Evaluation of a University‐Based Mentoring Program: Mentors’ Perspectives on a Service‐Learning Experience

Researchers in the educational field have investigated how a caring adult can best provide mentoring support to youth placed at risk and what functions a mentoring program should serve to promote healthy mentoring relationships. However, the perspective of mentors rarely has been sought to elicit their evaluation of a mentoring program or recommendations for programmatic change. The purpose of this article was to investigate the views of university students serving as mentors in high‐need high schools or community centers. We asked 49 students, primarily undergraduates across a range of liberal arts disciplines, who were participating in a university‐based service‐learning mentoring program for youth attending high‐poverty high schools: (a) what activities they engaged in with mentees, (b) how they benefited from the mentoring program, and (c) how they perceived the program and what recommendations they had for change. Findings revealed specific suggestions that mentoring program coordinators can adopt to address mentors’ concerns and promote sustained, durable mentoring relationships for youth.     

Acquisition of Complex Systemic Thinking: Mental Models of Evolution

We investigated the impact of introducing college students to complex adaptive systems on their subsequent mental models of evolution compared to those of students taught in the same manner but with no reference to complex systems. The students' mental models (derived from similarity ratings of 12 evolutionary terms using the pathfinder algorithm) were significantly similar to their teachers' mental models and were correlated to their performance on an essay on evolution. Introducing students to complex systems facilitated their understanding of the mechanism of inheritance, the mechanism of evolution, and the role of chance in evolution.     

“We were slow; it was challenging” and “It was hard not to make knots”: Crocheting as a Literacy Event in a Second Grade Classroom Community

This paper describes a “crazy about crocheting class” and shows how crocheting became a literacy event that promoted student empowerment and classroom community while engaging second grade students in authentic literacy practices. We document how crocheting evolved from a classroom management activity that also encouraged fine motor skills to a stimulus that drove individual and shared reading and writing. We show how this teacher planned instruction by building on student interest and enthusiasm and how these students experienced literacy as an every day social practice.     

Early Malnutrition and Child Neurobehavioral Development: Insights from the Study of Children of Diabetic Mothers

In this study we sought to discern whether disturbances in mothers' metabolism during pregnancy may exert long-range effects on the neurobehavioral development of the progeny. Participants were 139 Women with diabetes in pregnancy and their singleton offspring. Serial estimates of circulating maternal fuels were obtained for each pregnancy, along with detailed records of perinatal course and outcome. Offspring were administered the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for children—Revised (WISC-R) full-scale IQ scores below 70 in our cohort did not differ significantly from national estimates. Nonetheless, after statistically controlling for other influences, WISC-R verbal, performance, and full-scale IQ scores, and Bannatyne's indices of Verbal Conceptualization Ability, Acquired Knowledge, Spatial Ability, and Sequencing Ability were inversely correlated with measures, of maternal lipid and glucose metabolism in the second and third trimesters. KTEA Arithmetic scores were similarly correlated with measures of maternal lipids in the third trimester. All correlations indicate that poorer metabolic regulation was attended by poorer child performance. The effects of maternal metabolism on fetal brain and neurobehavioral development are discussed as potential intermediary factors.     

An “Ideal” Home for Care: Nel Noddings,Thomas Hill Green,and an Ontological Support for a Phenomenology of Care

This paper is grounded in a deep appreciation of Nel Noddings’ “ethics of care” as an important contribution to moral philosophy and moral education. We seek to offer some philosophical reflections that have the potential to strengthen this important alternative to mainstream ethics and to how moral education might be conceived and practiced differently. After identifying some ambivalence in Noddings’ own position toward abstract philosophy, and despite the practical reasons for this that we share, we then find grounds for pressing in this speculative direction, some of which indeed accord with Noddings’ own statements and philosophical concerns. To show how such further philosophical reflection upon her relational morality could help, we focus on elaborating a perspective on ontological issues that we find in the work of Thomas Hill Green, a 19^th century idealist, and seek to show its compatibility with Noddings’ more pragmatic stance. A concluding point addresses, and dispels, a possible worry that the grand narrative structure of Green’s idealism might undercut Noddings’ aim of having an ethic that is melioristic and open.     

Predicting Future Trends in Adult Fitness Using the Delphi Approach

Abstract

This study determined how experts see the future of adult fitness by using the Delphi Technique as a measurement tool. Experts (n = 50), all Fellows of the American College of Sports Medicine, were selected on the basis of their reputations in adult fitness. Three questionnaires were submitted to the panel. In the first questionnaire each expert listed five or more events, trends, or developments they thought would take place and five or more events they would like to see take place in the next 25 years. From the events and trends listed on this questionnaire, 100 items were generated that formed the basis for the last two questionnaires. Responses to the items on the second questionnaire were evaluated on a 5-point Likert scale for probability and desirability. In the third questionnaire, group means and standard deviations were calculated and recorded for each item. Only those items which were significantly (p < .01) higher than 3.0, the average probability or desirability response on the Likert scale, were included in the analysis. The items were divided into seven categories: fitness in sport and recreation, fitness and wellness, fitness in industry, fitness in education, fitness in business, research in fitness, and fitness equipment and facilities. The highest single mean for any item for both probability (M = 4.31) and desirability (M = 4.83) was increased awareness of health and fitness among the elderly.