International collaborations in learning and teaching: perspectives from a visiting professorship

This article provides a reflection on the outcomes of an international collaboration between health librarians and academics at York St John University and Pacific University Oregon. In particular, it describes how a month‐long visiting professorship from an academic with a clinical librarian background at the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences helped to develop and inform teaching practice in the areas of information literacy and evidence‐based health practice on health programmes at Pacific University. Perspectives are offered from both institutions on the rich exchange of knowledge and practice that took place during the visit and the ongoing impact it has had on teaching practices. H. S.     

The importance of financial literacy

Adrianna Kezar and Hannah Yang argue that financial literacy is both an important life skill and a critical intellectual competency.     

Training Mispronunciation Correction and Word Meanings Improves Children’s Ability to Learn to Read Words

Previous research has suggested that learning to read irregular words depends upon knowledge of a word’s meaning and the ability to correct imperfect decoding attempts by reference to the known pronunciations of a word. In an experimental training study, 84 children ages 5–7 years were randomly assigned to an intervention or control group. Children in the intervention group participated in a 4-week programme in which they were taught to correct mispronunciations of spoken words as well as being taught the meanings of those words. Children in the control group received no additional teaching. The intervention group made significant gains in their ability to correct mispronunciations and to read and define the taught words; these gains also generalised to a comparable set of untaught control words. Children can be taught to correct errors in the pronunciation of irregular words, and this may produce generalised effects on learning to read.     

Does parental employment affect children's educational attainment?

This paper analyzes whether there exists a causal relationship between parental employment and children's educational attainment. We address potential endogeneity problems due to (i) selection of parents in the labor market by estimating a model on sibling differences and (ii) reverse causality by focusing on parents’ employment when children are aged 0–3. We use data from the German Socioeconomic Panel that provide information on household income, parental employment, and time spent with child care. Our approach disentangles income and time effects of parental employment. Overall, we find little support that parental employment affects children's educational attainment. Controlling for household income, we can rule out that having a mother who works one hour more per week lowers the probability of high secondary track attendance by more than 0.1%.     

Utilizing Improvisation to Teach Empathy Skills in Counselor Education

Empathy development is foundational to counselor training, yet there is scant research on techniques for teaching empathy aside from traditional microskills models. The authors discuss empathy as a skill set, highlight how improvisation (improv) can be used to enhance training, and describe how to incorporate improv activities within the classroom.     

Key to Freshwater Algae: A Web-based Tool to Enhance Understanding of Microscopic Biodiversity

The Freshwater Ecology Laboratory at Connecticut College has developed an interactive, Web-based identification key to freshwater algal genera using the Lucid Professional and Lucid 3 software developed by the Centre for Biological Information Technology at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. The Key to Freshwater Algae was funded by the National Science Foundation (Award #CCLI-0229531) to encourage awareness of microscopic diversity through a creative, investigative approach to learning. Users may answer questions in any order to quickly and efficiently narrow down the list of taxa to only those that match the characteristics they have chosen. All characters and terms are clearly explained for ease of use by those unfamiliar with the algae. This non-hierarchical, user-friendly key is linked to Web pages containing a wealth of resources, including images, movies, and information about the morphology, ecology, and reproduction of each organism. These materials are especially well suited for classroom use in conjunction with cultures purchased from the Carolina Biological Supply Company, a popular distributor of biological materials. Cultures from the Carolina Biological Supply Company representing nearly 75 freshwater genera from a variety of algal groups were observed and photographed using high resolution digital imaging to fully document cellular structure and highlight distinguishing features. High quality video footage of each taxon incorporating titles, diagrams, and structural terminology was outputted as QuickTime movies, on DVD, and on VHS cassettes. The Key to Freshwater Algae and supplemental materials are available online at http://silicasecchidisk.conncoll.edu to provide an innovative alternative to traditional dichotomous keys that is particularly appropriate for introducing students in undergraduate life science courses to the algal groups and genera.