Evaluating Student Success in a Cohort-based Graduate Program for Criminal Justice Professionals

Previous studies have shown that additional education for criminal justice professionals can improve individual effectiveness. This higher level of education can facilitate better communication, problem-solving skills, and performance. The University of South Florida offers a unique cohort-style/weekend-based Master’s program (MACJA) that is designed specifically for these professionals. This program has graduated 180 students since 2006, all members of the criminal justice field. The current study aims to determine which student background factors are associated with a higher graduating GPA in the program. This project will also discuss the results of a follow-up survey of MACJA graduates assessing professional advancement following graduation, specifically targeting topics such as promotions, special awards or recognitions, teaching experience, and further education.     

Problems of Transferring Software

If we make a survey of the present state of the distribution of teaching media around the world, we can venture to say, after a first analysis, that ‘software is the least equally shared thing in this world’. This phenomenon generally remains unnoticed because not very obvious, for it is difficult to evaluate the capital of software, because the studies led for the past ten years in the educational field have brought to the fore the problems of how to deal with systems, of planning, mainly enhancing thereby the social and economical elements. The diagrams displaying the compared situations, as well as the markingout of the boundary between well-equipped and developing countries, have been established according to easily ‘measurable’ facts: the percentage of the national income devoted to education, the number of practising teachers, the equipments, the schooling rate, the school dropout rate, the growth rate.     

Transformation and contextualisation: conceptualising students’ conceptual understandings of threshold concepts in calculus

Research on student learning in higher education suggests that threshold concepts within various disciplines have the capacity to transform students’ understanding. The present study explores students’ understanding in relation to particular threshold concepts in mathematics—integral and limit—and tries to clarify in what sense developing an understanding of those threshold concepts involves a transformation of understanding in relation to ways of thinking in mathematics. Drawing on data collected in interviews with students taking a basic course on calculus the analysis offers an initial characterisation of students’ understandings as algorithmic. It then proceeds to construct a more fine-grained theoretical account for how these understandings develop in the course of the interview, suggesting that the transformative aspects of threshold concepts may be conceptualised in terms of shifts in students’ contextualisations allowing the development of conceptions at different levels of abstraction simultaneously interacting to shape students’ awareness of the ways of thinking and practising in the subject.