Digital Media and Disciplinarity

This article asks two related questions: Is digital media studies a discipline, and should scholars within the field desire to move toward disciplinarity? Drawing on the writings of Michel Foucualt and Pierre Bourdieu, as well as several Anglo-American cultural studies of disciplinarity, the essay argues that digital media studies has not yet constituted a truly novel scholarly discourse. Because of that, our reasons for disciplinizing—to the extent that it is possible to choose to become a discipline—would be largely strategic. Given that the field is already successfully reproducing itself, the symbolic benefits of becoming a discipline are relatively limited, and such a move would also have significant intellectual costs.     

Attachment,Entitlement, and the Impostor Phenomenon in Female Graduate Students

This study examined the utility of attachment and entitlement as predictors of the impostor phenomenon in female graduate students. Findings suggested that individuals with high levels of self‐reliance/self‐assurance entitlement are able to associate positive feedback with stable internal attributes. Those with anxious attachment and narcissistic expectations/self‐promotion entitlement, however, were unable to openly accept positive feedback because of perceived deficits in self‐worth. Implications are discussed for addressing these issues with female college counseling clients.     

Can computer-aided instruction accommodate all learners equally?

This exploratory study investigated the impact of learning styles on human-computer interaction. Seventy learners who were enrolled in a large urban post-secondary institution participated in the study. The Gregorc Style Delineator™ was used to obtain subjects' dominant learning style scores. Results indicated that patterns of learning indices did not differ significantly based on subjects' dominant learning style. Five of the six measures indicating human-computer interaction behavior were not significant at the p < 0.05 level. However, learning styles significantly affected learning outcomes, as indicated by a significant main effect, as well as an interaction effect between dominant learning style and achievement scores. It would appear that Abstract Random learners may be at-risk for doing poorly with certain forms of computer-aided instruction. Based on the review of literature and results found in this study, it was concluded that computer-aided instruction may not be the most appropriate method of learning for all students.     

Counting the Cost of International Assessment: why universities may need to get a second opinion

University academics and educationists have taken the lead in advising on testing practice in the state education system. They have encouraged the development of a multiple judgement assessment system in which the requirement for test ‘reliability’ has been viewed as inappropriate. They have also supported the growing practice amongst examination boards of downgrading the importance of test reliability in another critical area of educational assessment, that of English language proficiency testing. This paper critically examines the case that is being presented by such experts in support of this type of development in English language proficiency testing. It suggests that both the experts and the examination boards they advise, may be following a hidden agenda. It goes on to review the evidence that their advice is being heeded and that there is a growing disregard for reliability estimation amongst the English language proficiency test producers. It argues that in light of this departure, universities, which are the largest users of scores derived from the assessment of the English language proficiency of international students, must move quickly towards the adoption of an appropriate multiple‐judgement approach. It attempts to identify appropriate alternative sources of relevant information in such an assessment, and seeks to show that such a system would need to differ radically from that introduced in the state sector. It concludes by outlining a number of reasons why universities might not wish to deal with an issue, which is of real importance to the educational health of the 400,000 international students who seek admission to the tertiary sector in the UK.     

An evaluation of adaptive filtering in the context of realistic task-based information exploration

Exploratory search increasingly becomes an important research topic. Our interests focus on task-based information exploration, a specific type of exploratory search performed by a range of professional users, such as intelligence analysts. In this paper, we present an evaluation framework designed specifically for assessing and comparing performance of innovative information access tools created to support the work of intelligence analysts in the context of task-based information exploration. The motivation for the development of this framework came from our needs for testing systems in task-based information exploration, which cannot be satisfied by existing frameworks. The new framework is closely tied with the kind of tasks that intelligence analysts perform: complex, dynamic, and multiple facets and multiple stages. It views the user rather than the information system as the center of the evaluation, and examines how well users are served by the systems in their tasks. The evaluation framework examines the support of the systems at users’ major information access stages, such as information foraging and sense-making. The framework is accompanied by a reference test collection that has 18 tasks scenarios and corresponding passage-level ground truth annotations. To demonstrate the usage of the framework and the reference test collection, we present a specific evaluation study on CAFÉ, an adaptive filtering engine designed for supporting task-based information exploration. This study is a successful use case of the framework, and the study indeed revealed various aspects of the information systems and their roles in supporting task-based information exploration.     

Influence of Mindfulness,Emotion Regulation,and Perceived Social Support on Burnout

We used canonical correlation analysis to examine the predictive nature of three facets of wellness (mindfulness, emotion regulation, and perceived social support) on burnout in counselors-in-training (N = 136). The cognitive reappraisal construct made a significant contribution to the wellness predictor variate. Implications for counselor training programs are discussed.