Developing and designing online engineering ethics instruction for international graduate students

The present project embarked on an educational intervention, consisting of a series of online ethics learning modules, to aid international graduate students in overcoming the acculturation barriers to understanding and inculcating normative ethical obligations associated with engineering practice and research in the United States. A fundamental initial step in the process of helping international, as well as domestic, engineering graduate students embrace ethical obligations is to provide clear instruction on fundamental engineering ethical principles and values relevant in the United States. Most institutes of higher education do not have a cohesive approach to basic graduate engineering ethics instruction, much less materials that have been calibrated for international students (National Science Foundation, , 2009). Herein the authors describe our instructional intervention, as well as to document the development, design, and assessment of the learning modules intended to provide students with a framework for learning ethical precepts and applying them in the engineering field. Think-Aloud Protocol and Cognitive Task Analysis results were used to improve the content modules and learning experience. Initial pilot findings indicate that the content modules increased student knowledge acquisition compared to pre-test performance, indicating a step-forward in the formulation of a useful learning tool for graduate engineering ethics instruction.     

Aspects of ‘relevance’ in the alignment of curriculum with educational standards

With over 60,000 US K-12 science and mathematics education standards and a rapid proliferation of Web-enabled curriculum, retrieving curriculum that aligns with the standards to which teachers must teach is a key objective for educational digital libraries. However, previous studies of such alignment use single-dimensional and binary measures of the alignment concept. As a consequence, they suffer from low inter-rater reliability (IRR), with experts agreeing about alignments only some 20–40% of the time. We present the results of an experiment in which the alignment variable was operationalized using the Saracevic model of relevance ‘clues’ taken from the everyday practice of K-12 teaching. Results show high IRR across all clues with IRR on several specific alignment dimensions significantly higher than on overall alignment. In addition, a model of overall alignment is derived and estimated. The structure and explanatory power of the model as well as the relationships between alignment clues differ significantly between alignments of curriculum found by users themselves and curriculum found by others. These results illustrate the usefulness of clue-based relevance measures for information retrieval and have important consequences for both the formulation of automated retrieval mechanisms and the construction of a gold standard or benchmark set of standard-curriculum alignments.     

Networks of value in electronic music: SoundCloud,London, and the importance of place

While recent debate has often focused on a reified “cultural value” (whether opposed to or aligned with monetary value), this article treats “value” as a verb and investigates the acts of valuing in which people engage. Through ethnographic research in London's electronic music scene and social network analysis of the SoundCloud audio sharing website (which is dominated by electronic dance music and, to a lesser extent, hip hop), it uncovers substantial patterns of geographical inequality. London is found at the very centre of a network of valuing relationships, in which New York and Los Angeles occupy the next most privileged locations, followed by Berlin, Paris, and Chicago. Cities outside Western Europe and the Anglophone world tend to occupy peripheral positions in the network. This finding suggests that location plays a major role in the circulation of value, even when we might expect that role to have been curtailed by an ostensibly “placeless” medium for the distribution and valuing of music. While there are reasons for the metropolitan emplacedness of dance music – given the importance of the relationship between production, consumption, and live DJing – the privileging of particular cities also mirrors patterns of inequality in the wider cultural economy. That London should appear so supremely privileged reflects both the exporting strength of British creative industries and the imbalanced nature of the UK's cultural economy.     

Interaction of race with other variables on achievement in school

This study was concerned with academic performance in black and white children and the interactions of race with other variables on school achievement. Subjects were 334 blacks and 637 whites in grades three to six. Data consisted of general background information and grade equivalent scores on the California Achievement Tests. They were analyzed using multiple re- gression analysis of variance. Results indicated that blacks scored lower than whites and fell farther behind as they progressed from grade to grade. Significant interactions were revealed for sex, social class, family structure, and teachers. Means for black children were generally less variable than for white children.