Making values education everyone's business

Adults are typically required to make values‐based decisions multiple times each day.Why, then, should a discussion of values not be explicit across the college curriculum and intentionally integrated into the cocurriculum? The authors describe a place where the work of values education is widely shared.     

Instructing adolescents with learning disabilities: converting a meta-analysis to practice

A previous meta-analysis indicated that eight instructional factors--Questioning, Sequencing and Segmentation, Skill Modeling, Organization and Explicit Practice, Small-Group Setting, Indirect Teacher Activities (e.g., homework), Technology, and Scaffolding-captured the majority of successful intervention programs for adolescents with learning disabilities (LD). Most important was the Organization/Explicit factor, which contributed significant variance (16%) to effect size. This factor included two important instructional components: advance organization and explicit practice. In this article, we convert these findings into practical guidelines to direct instructional practice.     

The expert witness in child abuse and neglect: An interdisciplinary process

The legal system is an important part of a society's response to child abuse and child neglect. Courts need to be guided in their deliberations by experts from many different professions. Consultation and in-court expert testimony is necessary from medicine, psychology, psychiatry, social work and other professions both to prove child abuse and neglect and establish the power of the court to act on behalf of a child but also to guide the court in the intervention strategy most suited to the needs of the child and his family. Non-lawyers often feel uncomfortable in the legal setting. The adversary process is foreign to their training and professional experience. Collaboration with a lawyer greatly improves their effectiveness in court. Lawyers, on the other hand, need to make maximum use of medical and social-psychological experts in the court process in the interests of their clients; but to do so lawyers need a basic understanding of the other professions. With an emphasis on a process of mutual education, the paper presents a framework for collaboration between lawyers and expert witnesses in child abuse and neglect cases. “Expert witness” is defined; informal consultation is encouraged; suggestions for selecting a collaborator are made; initial contracts between lawyer and expert, case conferencing and preparation for trial are discussed; specific advice on direct and cross examination is provided.     

The other half of international teaching assistant training: Classroom communication workshops for international students

ITAs often experience particular difficulty balancing their roles as teachers with their roles as students. Student communication skills training is warranted for ITAs because it may be more motivating than instructional skills training, because it captures an otherwise elusive segment of the clientele, and because learning can transfer to ITAs' own teaching repertoires. Such a program can begin with a focus on naming and social identity. The bulk of the program focuses on communication practices for participative learning such as small group problem solving and whole-group responding. A typical workshop concludes with a forum for student concerns, often focusing upon how to interact with one's academic advisor.He obtained his Ph.D. in 1978 at the University of Minnesota. Among the courses he teaches are offerings in intercultural communication, applied linguistics, and composition research. He has also conducted research pertaining to perceptions of international instructors.     

Child Development and the Social Demography of Childhood

This article provides background information and a practical guide for including demographic information in developmental research. First, it portrays historic demographic trends reflecting critical ways in which the family and economic environments of children have been, and continue to be, transformed in the United States. Second, it presents current demographic statistics to provide a basis for researchers to compare their special study population to the general population of children and to formulate specific hypotheses about ways in which their result might differ for children in various demographic situations. Third, it offers an Appendix with standardized wording for a minimum set of questions needed to measure the demographic characteristics and environments of children. The Appendix provides researchers the technical capacity to collect such data, so they can develop and test hypotheses about how family and econmic environments shape child development processes and outcomes.     

The approximate frequency response of semi-active systems requiring no computer

Semi-active systems are those in which a passive, dissipative element (damper, friction clutch, fluid orifice) is modulated, via low power inputs, to enhance the performance of its associated dynamic system. This type of control is inherently nonlinear, thus forcing the closed-loop response of the total system to be determined numerically using a digital computer. Although, strictly speaking, the frequency response for nonlinear systems does not exist, it is typical to simulate semi-active systems with sinusoidal input and present results as frequency transmissibilities. This paper uses energy dissipation per cycle to determine an approximate frequency response of semi-active systems requiring only a calculator for numerical analysis.     

Engaging adolescents with LD in higher order thinking about history concepts using integrated content enhancement routines

The understanding and use of historical concepts specified in national history standards pose many challenges to students. These challenges include both the acquisition of content knowledge and the use of that knowledge in ways that require higher order thinking. All students, including adolescents with learning disabilities (LD), are expected to understand and use concepts of history to pass high-stakes assessments and to participate meaningfully in a democratic society. This article describes Content Enhancement Routines (CERs) to illustrate instructional planning, teaching, and assessing for higher order thinking with examples from an American history unit. Research on the individual components of Content Enhancement Routines will be illustrated with data from 1 of the routines. The potential use of integrated sets of materials and procedures across grade levels and content areas will be discussed.     

I am not unskilled and unaware: deaf and hearing learners’ self-assessments of linguistic and nonlinguistic skills

The unskilled and unaware effect refers to the finding that individuals who are less knowledgeable or less skilled in a domain are relatively less able to evaluate their level of skill or effectively utilise feedback relative to individuals who are more skilled. Studies finding deaf students less accurate than hearing students in estimating their English vocabulary knowledge and in judging how much they are learning from material presented via sign language have attributed those results to the unskilled and unaware effect, citing the lack of language fluencies frequently demonstrated among deaf learners. The present study addressed the issue more directly by comparing both deaf and hearing individuals who were more and less skilled in four domains, three linguistic and one nonlinguistic. Results indicated that even individuals who are unskilled in a nonlinguistic domain can evaluate their performance when they are aware of what skilled performance would look like, and that unskilled and unaware effects can be influenced by individuals’ desires to be skilled.     

Truth(s), Fiction,and Storytelling in Performance Improvement

The consulting‐oriented field of performance improvement is ideally based on a radically empirical foundation. We are supposed to be data driven and evidence based and to derive all of our processes and all of our advice to clients from empirical evidence (which can be either qualitative or quantitative) that allows us to make clear and distinct links from cause to effect. But much of the time we are simply unable to make conclusions based solely on actual performance data that unambiguously shows us a clear path for identifying gaps and effecting changes. In such a case, what is an earnest professional to do? The answer is, tell a story and change it as you go.