Dismantling the Built Drawing: Working with Mood in Architectural Design

From the late Middle Ages onward an emphasis on the rational and the technical aspects of design and design drawing gained hold of architectural practice. In this transformation, the phenomenon of mood has been frequently overlooked or seen as something to be added on to a design; yet the fundamental grounding of mood, as described in Martin Heidegger's philosophy, is anything but secondary to our experience of the world. In fact, other facilities such as embodied experience, tactile and spatial awareness, and temporal perception all spring from the basic encounter with mood. In this article I describe how a lack of attunement to, and limited ability with, the various manifestations of mood perpetuates a disconnection between the architectural drawing and real buildings. I argue that as long as educational frameworks relegate the emotional and experiential to the place of a supplement, then our design processes will continue to unconsciously promote environments of thinness and superficiality.     

Test‐based accountability: Potential benefits and pitfalls of science assessment with student diversity

Recent test‐based accountability policy in the U.S. has involved annually assessing all students in core subjects and holding schools accountable for adequate progress of all students by implementing sanctions when adequate progress is not met. Despite its potential benefits, basing educational policy on assessments developed for a student population of White, middle‐ and upper‐class, and native speakers of English opens the door for numerous pitfalls when the assessments are applied to minority populations including students of color, low SES, and learning English as a new language. There exists a paradox; while minority students are a primary intended beneficiary of the test‐based accountability policy, the assessments used in the policy have been shown to have many shortcomings when applied to these students. This article weighs the benefits and pitfalls that test‐based accountability brings for minority students. Resolutions to the pitfalls are discussed, and areas for future research are recommended. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47: 6–24, 2010     

Distinguishing between Net and Global DIF in Polytomous Items

In this article, I address two competing conceptions of differential item functioning (DIF) in polytomously scored items. The first conception, referred to as net DIF, concerns between-group differences in the conditional expected value of the polytomous response variable. The second conception, referred to as global DIF, concerns the conditional dependence of group membership and the polytomous response variable. The distinction between net and global DIF is important because different DIF evaluation methods are appropriate for net and global DIF; no currently available method is universally the best for detecting both net and global DIF. Net and global DIF definitions are presented under two different, yet compatible, modeling frameworks: a traditional item response theory (IRT) framework, and a differential step functioning (DSF) framework. The theoretical relationship between the IRT and DSF frameworks is presented. Available methods for evaluating net and global DIF are described, and an applied example of net and global DIF is presented.     

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.     

Discovering Music: Small-Scale,Web-Scale,Facets, and Beyond

In this presentation, two music librarians addressed the issues related to the discovery of library music resources. Rebecca Belford talked about the Music Library Association’s “Music Discovery Requirements” (MLA MDR) document, and how it applies to some contexts. Tracey Snyder then described the incorporation of MLA MDR into the development of a specific discovery interface. The presenters identified some of the challenges characteristic of music resources and ways in which those challenges may be met, reasoning that a tool capable of handling music will be capable of handling most things in a general collection.     

Planning in Middle Childhood: Early Predictors and Later Outcomes

Data from 1,364 children and families who participated in the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development's Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development were analyzed to track the early correlates and later academic outcomes of planning during middle childhood. Maternal education, through its effect on parenting quality when children were 54 months old, predicts their concurrent performance on sustained attention, inhibition, and short‐term verbal memory tests. This performance predicts planning in first grade, which predicts third‐grade reading and mathematics attainment, but not the rate of growth in academic skills from first to fifth grades. This path was also found when the same parenting, cognitive, and academic constructs were measured at later time points.     

Does visual redundancy inhibit older persons’ information processing in learning?

ABSTRACT

This study investigated the redundancy effect on older and younger persons’ cognitive performance in a caregiver video training. Participants (N = 92) were recruited from one research-intensive university and three senior centers in a midsize city in the western United States. The mixed within- and between-subjects design was used. Participants watched the caregiving video with caption followed by a video without caption or vice versa depending on the condition. The results showed that older persons benefited from the redundancy learning whereas younger persons suffered from the redundancy learning. Implications of the findings are discussed with suggestions for future research.     

Editor's note

This article provides a didactic example and application of new developments in structural equation modeling (SEM) that allow for the modeling of multilevel data. Such data often arise naturally from organizational structures in which within‐group units (employees, students, etc.) are observed in larger between‐group units (firms, schools, etc.) The article begins with an overview of the basic ideas of SEM and multilevel linear regression. The synthesis of both methods developed by Muthéin (1994) is then presented in the simple case of a multilevel path analysis model, in which the variations in within‐group level intercepts are modeled as a function of between‐group variables following their own path model. An application motivated by a real problem in the field of education that focuses on validating indicators of the quality of science education in the United States follows. The results show that it is possible to statistically capture the salient complexities of organizations through the application of multilevel SEM. The article concludes with a discussion of the utility of multilevel SEM for organizational studies.