The development of a mentoring program for university undergraduate women

The Women's Center at a university in the United States implemented a mentoring program based on feminist and networking models to improve the educational climate for female undergraduate students. Due to a lack of literature detailing how to develop such a program, an interdisciplinary team of researchers collaborated with the Women's Center to address program development and implementation, including how to institutionalize the program, effective recruitment and retention strategies, how to facilitate formation of mentor relationships and strategies for maintaining those relationships, appropriate interventions and monitoring, and how to ensure that the program met mentees' needs. Among the findings are that success depends on a full‐time and dedicated coordinator, appropriate matching of mentors and mentees, and emphasis during training on continuing communication between mentors and mentees to reassess mentee needs.     

Engaging students in active learning: use of a blog and audience response system

Librarians provide instruction to medical students as part of a core course in the medical school curriculum. Instruction was provided, in part, through didactic sessions covering professional-level medical information resources, PubMed search skills, psychosocial information, and evidence-based medicine. Librarians redesigned instructional sessions with the goals of increasing student engagement and minimizing the lecture format, maximizing the number of students receiving feedback on their search and evaluation skills, and permitting students to see a variety of possible responses as well as engage in peer- and self-evaluation. Librarians integrated the use of a blog and an audience response system (ARS) into the instruction to help accomplish these goals.     

A Longitudinal Investigation of Chimpanzees' Understanding of Visual Perception

Seven chimpanzees were tested for their understanding of the intentional aspect of visual perception at 5 – 6 years of age and again at 7 years of age. They appeared not to understand that they should use a species-typical, visually based begging gesture in front of someone who could see them, as opposed to someone who could not. Four experiments that were conducted when these same subjects were adolescents are reported here. The results suggest that there was no development between 5 and 9 years of age in the animals' understanding of visual perception as an internal state of attention. The subjects appeared to learn procedural, stimulus-based rules related to the frontal orientation, the face, and the eyes of the experimenters. Even subjects most adept at these tasks appeared to rely on stimulus-based rule structures, not an attribution of "seeing."