over politics and representation were enabled, constrained, and otherwise shaped by the particular textual circulations made possible in digital media. As the text traversed online newspapers, comments forums, blogs, social media networks, and private-turned-public personal emails, it produced a body of commentary that was both directly and indirectly a struggle over representation. While substantive debates unfolded over ethnic and national politics, much of the online commentary concerned the expertise of the commenters weighing in and the expertise and identity of the anthropologist who had been cited. This essay argues that Russian commenters and posters were productively using the intertextual gaps offered by digital circulation, while minimising those gaps' increasing breadth and depth by attributing ‘original’ authorship to a discrete, stable person.     

Pathogenic organization in science: Division of labor and retractions

Science is increasingly a team activity, and the size of the teams has been growing. At the same time, there are concerns about an increasing rate of pathologies in science. The growth of team science suggests the need to look beyond individual-level explanations and focus on organizational structures and institutional contexts to explain pathologies in science. Drawing on the literature on organizational pathologies, we argue that division of labor may be a key factor contributing to pathologies in science. Furthermore, we examine the effects of high-stakes incentives and of institutional corruption as additional predictors of scientific pathologies. Using retractions as an indicator of pathologies, and drawing on a matched sample of 195 retracted papers and 349 paired papers that were not retracted, we develop indicators of the division of labor in the team that produced a paper and find that the rate of retractions is higher as the division of labor increases (net of team size). Additionally, we find that high-stakes incentives and institutional corruption are also associated with increased retractions. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for science policy, in particular for organizing team science projects.     

A qualitative investigation of design knowledge reuse in project-based mechanical design courses

ABSTRACT

The interpretation and reuse of previous design solutions, or precedents, is central to design. This paper describes qualitative research conducted over three years at two institutions, aimed at investigating the role of design knowledge re-use in project-based mechanical design courses. Research data were collected through participant observation, student interviews, anonymous questionnaires, and website analytics. The paper identifies challenges that must be addressed in order to support novice engineers in rehearsing the types of knowledge required to successfully reason about and engage with design precedents. Two categories of design precedents are identified: concept precedents and detail precedents. Providing students with access to the latter is identified as a particular challenge, as is providing students with access to engineering communities of practice. Approaches to addressing these challenges are discussed.