Assessment matters: Considering the scholarship of teaching and learning in student affairs

Tony Ribera, Sarah Fernandez, and Matt Gray apply a scholarly approach to assessing student learning in the cocurriculum.     

Television Teaching: Parody,The Simpsons,and Media Literacy Education

This paper examines televisual parody as a media literacy educator, and the potential of parody to channel the powers of comedy and entertainment in order to “teach” the techniques and rhetoric of televisual texts and genres. It focuses on the case of the hugely successful and popular animated parodic sitcom, The Simpsons, and its playful attack on advertising and promotional culture. Currently in its 16th season, The Simpsons broadcasts to approximately 60 million viewers in 70 countries weekly, offering a playful critique of television from within the television frame.     

Personal Malpractice Liability of Reference Librarians and Information Brokers

No abstract available for this article.     

Changes in Examination Performance in English Secondary Schools over the Course of a Decade: Searching for Patterns and Trends Over Time

The article explores changes in the examination performance of a random sample of 500 English secondary schools between 1992 and 2001. Using econometric methods, it concludes that: there is an overall deterministic trend in school performance but it is not stable, making prediction accuracy poor; the aggregate trend does not explain improvement over time at school level, where there is very considerable variation in improvement paths; there is a degree of persistence with respect to changes in performance at school level but it is short-lived; whilst there is evidence of a general upward trend across schools, there is a large amount of year-to-year variation and little evidence of sustained improvement at school level; and the model applied has little ability to forecast the direction of change for particular schools in the following year(s).     

A behavioristic interpretation of language

This essay argues that Bitzer's situational theory provides non‐deterministic causal explanations of rhetoric by recognizing the operation of external and internal factors upon rhetors and audiences, including the necessary role of perception. Understood in this way, the theory accounts for forms of rhetorical creativity through the definition of controlling elements of situations, for the production of rhetoric as purposive action, and for the degree of accuracy or clarity with which observable features of situations have been interpreted.     

Bridging the teacher/researcher divide: Master’s-level work in initial teacher education

There is much current debate about the purpose and usefulness of educational research and the perceived communication gap between teaching professionals and academic researchers. UK government intervention into initial teacher education has in recent decades contributed to this divide by favouring school-based training. The most common route into teaching in England remains, however, the Postgraduate Certificate in Education, provided by higher education institutions and therefore required to comply with the higher education qualifications framework. The majority of initial teacher education in England therefore lies at the cusp of these two worlds, pulled in apparently opposing directions. The ‘teacher-as-researcher’ movement is widely seen as a bridge spanning these tensions, though there is discussion about the quality of practitioner research as well as about the appropriateness of a rigorous academic approach for investigating practice. This article offers examples of the use of small-scale research projects as a valid means of ‘discovery learning’ in pre-service teacher education. It argues that induction into research techniques as a means of exploring practical challenges can lead to knowledge production and ownership.     

Beginning literacy: links among teacher knowledge, teacher practice, and student learning

Although the importance of phonological awareness has been discussed widely in the research literature, the concept is not well understood by many classroom teachers. In the study described here, we worked with groups of kindergarten and first-grade teachers (the experimental group) during a 2-week summer institute and throughout the school year. We shared with them research about learning disabilities and effective instruction, stressing the importance of explicit instruction in phonological and orthographic awareness. We followed the experimental group and a control group into their classrooms for a year, assessing teachers' classroom practices and their students' (n = 779) learning. The study yielded three major findings: We can deepen teachers' own knowledge of the role of phonological and orthographic information in literacy instruction; teachers can use that knowledge to change classroom practice; and changes in teacher knowledge and classroom practice can improve student learning.