Assessing alumni success: income is NOT the only outcome!

Institutions may be interested in using alumni career success as evidence of institutional effectiveness, but the current study suggests that using income as the sole outcome may not be entirely capturing the occupational experience of graduates. Utilising data from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis indicated that there are two distinct components of job satisfaction for arts graduates: intrinsic satisfaction and extrinsic satisfaction. The results of ordinary least squares regression analyses for these two factors provide some relationships concerning demographic and occupational characteristics with these two areas of satisfaction. In considering overall job satisfaction, intrinsic satisfaction may play a larger role in how alumni perceive their career outcomes and success.     

Mixing methods in randomized controlled trials (RCTs): Validation, contextualization, triangulation, and control

In this paper we described how we mixed research approaches in a Randomized Control Trial (RCT) of a school principal professional development program. Using examples from our study we illustrate how combining qualitative and quantitative data can address some key challenges from validating instruments and measures of mediator variables to examining how contextual factors interact with the treatment. Describing how we transformed our qualitative and quantitative data, we consider how mixing methods enabled us to deal with the two core RCT challenges of random assignment and treatment control critical. Our account offers insights into ways of maximizing the potential of mixing research methods in RCTs.     

An Exploration of Transportation and Psychological Reactance in Organ Donation PSAs

The present study expands on prior work on the use of narratives in persuasive communication by examining students’ (N = 201) reactions to six organ donation public service announcements (PSAs). Reactions to the type of appeal, donor-focused or recipient-focused, were also explored. Results indicated that being immersed in the PSA was positively associated with message reactions and negatively associated with threats to overall freedom of choice when deciding whether or not to become an organ donor. Those perceived threats partially mediated the relationship between immersion into the story of the PSA and message reactions, such that increased threats were associated with reduced message reactions. Individuals exposed to the recipient-focused appeals were more interested in the narrative of the PSAs than those exposed to donor-focused appeals. Results are discussed in the context of future message and campaign development.     

Declaring the Value of Truth

As fake news has become a growing concern since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, attention to journalism history offers a useful means for rediscovering strategies for both fighting fake news and shoring up journalism’s commitment to the truth. This article argues that truth’s value emerges from the conditions under which journalism is produced, both commercial and cultural. Looking at arguments about fake news published in news reports, columns, letters to editors, and advertisements in major metropolitan papers between 1891 and 1919, we recover the particular ways journalists came to define the problem of fake news, arguing that its emergence as a discursive object offered opportunities for conceiving of and articulating practicable responses across the industry. For contemporary practitioners, scholars, and commentators alike, this means that clearly defining and responding to the problem of fake news in ways that are both critical and contextual offer a means for recovering agency in the face of this crisis.     

Improving Reading Skills in Predominantly Hispanic Title 1 First‐Grade Classrooms: The Promise of Peer‐Assisted Learning Strategies

The purpose of this study was to examine the efficacy of a supplemental peer‐tutoring reading program on phonological and reading fluency skills of first graders (N= 78) who were in predominantly Hispanic Title 1 classrooms. Sixty‐eight percent of the students were Hispanic, all were English speaking. Six classrooms were randomly assigned to either the peer‐assisted learning strategies (PALS) program or a control condition. PALS students participated in a peer‐mediated early literacy intervention three times a week for 20 weeks for a total of 30 hours. Reading fluency measures taken at fall, winter, and spring showed statistically significant differences favoring PALS on phoneme segmentation and nonsense word fluency. Additionally, results analyzed by ethnic subgroups (Hispanic and non‐Hispanic) revealed a differential pattern of response to PALS intervention. Social validity questionnaires reported that teachers and students viewed PALS in a positive light.     

Examining the Meaning of Vague Quantifiers in Higher Education: How Often is “Often”?

Research in Higher Education - Researchers, assessment professionals, and faculty in higher education increasingly depend on survey data from students to make pivotal curricular and programmatic...     

The contribution of Aboriginal epistemologies to mathematics education in Australia: Exploring the silences

Epistemology is a conceptual template for how we think about the world, and the study of how we come to know the world around us. The world does not dictate unequivocally how to interpret it. This article will explore this position on the fluidity of epistemic constructs through two prominent philosophical perspectives, those being derived from the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Michael Foucault, respectively. These insights will be used to more deeply unfold the current situation for Aboriginal students within dominant approaches to mathematics curriculum in Australia, and the subsequent approaches to the inclusion of Aboriginal knowledge and epistemologies. It is suggested that the epistemic constructs most valued and thus credited as conveyors of ‘truth’, and therefore positioned as powerful forms of knowledge within dominant curriculum and education policy, are those derived from Western, Eurocentric origins. This privileging of particular epistemological constructs over others is reinforced unconsciously through the articulation of educational goals deemed most appropriate, or ‘socially just’, for the Aboriginal student population. The place of Aboriginal knowledge within such constructs is therefore reflective of broader ideation around the role of education within society and its failure to challenge existing structures of power and injustice.     

Student Content Knowledge Increases After Participation in a Hands-on Biotechnology Intervention

Implementing biotechnology education through hands-on teaching methods should be considered by secondary biology teachers. This study is an experimental research design to examine increased student content knowledge in biotechnology after a hands-on biotechnology intervention. The teachers from both school groups participated in, Project Crawfish, a biotechnology professional development program. Students from both schools completed a pre and post assessment. The classroom was the unit of analysis. When the assessment was analyzed, each school had statistically significant increases in student content knowledge (p < 0.0001 for the intervention school and p = 0.0481 for the control school). When the schools were compared to each other, a p-value of 0.0543 provided a suggestive relationship that the biotechnology intervention school had a larger increase in student content knowledge overall. When the assessment was divided into the five components, the intervention school showed significant increases in all five components. The control school had significant increases in student content knowledge in the PCR and DNA sequencing components (p = 0.0459, p = 0.0043, respectively).     

Selling out (in) sport management: practically evaluating the state of the American (Sporting) Union

When teaching in Sport Management programs professors are often forced to respond to the actions and teachings of professionals in the field. According to the study by Kincheloe & Steinberg many of these normalized and, indeed celebrated, behaviors are actions that are part and parcel of the ‘recovery movement’ which (re)inscribe new forms of colonization, sexism, racism, classism and so on. Given that these performances are often considered ‘good business practice’, it is now more important than ever to challenge these conventions in what has been termed the post-neoliberal moment.

This paper, therefore, analyzes and explains how the mundane recycling of borrowed thought has seeped into America's collegiate educational system—particularly in sport management programs. It does so through a critical examination of Amber's educational and pre-professional experience as an intern for various sporting constituencies. Further, we examine the disguised precedence and obligatory requisites of the sporting industry, which use exploitative and manipulative marketing tactics to fabricate a hyperreal milieu of sporting production and consumption. Given this context, the project at present seeks to (re)evaluate just what we, as teachers, owe our students as they venture into an economy facing ‘hard times’.