Money Doesn’t Talk,It Swears: The Wolf of Wall Street as a Homology for America’s Ambivalent Attitude on Financial Excess

Audiences have praised and criticized Martin Scorsese’s film The Wolf of Wall Street since its release. Despite projecting a portrait of Wall Street greed, the film’s cultural reception demonstrates a public ambiguously mesmerized by a wealthy individual and his “get rich quick” philosophy. This article argues that Scorsese’s film and rhetoric from the real Jordan Belfort act as a homology for America’s ambivalent attitude on the hegemonic power of money and celebrity. Connecting rhetorical homologies to Raymond Williams’s structure of feeling, this article illustrates how personal and public attitudes are constituted through a text’s form and content.     

Civil Interactivity: How News Organizations' Commenting Policies Explain Civility and Hostility in User Comments

The digital transformation of journalism enables new modes of interactivity with the news. While user comments are nearly ubiquitous across news Web sites, there is little understanding about how to improve the quality of discussion spaces that many characterize as hostile and vitriolic. This study uses a keyword content analysis of user comments across 20 news Web sites to understand the organizational policies that encourage more productive dialogue. The findings show that specific policies regarding user registration, moderation of comments, and reputation management systems are effective facilitators of civil discussion.     

The effects on student achievement and attitudes when using integrated learning systems with cooperative pairs

The purpose of this study was to determine whether combining cooperative learning strategies with instruction delivered using an Integrated Learning System (ILS) produced academic and attitudinal gains in students. Sixty-five fifth-grade students were randomly divided into two groups, cooperative and individual. Students in the cooperative group worked on ILS math activities with a partner. Students in the individual group worked on the same activities by themselves. Achievement and attitudinal data were collected for the students prior to the experimental treatment and at the end of the treatment period. Results revealed that students using an ILS for mathematics instruction performed better on standardized tests and were more positive toward math and the computer math activities when they worked in cooperative groups than when they worked on the same activities individually.     

Beneath the surface of accountability: Answerability, responsibility and capacity-building in recent education reforms in Norway

Recent educational reforms in Norway include national tests and monitoring mechanisms to see if key outcomes are being achieved. At the same time, Norway has not established the follow-up mechanisms like high-stakes incentives and rewards that are characteristic of accountability policies in some other countries. As a consequence, one could argue that Norway has only moved “half-way” toward accountability. In contrast, this paper suggests that these developments in Norwegian policies demonstrate the difficulties of navigating the tensions between promoting two key aspects of accountability—answerability for the achievement of short-term goals and responsibility for the fulfillment of broader purposes—and the challenges of building capacity for both. Exploring developments in the Norwegian context highlights what it may take to develop policies that address both answerability and responsibility and reveals some of the cultural, geographic, political, and economic realities that make it difficult to do so.     

Situational interest helps correct misconceptions: An investigation of conceptual change in university students

Instructional Science - Many learners possess misconceptions regarding instructional content; toward this aim, educational practitioners employ teaching practices that support learners’...     

Using video clubs to develop teachers’ thinking and practice in oral feedback and dialogic teaching

ABSTRACT

The authors report outcomes of an evaluation of a ‘video club’ intervention to improve the feedback and dialogic teaching practice of 91 teachers from 11 primary schools in England. Participating teachers worked collaboratively in a sequence of six video clubs over a six-month period. To understand teacher engagement they examine videos of video club meetings; online platform use metrics; surveys; selected videos of classroom practice; focus groups; and interviews. They evaluate change in teachers’ thinking and practice using survey results for participants compared to a comparison group of non-participating teachers at the intervention schools. The survey includes a new instrument for gathering evidence of teachers’ thinking and practice in feedback. The results suggested changes in thinking and practice for teachers who self-reported as engaging highly with the intervention. They conclude by discussing the potential of video technology within professional development and the challenges of researching changes in thinking and practice.     

An examination of the relationship between technology problems and teaching evaluation of online instruction

To address faculty members' concern that teaching evaluation in the online environment might be lowered because of technology problems students experience in online courses, a sample of 202 undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory statistics course in a college of business administration was surveyed. Students' evaluation of their instructors and the course and their experiences with technology problems when taking the course were measured. As expected, a negative correlation between teaching evaluation and experience of technology problems was observed. Based on the finding, it is suggested that, to encourage faculty members to teach online, universities need to examine the relationship between teaching evaluation and technology problems experienced by students in the online environment and adjust the evaluation skewed by problems that are out of instructors' control. Measurement instruments used in the study and a suggested formula for adjusting teaching evaluation are provided.     

Childhood emotional invalidation and adult psychological distress: the mediating role of emotional inhibition

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate a model in which chronic emotional inhibition mediates the relationship between a history of childhood emotional invalidation or abuse and adult psychological distress. METHOD: One hundred and twenty-seven participants completed a series of self-report questionnaires, and a subset of this group (n=88) completed an additional measure of current avoidant coping in response to a laboratory stressor. Structural equation modeling was used to evaluate and compare a full and partial mediational model. RESULTS: Findings strongly supported a model in which a history of childhood emotional invalidation (i.e., psychological abuse and parental punishment, minimization, and distress in response to negative emotion) was associated with chronic emotional inhibition in adulthood (i.e., ambivalence over emotional expression, thought suppression, and avoidant stress responses). In turn, emotional inhibition significantly predicted psychological distress, including depression and anxiety symptoms. CONCLUSION: This study found support for a model in which the relation between recollected negative emotion socialization in childhood and adult psychological distress was fully mediated by a style of inhibiting emotional experience and expression. Although it is likely that childhood emotional inhibition is functional (e.g., reduces parental distress and rejection), results suggest that chronic emotional inhibition may have long-term negative consequences for the inhibitor.