Multiple audience rating form strategies for student evaluation of college teaching

Michael Scriven has suggested that student rating forms, for the purpose of evaluating college teaching, be designed for multiple audiences (instructor, administrator, student), and with a single global item for summative functions (determination of merit, retention, or promotion). This study reviewed approaches to rating form construction, e.g., factor analytic strategies of Marsh, and recommended the multiple audience design of Scriven. An empirical test of the representativeness of the single global item was reported from an analysis of 1,378 forms collected in a university department of education. The global item correlated most satisfactorily with other items, a computed total of items, items that represented underlying factors, and various triplets of items selected to represent all possible combinations of items. It was concluded that a multiple audience rating form showed distinct advantages in design and that the single global item most fairly and highly represented the overall teaching performance, as judged by students, for decisions about retention, promotion, and merit made by administrators.     

Non-anthropocentric Reasoning in Children: Its incidence when they are confronted with ecological dilemmas

This study used an individual structured interview to (1) verify the incidence of non-anthropocentric reasoning in 123 children attending the 3rd and 4th years in three primary schools in the Lisbon area (Portugal), when they are confronted with ecological dilemmas and (2) establish those places they frequented which permit animal contact. The results show a greater incidence of non-anthropocentric reasoning than that obtained in other international studies. This may be related to the focus of the questions asked, which invited children to imagine themselves as another animal or to present situations where human interaction is unfair. This incidence was found independently of gender, school origin and whether or not pets were owned, even with the more biologically complex animals. School year was the only variable proven to make a difference in conceptually more demanding questions. We also verified that the children's general past experience of nature is essentially aligned to ‘controlled environments depending on ongoing human management’, confirming a decline in direct contact with ‘natural and semi-natural environments’. However, this type of experience does not seem to exert a negative influence on their non-anthropocentric reasoning.     

Nanoparticle image velocimetry at topologically structured surfaces

Nanoparticle image velocimetry (nano-PIV), based on total internal reflection fluorescent microscopy, is very useful to investigate fluid flows within ∼100 nm from a surface; but so far it has only been applied to flow over smooth surfaces. Here we show that it can also be applied to flow over a topologically structured surface, provided that the surface structures can be carefully configured not to disrupt the evanescent-wave illumination. We apply nano-PIV to quantify the flow velocity distribution over a polydimethylsiloxane surface, with a periodic gratinglike structure (with 215 nm height and 2 μm period) fabricated using our customized multilevel lithography method. The measured tracer displacement data are in good agreement with the computed theoretical values. These results demonstrate new possibilities to study the interactions between fluid flow and topologically structured surfaces.     

Effective Life Management in Parents of Children with Disabilities: A Cross-National Extension

This study is part of an on-going research program exploring life management in families of children with a variety of disability characteristics and age ranges. Scorgie, Wilgosh, and McDonald (1996) used a qualitative, interview methodology to identify effective strategies, qualities, and transformational outcomes for parents of children with disabilities who had been identified, by service agencies, as having effective life management strategies. A larger group of parents, from similarly identified, effectively managing families, was surveyed (Scorgie, Wilgosh, & McDonald, 1997), using the Life Management Survey (LMS) developed from the nine themes found in the qualitative study, supporting the original findings. A replication of the LMS survey study (Wilgosh, Scorgie, & Fleming, 2000) confirmed the previous findings with parents who were not preselected as effective life managers. In fact, the consistency across the three Canadian studies supported examination of family life management cross-nationally. The present study shows that Catholic Italian parents of children with disabilities have patterns of effective life management strategies, parent qualities, and parent transformational outcomes which characterize them and are similar to those of the Canadian parents. However, in the Italian study, some differences were found related to type of disability, emphasizing the need for qualified professional support, guidance and counselling, focused on the unique needs of each family, as related to the child's disability needs.     

Teaching skills to promote clinical reasoning in early basic science courses

Basic and superior reasoning skills are woven into the clinical reasoning process just as they are used to solve any problem. As clinical reasoning is the central competence of medical education, development of these reasoning skills should occur throughout the undergraduate medical curriculum. The authors describe here a method of teaching reasoning skills in a clinical context during a human anatomy course. Anat Sci Educ 3:267–271, 2010. © 2010 American Association of Anatomists.