Building a technology foundation for future teachers

It is fitting that the teachers of tomorrow are provided with the correct modeling of technology in their first education class. To separate technology from education is both impossible and foolish. The sooner college students are exposed to the latest forms of technology, the more equipped they will be to integrate these tools into their teaching strategies for the benefit of future learners.     

Who Publishes More Books in U.S. English Departments,Men or Women?

The “gender gap” in the U.S. publication of English language and literature scholarly books has not been fully investigated. In order to investigate gender disparity, we collected, aggregated, and analyzed data on 1633 faculty members who authored or edited 4835 scholarly books at the top 50 U.S. English Ph.D. departments. Despite the fact that more women than men have received Ph.D.s in English since 1987, the top 50 departments are predominantly male, and male faculty members publish more books on a per capita basis. However, who publishes more books in these departments varies: (1) with the department that the faculty member is in (with grater parity in the middle 30 departments); and (2) when the faculty member published their first book, with female faculty who published their first book after 1998 publishing as many books on a per person basis as male faculty. This paper also offers recommendations on how marketing strategies can be used to ameliorate the “gender gap” in this academic field.     

Should Regularization Replace Simple Structure Rotation in Exploratory Factor Analysis?

Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) is an important tool when the measurement structure of psychological constructs is uncertain. Typically, factor rotation is applied to obtain interpretable results resembling a simple structure. However, an overwhelming multitude of rotation techniques is available of which none is unequivocally superior. Recently, regularization has been suggested as an alternative to factor rotation. In two simulation studies, we addressed the question if regularized EFA is a suitable alternative for rotated EFA. We compared their performance in recovering predefined factor loading patterns with varying amounts of cross-loadings. Elastic net regularized EFA yielded estimates comparable to rotated EFA. For complex loading patterns, both rotated and regularized EFA tended to underestimate cross-loadings and inflate factor correlations, but regularized EFA was able to recover loading patterns as long as a subset of items followed a simple structure. We conclude that regularization is a suitable alternative to factor rotation for psychometric applications.     

Book Thieves: Theft and Literary Culture in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Australia

Book thieves were a familiar figure to the reading public of Australia and other English-speaking nations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Their exploits were covered in books about books, library and medical journals, and in newspapers that reported their appearances in court, and treated them as a humorous oddity in other coverage. This article examines the historic concerns and assumptions about book thieves, as well as what these tropes reveal about prevailing discourses regarding thieves more generally. The book thief – invariably constructed in the popular imagination as a middle-class male – was a classed and gendered figure, one at odds with contemporary understandings of theft as an act committed by members of an uncultured criminal class. By scrutinizing the development of popular conceptions of the book thief as an entity clearly distinguishable from the ordinary thief, I demonstrate the centrality of literacy and literary culture to how thieves themselves were read.     

Sammelrezension: Unsicherheit — Chancen und Risiken der Generalisierung

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Doing Social Justice: Turning Talk into Action in a Mathematics Service Learning Course

Abstract

Many students experience mathematics as a neutral entity, without understanding its impact on social justice and equity. Students must understand that mathematics and statistics are powerful tools for creating social change, and that students themselves are capable to enact positive social change through their mathematical abilities. In this paper, we discuss how we have integrated both service learning and mathematical consulting into a single course to promote civic engagement by mathematics majors through professional applications. We outline methods to engage with community partners to create consulting projects for students while integrating discussions of professionalism, practice, ethics, and social justice into the classroom. We provide qualitative evidence that the integration of service learning and consulting empowers mathematics students to make a difference by doing social justice with mathematics.     

Engaging students in reflective writing: an action research project

ABSTRACT

Due to limited exposure to the reflective genre, students experience cognitive, psychological and linguistic issues that prevent them from producing proficient reflective pieces. This study investigated how these issues could be addressed through modelling, the 6 + 1 traits writing rubric and blended learning. The study reports on the experiences of 37 participants in the fourth year of secondary schooling at an all male school in Trinidad and Tobago. Change in a regional examination syllabus which introduced a focus on the reflective mode and reflective writing had implications for teaching and learning. Through one cycle of a practical action research project using an embedded quasi-experimental design, an intervention to address cognitive, psychological and linguistic issues was implemented. Quantitative data were collected using a pre- and post-test and a Writing Attitude Survey (WAS). Qualitative data were gathered through student journals and students’ formative writing assessment artefacts. The intervention succeeded in positively changing students’ dispositions towards reflective writing, developing students’ reflective writing and addressing text organization issues. This research is significant for teachers and students where intentional reflection and reflective writing are competencies that can enhance critical thinking and metacognition and potentially lead to personal, intellectual and professional development.