Thinking Spatially: Teaching an Undervalued Practice Skill

Spatial thinking, which is taught and practiced in many of the social sciences, is a skill that is often overlooked in the social work curriculum. Spatial thought increases perception, logic, and organized cognition of goals and therefore holds promise for social work practice. Developing skills in spatial thought offers social workers additional tools for problem solving at all practice levels. Finally, thinking spatially raises awareness of problem-solving techniques in relation to environmental resources, a key aspect of systems theory. Fortunately, spatial thinking can be easily integrated into a variety of social work classes helping students master the skill and understand its importance. This article defines and describes spatial thinking, explores its fit in various areas of the social work curriculum, and discusses ways its use can be encouraged.     

An analytical model for university identity and reputation strategy work

Universities face increasing global competition, pressuring them to restructure and find new identities. A multidimensional model: identity, image and reputation of strategic university identity and reputation work is developed. The model includes: organizational identity; employee and student attitudes; symbolic identity; influence from buildings, artefacts and reputation; and external stakeholders’ valuations. Image perceptions among employees, students and external stakeholders are proposed to have a transition-mediating function with respect to university identity. The model serves as an analytical tool for both academic scholars and university administrators in the strategic work with university identity, image and reputation, and aim to clarify the complex relations between these concepts.     

Educational Equity Policies and the Centralization of American Public Education: The Case of Bilingual Education

Sixty years ago, federal guidelines regarding the instruction of special populations in American public schools were nonexistent. Racial minorities, language minorities, women, the poor, and those with physical and mental disabilities had not been identified as groups that needed special protections. Much has changed since then. Federal legislation that is designed to ensure that all of these groups have access to equal educational opportunities in the United States is now in place. This article examines the evolution of policies surrounding bilingual education to illustrate that the need to ensure the educational opportunities of certain student populations compelled the federal government to become more involved in the governance and oversight of American public education. The implementation of such federal “protection policies” designed to expand educational opportunities for traditionally underserved groups of students ultimately fortified and solidified the federal government's more pronounced role in public education.     

Instructor fluency leads to higher confidence in learning,but not better learning

Students’ judgements of their own learning often exceed their knowledge on a given topic. One source of this pervasive overconfidence is fluency, the perceived ease with which information is acquired. Though effects of fluency on metacognitive judgments have been explored by manipulating relatively simple stimuli such as font style, few studies have explored the effects of fluency on more complex forms of learning encountered in educational settings, such as learning from lectures. The present study manipulated the fluency of a 31-min video-recorded lecture, and measured its effects on both perceived and actual learning. In the fluent condition, the instructor used non-verbal gestures, voice dynamics, mobility about the space, and appropriate pauses. In the disfluent condition, the same instructor read directly from notes, hunched over a podium, rarely made eye contact, used few non-verbal gestures, spoke in monotone pitch, and took irregular and awkward pauses. Though participants rated the fluent instructor significantly higher than the disfluent instructor on measures of teaching effectiveness and estimated that they had learned more of the material, actual learning between the two groups did not differ as assessed by a memory test over the lecture contents given immediately (Experiment 1) or after a 1-day delay (Experiment 2). This counterintuitive result reveals an “illusion of learning” due to fluency in lecture-based learning, a very common form of instruction.     

Confirmatory factor analysis of the KABC‐II in preschool children

The present study assessed the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children, Second Edition (KABC‐II) in relation to the synthesized Cattell–Horn–Carroll (CHC) theory of intelligence with a preschool sample. Participants were 200 preschool children between four and five years of age. A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was conducted, and different variations of the CHC model were examined to determine which provided the best representation of the proposed underlying CHC constructs tested by the KABC‐II. The models included one similar to Spearman's g, a contemporary two‐stratum model consisting of fluid and crystallized intelligence (Gf‐Gc model), and a synthesized CHC broad factor +g model. The last was the empirically validated theory of interest in this study. Results of the CFA revealed that the broad factor +g CHC model was the best overall design to explain KABC‐II results. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Development of Children’s monitoring and control when learning from texts: effects of age and test format

Metacognition and Learning - This study investigated elementary school children’s development of monitoring and control when learning from texts. Second (N = 138) and fourth...