Examining interactive whiteboard-based instruction on the academic self-efficacy,academic press and achievement of college students*

Abstract

The study reported here examined college students’ academic self-efficacy, ‘academic press’ and learning achievement, as well as the association between these three variables within learning contexts using interactive whiteboard-based instruction. A quasi-experimental study was conducted using a sample (n = 103) of first-year college students in China. Participants were taught English by either an interactive whiteboard-based or traditional lecture-based instructional approach for three months. The results showed that the interactive whiteboard-based instructional intervention cultivated higher levels of academic press and academic self-efficacy among students and a significant, positive correlation was identified between these two variables. Students’ learning achievement was not affected by the instructional intervention. These results indicate that interactive whiteboard-based instruction offers some distinct benefits. In future work, additional research is needed to clarify how the instructional model relates to understanding learning achievement.     

The role of mentoring relationships in the career development of successful deaf persons

A qualitative study of deaf graduates of Rochester Institute of Technology in New York State who became supervisors in primarily hearing work settings found that having a mentor was a primary and persistent element in their career success. In the deaf individual's early years, generally it was a family member or teacher who conveyed a belief in that individual's abilities, encouraged effort, and helped instill self-esteem and confidence. Parents were often their strongest advocates, and teachers were their advisors and facilitators. In the work setting, a supervisor or coworker often served as a mentor by coaching, advising, and teaching the individual what they needed to know to succeed on the job. In many ways, these "informal" mentors provided the foundation that enabled the deaf individual to break through what are often barriers to career success despite their skills and abilities. The various forms of mentorship and their impact on deaf college graduates are explored.     

Internally Incentivized Interdisciplinarity: Organizational Restructuring of Research and Emerging Tensions

Interdisciplinarity is widely considered necessary to solving many contemporary problems, and new funding structures and instruments have been created to encourage interdisciplinary research at universities. In this article, we study a small technical university specializing in green technology which implemented a strategy aimed at promoting and developing interdisciplinary collaboration. It did so by reallocating its internal research funds for at least five years to “research platforms” that required researchers from at least two of the three schools within the university to participate. Using data from semi-structured interviews from researchers in three of these platforms, we identify specific tensions that the strategy has generated in this case: (1) in the allocation of platform resources, (2) in the division of labor and disciplinary relations, (3) in choices over scientific output and academic careers. We further show how the particular platform format exacerbates the identified tensions in our case. We suggest that certain features of the current platform policy incentivize shallow interdisciplinary interactions, highlighting potential limits on the value of attempting to push for interdisciplinarity through internal funding.

     

Peer mentoring in engineering: (un)shared experience of undergraduate peer mentors and mentees

In this qualitative study, we explored the experiences of 26 engineering student mentors and mentees in a peer mentoring program. We found that mentors and mentees exploited the mentoring program’s fluid structure and situated social relationships to enact a specific type of academic/professional goal and identity conducive to their entry to one of two communities of practice, the on-campus engineering program community and the community of professional engineers. The mentoring program functioned as a social space in which identities of these students converged and diverged, creating a subtle tension and self-reflection in relation to the two different communities of practice that they pursued.     

Strategies for building distributed information retrieval systems

In this article we discuss the need for distributed information retrieval Systems. A number of possible configurations are presented. A general approach to the design of such systems is discussed. A prototype implementation is described together with the experiences gained from this implementation.