Functional Requirements Specification for Archival Asset Management: Identification and Integration of Essential Properties of Services-Oriented Architecture Products

The complexity and size of geospatial data can constrain the capabilities of service providers and create risks to the long-term preservation and archiving of valuable information assets. While services-oriented architectures such as the Earth Data Analysis Center's Geographic Storage, Transformation and Retrieval Engine (GSToRE) facilitate increased use and impact of geospatial data by mitigating these complexities by development of dynamic applications and interfaces, such services can often be primarily focused on the maintenance and delivery of only the most current versions of geospatial data that may nonetheless possess significant historical, cultural, or scientific value. Actions and documentation required to assure long-term preservation may not be supported by existing business models or may be otherwise compromised. However, general purpose archives offer a preservation capability that is complementary to the value created by dynamic service providers. We present an overview of the features of GSToRE, and the DSpace repository platform and describe the requirements of a methodology for the harvest, quality assurance, and ingest of geospatial data into an institutional repository as a complement to the dynamic data access and visualization services provided by GSToRE and systems like it.     

Teaching the teacher: exploring STEM graduate students’ nature of science conceptions in a teaching methods course

ABSTRACT

Graduate students regularly teach undergraduate STEM courses and can positively impact students’ understanding of science. Yet little research examines graduate students’ knowledge about nature of science (NOS) or instructional strategies for teaching graduate students about NOS. This exploratory study sought to understand how a 1-credit Teaching in Higher Education course that utilised an explicit, reflective, and mixed-context approach to NOS instruction impacted STEM graduate students’ NOS conceptions and teaching intentions. Participants included 13 graduate students. Data sources included the Views of Nature of Science (VNOS-Form C) questionnaire administered pre- and post-instruction, semi-structured interviews with a subset of participants, and a NOS-related course project. Prior to instruction participants held many alternative NOS conceptions. Post-instruction, participants’ NOS conceptions improved substantially, particularly in their understandings of theories and laws and the tentative nature of scientific knowledge. All 12 participants planning to teach NOS intended to use explicit instructional approaches. A majority of participants also integrated novel ideas to their intended NOS instruction. These results suggest that a teaching methods course for graduate students with embedded NOS instruction can address alternative NOS conceptions and facilitate intended use of effective NOS instruction. Future research understanding graduate students' NOS understandings and actual NOS instruction is warranted.     

Curriculum Reform in the Seventies—Mathematics

It is hard for those engaged in curriculum reform to be simultaneously committed and objective. I don't question the commitment of those who have so far involved themselves; their objectivity seems to me to be less demonstrable. I offer the following remarks as an attempt to clear the ground for a definition of the real problem.     

Veterans’ Transitions to Community College: A Case Study

Veterans on college campuses are not new; however, the recent influx of veterans returning home from war-time service present challenges to the colleges they attend. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to examine the transition process experienced by veterans leaving military service and attending community college for the first time. This study sought to understand the process veterans experience as they leave overseas deployment in support of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and negotiate the various changes such a transition entails. Using Schlossberg's (1984 Schlossberg , N. K. ( 1984 ). Counseling adults in transition: Linking practice with theory . New York , NY : Springer . [Google Scholar]) Theory of Adult Transitions as the guiding framework, three themes emerged regarding how veterans manage this transition: academic experiences, personal relationships and connections, and benefit bureaucracy. These findings could be used to help community colleges better serve this special population.     

Students' evaluations of university instructors: The applicability of American instruments in a Spanish setting

Items from two American instruments designed to measure students' evaluations of teaching effectiveness were translated into Spanish and administered to a sample of Spanish university students. Most of the items were judged by the students to be appropriate, every item was chosen by at least a few as being a most important item, and all but the Workload/Difficulty items clearly differentiated between lecturers whom students indicated to be “good,” “average,” and “poor.” A series of factor analyses clearly identified the factors that the instruments were designed to measure and that have been identified in previous research. Finally, a multitrait-multimethod analysis demonstrated that there was good agreement between factors from the two instruments which were hypothesized to measure the same components of effective teaching, and provided support for both the convergent and discriminant validity of the ratings. The findings illustrate the feasibility of evaluating effective teaching in a Spanish university and the appropriateness of the two American instruments.