Connecting Past to Future Needs: Nursing Faculty and Librarian Collaboration to Support Students’ Academic Success

The article illustrates the evolution of a research assignment in an undergraduate nursing course and the development of the information literacy session. The authors show how, through a variety of strategies, they were able to retain research and writing rigor and at the same time, decrease research stress in the students. Through feedback from students, observations, and analysis of the research articles, the authors were able to think critically on how and what to teach the students. The article supports the existing literature on research stress in nursing students and offers a model on how nursing faculty and librarians can collaborate to support students’ academic success.     

Creating Collaborative Community in Multidisciplinary Settings

This study examines part-time students' perceptions of collaborative community in a graduate, multidisciplinary, education department where courses are offered on multiple campuses. Perceptions of community are synonymous with friendship, involvement, cohesion, communication, and trust. These feelings are affected more by campus location, program area, and credits earned than by age, race or sex. The knowledge students gain fuels the trust, communication, and cohesiveness that in turn, facilitate the collaborative process. Students value this as part of their professionalization process, desire opportunities to build relationships with one another outside the classroom, and suggest ways to facilitate community.     

The Colonisation of Social Class in Education

The purpose of this paper is to explore the dilemmas posed by the analysis of working class issues in education by professional sociologists. There are two central themes in the paper. First it suggests that the inequalities experienced in the education system by working class people has been colonised by middle class academics for their own professional purposes. This colonisation has been greatly facilitated by the nature of the scholastic context itself. To globalise one's point of view in academic writing requires both freedom from the urgency and necessity of survival, and intellectual legitimacy. Working class people lack both. The paper also suggests that working class people occupy a struturally contradictory role in relation to education: on the one hand, social mobility generally requires that they be well educated. Yet if they are to succeed in the education system they have to abandon certain features of their class background. They cease to be working class at least to some degree. Other oppressed or marginalised groups in education, do not lose their defining minority identity or status by being educated: an educated woman never ceases to be a woman, an educated black person never ceases to be black, and a physically disabled person who is educated never ceases to be disabled. The structural relationship between social class and education, is fundamentally different therefore to that of gender, race and ethnicity and this issue needs to be re‐assessed in educational analysis. Finally, the paper suggests that the failure to incorporate a working class perspective on educational inequalities leads to the impoverishment of academic analysis as the interests of professional academics rather than working class people dominate the agenda.     

Early language intervention: A deterrent to reading disability

Reading is a language art! In acquiring competence in reading we build on proficiencies already available in the primary (spoken) language system. Language is made up of three primary components that impact on reading—phonology, or the sound structure of language including syllables and phonemes; syntax, or the rules governing the sequential ordering of words in phrases and sentences; and semantics, or the meaning system that is attached to words and phrases as a consequence of experiences in a variety of contexts. All three depend upon adequate short- and long-term memory capacities and functioning for their growth and refinement. Additionally, the bridging of speech to print, or the task of establishing sound/symbol correspondences in beginning reading draws not only upon phonological competencies and memory, it is also dependent upon the discovery that words are made up of smaller and isolable parts. This knowledge is often referred to as auditory segmenting which is one aspect of metalinguistic awareness. This paper will discuss these five language roots of reading. The authors will report on research that demonstrates that children, upon school entrance, do not all possess equal levels of competencies in these five critical language areas. Since success in beginning reading is dependent upon the adequate development and functioning of each of the five language areas noted above, early school experiences should be directed toward language development, as well as reading instruction, if we are to reduce the incidence of reading difficulties in our schools. Finally, we will offer suggestions for enhancing language competencies that will support and promote the acquisition of reading.     

Influences of the learning environment of a Regional University Campus on its international graduates

Staff and students at small regional campuses often consider them to be a learning environment with many advantages. Students can benefit from the opportunities for enhanced access to staff provided by factors such as small classes and a compact campus. International students from non-English-speaking backgrounds are one group for whom these factors can be particularly helpful in their adjustment to a new society as well as in their continuing study program. This belief is tested in the study described in this paper. Factors identified by international students as influencing their learning at a small campus situated a considerable distance from the state capital indicate strengths to be built on and celebrated and areas that call for the development of strategies to improve the quality of that learning environment. Former international student graduates were surveyed concerning their perceptions of their regional Australian university experience and the professional preparation it provided. Other Australian higher education institutions, particularly those with regional campuses, can make use of the insights gained through the study: as well as having implications for the provision of a quality learning experience and environment for all students, not only international students, they also have a bearing on international marketing strategies.     

Public speaking procrastination as a correlate of public speaking communication apprehension and self‐perceived public speaking competence

In the present study, the relationship between public speaking procrastination and communication apprehension, and the relationship between public speaking procrastination and self‐perceived public speaking competence were investigated. A significant, positive correlation was found between public speaking procrastination and communication apprehension. A significant, negative correlation was found between public speaking procrastination and self‐perceived public speaking competence. The implications of public speaking procrastination for students and their instructors are discussed along with “anti‐procrastination “ pedagogical strategies.     

From Findings to Theories: Institutionalizing Social Informatics

We focus here on the history, status, and future of social informatics. In doing this we build on the visionary work of the late Rob Kling. Social informatics research contributes insights and perspectives to the study of computing in our society that other approaches do not. We make the case that social informatics is on its way to becoming a scholarly institution: accepted as one of the several approaches to study computing, and in particular, the approach best suited to engage on computerization. In making this case, we highlight the value of social informatics, summarize its principles and common findings, point to current work and issues, illustrate the three perspectives through which to pursue this scholarship, and identify several current activities remaining for social informatics to institutionalize.