Succeeding in the city: Challenges and best practices on urban commuter campuses

Students who make the daily commute to urban campuses face academic and nonacademic issues not typically experienced by their suburban or rural counterparts. A veteran of multiple types of campus environments offers insight into the lives of these students and suggests strategies for helping college urbanites thrive.     

Developmental issues in cognitive mapping: the selection and utilization of environmental landmarks

2 studies were conducted to investigate developmental differences in the ability to select and use environmental landmarks for cognitively organizing distance information from a walk. In experiment 1, second-grade, fifth-grade, and college subjects viewed a simulated walk and selected scenes that were high in potential landmark value. In experiment 2, children from the same grade levels first viewed the walk and then ranked distances among either the test scenes most frequently selected by their peers or those selected most frequently by adults. Results indicated that (a) adults and children may not spontaneously select the same features as real-world landmarks; (b) children are less capable than adults in judging the value of potential landmarks as distance cues; and (c) the ability to use environmental landmarks as cues for distance information developmentally precedes the ability to assess this potential information value.     

Adjunctive drinking during variable and random-interval food reinforcement schedules

Rats were trained to leverpress for food and subsequently exposed to either arithmetic series or random variable-interval reinforcement schedules. Adjunctive drinking developed in all subjects exposed to arithmetic variable-interval reinforcement, but did not develop in six of the eight animals trained on the random schedule. The results suggest that adjunctive drinking is the result of an interaction between the tendency of rats to drink after eating and the ability of locally low probabilities of reinforcement within schedules to induce conditioned behavioral states.     

In the shadow of Sputnik: a transnational approach to Menzies support for science education in Australia, 1957–1964

Abstract

This paper examines prime minister Robert Menzies decision to support science education in Australian schools in 1963. This was a landmark shift in policy for the federal government, but in many ways mirrors the decision of Eisenhower who brought down the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) in 1958. The paper uses a transnational approach to offer a new way of looking at the 1963 decision by focusing on the need for science education and the environment which supported science advocacy rather than the traditional interpretation of political expediency to court the Catholic vote.     

Real education in non-real time: The use of electronic message systems for instruction

Education in different communication media takes place with functional differences that have consequences for the course of instructional interaction. In this paper, we examine instructional interaction among people using a computer-based electronic message system, contrasting it with conventional face-to-face discussion in a college level class. Interaction via the non-real time message system contained multiple “threads of discourse,” a higher proportion of student turns to teacher turns, and other deviations from the “initiation-response-evaluation” sequences usually found in face-to-face classroom interactions. Based on the results of our contrast, we describe ways to organize instruction using electronic message systems to take advantage of new properties and to avoid shortcomings of these new instructional media.     

Too Much,Too Young? An Analysis of the Key Stage 3 National Literacy Strategy in Practice

This article was first drafted after I worked for 14 weeks last year in a school that was piloting the National Literacy Strategy at Key Stage 3. I now work in another school delivering the full published Strategy to Year 7. In this article, I explore the contradictions inherent in the Strategy in attempting to develop the English and literacy skills of Key Stage 3 pupils. Ultimately, my argument is that the educational benefits of this teaching to objectives is at odds with some of the deeper aims of the Strategy and of English teaching, and that the constant assessment involved puts too much pressure on our youngsters at an age when they should be concentrating on social development as people.     

Can creative destruction be destroyed? Military IR&D and destruction along the value-added chain

We elaborate a supply chain innovation matrix that can be applied to both commercial and military supply chains. By shifting the analysis from a focal firm to industry structure, we argue that the market structure of the entire supply chain functions as a major moderating variable in determining both the timing and adoption of innovations, both for commercial and military markets. We extend work on supply chain resource dependency by drawing a distinction between market-structure-induced resource dependency and supplier over-reliance on a customer in a competitive market. This has policy implications for the organization of military industrial research and development (IR&D). Joint service research and development (Jointness) will certainly bring about innovation, but it will be incremental, reinforcing established military hierarchies. Policy makers may need to add this probable consequence when comparing Jointness and inter-service rivalry. The cost savings inherent in Jointness may unwittingly sustain a military force unready for fighting the next war.