Circuits of Dominance in Education and Poverty: Control Logic and Counter Narrative

In this article I represented educational narratives from two students who completed college coursework while they were incarcerated in a closed correctional facility in North Carolina. Alongside their narratives, I shared literature that addressed inadequacies in the United States social welfare programs, an absence of a living wage, and whitestream dominance in US public schools and analyzed the narratives of these students’ childhoods. These narratives were situated at the intersections of poverty and illegal work. Often these intersections remain invisible in policy discourse and educational contexts in the high accountability/high stakes testing movement that positions the curriculum, and not the child, as the most important thing in the classroom. Subsequently, I challenged educators and researchers committed to the pursuit of equity to question how the children in our classrooms and youth in our prisons were raced, gendered, and classed, and to engage in careful and layered understandings of our students’ lives.     

The effect of context on student engagement in engineering

The self-belief, motivation, tendency to procrastinate and learning styles of engineering students are discussed. It is proposed that engineering has developed an idiom and a learning approach that favours the dominant client, i.e. men, while simultaneously undermining the self-efficacy and motivation of women. Thematic coherence and teaching within a context that is familiar to students have been shown previously to be effective approaches for engaging students and are extended here to utilise the common experiences of all students to initiate the learning cycle. These approaches are combined with a template for teaching that uses the 5Es (Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate and Evaluate) in order to render the fundamentals of engineering more accessible to all students. This methodology can be introduced by individual instructors, who will be rewarded by students who are more engaged, more motivated and more likely to give a higher rating to the instructor and the course.     

Real time search on the web: Queries,topics, and economic value

Real time search is an increasingly important area of information seeking on the Web. In this research, we analyze 1,005,296 user interactions with a real time search engine over a 190 day period. Using query log analysis, we investigate searching behavior, categorize search topics, and measure the economic value of this real time search stream. We examine aggregate usage of the search engine, including number of users, queries, and terms. We then classify queries into subject categories using the Google Directory topical hierarchy. We next estimate the economic value of the real time search traffic using the Google AdWords keyword advertising platform. Results shows that 30% of the queries were unique (used only once in the entire dataset), which is low compared to traditional Web searching. Also, 60% of the search traffic comes from the search engine’s application program interface, indicating that real time search is heavily leveraged by other applications. There are many repeated queries over time via these application program interfaces, perhaps indicating both long term interest in a topic and the polling nature of real time queries. Concerning search topics, the most used terms dealt with technology, entertainment, and politics, reflecting both the temporal nature of the queries and, perhaps, an early adopter user-based. However, 36% of the queries indicate some geographical affinity, pointing to a location-based aspect to real time search. In terms of economic value, we calculate this real time search stream to be worth approximately US $33,000,000 (US $33 M) on the online advertising market at the time of the study. We discuss the implications for search engines and content providers as real time content increasingly enters the main stream as an information source.     

The efficacy of a computer-adaptive reading program on grade 5 students’ reading achievement scores

Education and Information Technologies - Reading in upper-elementary grades includes comprehending complex texts and learning disciplinary-specific vocabulary. This study aims to determine the...     

What Could Have Been Done? Circuit City: A Case Study of Management and Employee Performance Failure

This case study is an employee performance analysis that utilizes Gilbert's behavior engineering model (Gilbert, 2007 ) as a theoretical framework to examine the events that caused Circuit City to fail in 2008. Additionally, the case study views the events through a systemic lens. As management implemented changes, employee morale and performance faltered, which in turn affected customer perceptions and attitudes. Taken together, these actions resulted in a negative feedback loop that greatly contributed to the demise of the company.     

Self‐Compassion Among College Counseling Center Clients: An Examination of Clinical Norms and Group Differences

There has been growing interest in the mental health benefits of self‐compassion. This study was designed to establish norms on the Self‐Compassion Scale–Short Form, a popular measure of self‐compassion for individuals seeking counseling, and to examine group differences in self‐compassion based on gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, previous counseling, and psychiatric medication use. Data for this study were collected through the Center for Collegiate Mental Health, a practice‐research network of more than 240 college and university counseling centers.     

Distributed leadership with the aim of ‘reculturing’: a departmental case study

This article considers a secondary science department that has, since 2000, developed distributed leadership as a form of human capacity building. Using a longitudinal ethnographic case study allowed us to consider how distributed leadership can be nurtured and developed in a department. Our analysis centres on two key issues: the nature and pattern of distributed leadership practices and the continuity that provides coherence to those practices. From our analysis, there appear to be two major conclusions. The first of these is the need for administrators to be purposeful in the appointments that they make to formal leadership positions. To enact distributed leadership practices requires leaders who can exercise both formal power and influence. The second conclusion relates to the time required for continuity of leadership practices to give rise to changes that lead to teachers managing the teaching and learning programme.     

School Start Time Change: An In‐Depth Examination of School Districts in the United States

In response to the scientific evidence documenting both profound developmental changes in sleep and circadian biology during adolescence and the myriad of negative health, performance, and safety outcomes risks associated with chronic sleep loss, at least 70 public school districts in the United States, representing approximately 1,000 schools, have successfully implemented a delay in high school start times. However, despite the compelling evidence supporting school start time change as a key strategy in addressing the epidemic of adolescent sleep loss, many school districts across the country with early high school start times have not considered the option to implement later bell schedules for adolescents. Moreover, while the current scientific literature has clearly documented the positive outcomes associated with delayed high school start times, these studies contain limited information regarding the process by which school districts consider, approve and implement bell schedule changes. Thus, this in‐depth examination of those school districts that have been successful in changing their bell schedules is intended to support the efforts of other districts in various stages of contemplating this measure. We utilized a multi‐pronged approach (literature review, case studies, telephone interviews, online survey) to summarize the experiences of school districts across the United States in regard to challenges faced, strategies employed, and lessons learned in the hope that this information will be a useful tool for other school districts looking to chart a course forward to promote the health, safety, and academic opportunities of their students.     

Multiple Copies of Bestsellers in Public Libraries: How Much Is Enough?

How do public libraries develop their collections of high-demand materials for the “I want it now” generation? Ten public libraries’ holdings of fiction and nonfiction bestseller titles were observed over a four-week period. The number of copies rose fairly consistently, with the five fiction titles having roughly about twice the number of copies as the five nonfiction titles. The ratio of holds to copies averaged 2.7:1 and ranged from 0.8:1 to 6.5:1. Demand for e-books was consistently higher than the number of copies available, averaging more than 4:1 across all libraries.     

Enacted Goal Attention in Family Conversations about End-of-life Health Decisions

Most extant research on end-of-life communication in families has been based on the assumption that more communication is better communication. We used a multiple goals theoretical perspective to demonstrate that the quality of communication about end-of-life decisions matters. Members of 121 older parent/adult child dyads (N = 242) engaged in an elicited conversation about end-of-life health choices and reported their assessments of the conversation. Using multilevel linear modeling, we found that outside ratings of a person's communication quality (i.e., attention to task, identity, and relational goals) as well as outside ratings of the partner's communication quality were positively associated with the person's reported conversational satisfaction and hopefulness and negatively associated with the person's hurt feelings and relational distancing.