Evaluating the impact of library services on the quality and cost of medical care

Recent federal regulations have minimized the role of the hospital library in contributing to the quality of medical care and in lowering hospital costs. We trace the events that have led to these assumptions and discuss the complex problem of evaluating the impact of library services. Current research on the value and effectiveness of information is outlined.     

The effects of a motivational general-mastery imagery intervention on the sport confidence of high-level badminton players.

A multiple-baseline across-participants design was used to examine the effects of a Motivational General-Mastery imagery intervention on the sport confidence of 4 high-leveljunior badminton players. Sport confidence data were collected once a week for 21 weeks prior to international and county matches. The imagery intervention consisted of six imagery sessions (two per week for 3 weeks) and was administered using a multiple-baseline design with interventions commencing at Weeks 5, 7, 9, and 11 for Participants 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively. Results of visual inspection and Binomial tests suggested significant increases in sport confidence for Participants 1 and 2, a significant decrease in sport confidence for Participant 3, and a delayed increase in sport confidence for Participant 4. The results are discussed in terms of the implications of using mastery imagery and the usefulness of multiple-baseline designs for furthering imagery research.     

Examining the Relation of Parenting to Children's Coping with Everyday Stress

The relation between parenting and the coping styles of children in response to everyday stress was investigated. 60 children, 9–10 years old, and their mothers participated. Children and mothers described how they responded to stressful episodes the child had experienced within the past 2 months. Mothers completed questionnaires that assessed a variety of parenting dimensions (e.g., nurturance, directiveness, organization). Results indicated that ( a ) the aspects of child coping studied (e.g., perceived effectiveness, variety of coping strategies) were relatively independent, ( b ) children from families with high levels of maternal support and relatively low levels of family structure used the greatest variety of coping strategies, ( c ) children of supportive mothers used the greatest number of avoidant strategies (but only in uncontrollable situations), and ( d ) children from families with high levels of parental structure used fewer aggressive coping strategies.     

Authentic assessment for a more inclusive history

ABSTRACT

Practitioners and theorists in higher education have explored authentic assessment as a mechanism to better connect student work to real-world practice. This article considers the possibilities for authentic assessment in teaching history as a discipline and professional field at university, considering how ‘real-world practice’ might be expanded to include the understanding and practice of inclusive or participatory history. This article explores student survey responses related to three authentic assessment tasks, designed and delivered over a three-year history curriculum. This survey was designed to understand the efficacy of authentic assessment for scaffolding historical practice at university, and to also evaluate its possibilities for helping to transform the practice of history, which in recent decades has sought, with limited success, more inclusive epistemologies and pedagogies. In this article we suggest that authentic assessment is likely to successfully connect history students to real-world activities, but that it is necessary to consider whose authenticity is at stake if the discipline of history is to succeed in its wider aims. Drawing on student comments, we conclude that authentic assessment can contribute to student becoming, but that it also helps build a similar kind of ‘becoming’ for the discipline and practice of history itself.     

Outcomes of the primary and early childhood science and technology education project at the university of Canberra

The aim of the Primary and Early Childhood Science and Technology Education Project (PECSTEP) is to improve teaching and learning in science and technology of by increasing the number of early childhood and primary teachers who are effective educators. PECSTEP is based on an interactive model of teaching and systematically links work on gender with the learning and teaching of science and technology. The project involves: a year-long inservice program which includes the development of a science curriculum unit by teachers in their schools; linking of the preservice and inservice programs; and the development of support networks for teachers. Each phase of PECSTEP has been researched by means of surveys, interviews and the use of diaries. Research questions have focussed particularly on changes in: teachers’ and student teachers’ attitudes to teaching science and technology; their perceptions of science and technology; their perceptions of their students’ responses and their understandings of how gender relates to these areas. Specializations: primary science curriculum, science teacher education, sociology of science, technology and education. Specializations: gender and science/science teacher education, feminist theory, curriculum theory. Specializations: Science education research, curriculum development.     

‘Capitalising’ on community? Understanding and critiquing instrumentalist approaches to Indigenous schooling

This paper provides insights into non-Indigenous teachers’ efforts to engage proactively and productively with students to enhance their learning in a predominantly Indigenous community in northern Queensland, Australia. Drawing upon notions of ‘funds of knowledge’, forms of capital as part of community cultural wealth, Critical Race Theory, and ‘whiteness’ studies, the research explores and challenges how white teachers draw upon community as a form of ‘capital’ to enable them to foster their students’ learning. These efforts to ‘capitalise’ on community reveal the school as a site of struggle for genuinely inclusive educational practices. These struggles were evident in: teachers' and school administrators’ ostensive care about their students but struggles to translate this into robust expectations as part of a genuinely inclusive curriculum; the cultivation of social and cultural capital to learn about the nature of the communities in which teachers worked but a tendency to deploy such knowledges for more instrumentalist reasons as part of their engagement with both the ‘official’ curriculum and Indigenous students; and, a desire and capacity to develop connections between community cultural capital and more dominant forms of capital but in ways which do not adequately foreground Indigenous epistemologies as curriculum. The research reveals teachers’ efforts to develop understandings of community cultural wealth and the funds of knowledge within communities, but also how their understandings were partial and proximal, and how subsequent social and teaching practices tended to instrumentalise Indigenous perspectives and insights.     

Die Effektivität schriftlicher und kombiniert auditiv-schriftlicher Wortschatzfördermaßnahmen bei Kindern mit nichtdeutscher Herkunftssprache

Disparities in language competencies of children with and without immigrant background are well-documented through large scale assessments. This study investigates the potential of implicit language promotion, presented in written and combined auditory-written formats. Three experimental groups of 4^th graders in elementary schools have been compared. Intervention group (IV) 1 (n?=?33) read the intervention texts two times in German, IV 2 (n?=?52) read texts in their heritage language Turkish and afterwards in German, and IV 3 (n?=?35) listened to texts in Turkish first and read them in German afterwards. All children learned new vocabulary, but analyses of variance showed that students from IV 2 achieved greater vocabulary gains than IV 3. Results also do not support advantages for the combined auditory-written form including the heritage language. Students’ text comprehension and reading competencies influence their incidental vocabulary acquisition. The results are discussed in the light of practical and research implications.     

The quandary of quantification: data,numbers and teachers’ learning

ABSTRACT

Drawing upon recent theorising of numbers and data, and applications to schooling, this paper reveals how tensions between more accountability-oriented logics, and more contextually-situated conceptions of engagement with data, played out in one school in a regional community in northern Queensland, Australia. The research reveals that at the same time teachers’ work and learning were heavily influenced by more reductive processes of quantification to account for teachers’ practices, teachers also sought to draw upon the attention to numeric markers of student achievement to foster more substantive teacher learning for student learning. These tensions were expressed in relation to: efforts to foster improved student learning through collection of evidence via ‘short-term data cycles’; engagement in various ‘data conversations’ with senior members of staff, and coaching by more experienced teachers, and; broader teacher learning initiatives focused on enhancing outcomes for specified groups of students identified as able to perform at higher levels of attainment. The research cautions that such practices present a quandary; even as broader processes of quantification of education may stimulate instances of more ongoing, substantive teacher learning for student learning, more performative applications of these numbers and data mitigate against the educative potential of such practices, and substantive learning for all students.     

The Trouble with Ruskin…

Art teaching is a uniquely satisfying job. More than anyone else in education, we in Britain remain, for the most part, the authors of our own syllabuses in spite of occasional skirmishes with the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) and those who would box us in. Our mystique remains unassailable. Yet, within these ramparts, is a profession riven by a philosophical chasm which is peculiar to this country and occasionally manifests itself with disagreement, rancour, entrenched opinion and self‐righteousness. Central to this divide is an unhealthy retrospection which has skewed the debate about art and art education in Britain for the better part of a century and a half. The contention of this essay is that this malaise can be traced back to John Ruskin, the polemics of his Two Paths diatribe and his ‘predilection to admit a moral element into the assessment of artistic values [1].’