Development of an Evaluation Tool for Online Food Safety Training Programs

Abstract: The objective of this study was to provide the person in charge and food safety instructors an assessment tool to help characterize, identify strengths and weaknesses, determine the completeness of the knowledge gained by the employee, and evaluate the level of content presentation and usability of current retail food safety training platforms. An existing evaluation tool was modified to assess online food safety training programs that contained 5 areas of emphasis: content and instruction, learners, job transfer, design and packaging, and operation. Participation included watching 3 food safety training modules and afterwards evaluate what degree the module content met objectives. More than 85% of the participants responded positively to the scale‐based items of the course evaluation. Items addressing the content and instruction received positive responses. The assessment tool helped panelists to objectively evaluate an online food safety training program that provided numeric data for a valid comparison.     

Identifying Food Safety Concerns When Communication Barriers Exist

Abstract: Students must be prepared to lead a diverse workforce. The objective of this study was to establish a teaching method that helps students identify barriers to food safety while working in a simulated environment with communication barriers. This study employed a perspective taking exercise based upon the principles of social learning theory. Students were randomly assigned as a “manager” or an “employee.” The managers were provided with a recipe and instructions in English and employees were provided with the recipe and instructions in an abstract, non‐English language. Students were instructed to prepare the recipe in silence using only nonverbal communication methods. Three teaching techniques were employed under this scenario to determine the most effective method of instruction. For the 1st method (Barrier Identification), students were asked to complete an open‐ended survey concerning their communication barriers in regards to food safety. Next (Modeling through Pictures), recipe books with pictures of each recipe with food safety icons were provided to half of the participants. In the 3rd scenario (Observation), students were videotaped to identify communication techniques and to identify common food safety violations. Lastly, a focus group was conducted, whereby students were required to reflect upon the experiment in order to identify specific food safety barriers. Students identified communication challenges to food safety and developed techniques to help overcome language barriers. However, the use of pictures did not increase the frequency of proper food handling procedures. This study found that a combination of gestures and demonstrations were the most valuable nonverbal forms of training.     

Bangladeshi Science Teachers’ Perceived Importance and Perceived Current Practices in Promoting Science Education Through a Context-Based,Socio-scientific Framework

Science & Education - The paper reports a study that seeks to develop an instrument so as to explore Bangladeshi science teachers’ perceived importance and perceived current practices,...     

Accumulating Knowledge: When Are Reading Intervention Results Meaningful?

Abstract

The three target articles provide examples of intervention studies that are excellent models for the field. They rely on rigorous and elegant designs, the interventions are motivated by attention to underlying theoretical mechanisms, and longitudinal designs are used to examine the duration of effects of interventions that occur. When studies are carefully designed, effect sizes tend to be modest. We argue that the meaningfulness of effect sizes should not necessarily be determined with reference to Cohen's rule of thumb, and that modest effect sizes can result in major change in performance if they cumulate.     

Rhetoric and practice in pre-service teacher education: the case of Teach For America

Teach For America (TFA), an organization that places college graduates in urban and rural classrooms for two-year terms of service, is lauded by reformers who see its five-week summer training institute as evidence that teachers have little to learn before entering classrooms. Yet, while boosters see TFA as a radical alternative to traditional teacher education, a look at the evolution of their increasingly robust summer training model hardly affirms that perception. In fact, much of what is done in the summer institute parallels the work of traditional teacher education programs in the USA – a surprising state of affairs given the rhetoric of so many TFA supporters. This project traces the evolution of TFA’s summer training institute across two decades, highlighting the growing divide between TFA’s outward-facing image and its actual work. Framing TFA’s summer institute as a case study for examining the relationship between rhetoric and practice in education, the article raises broader questions about how the policy-making context affects the construction and perception of reality.     

Electronic reading and digital library technologies: understanding learner expectation and usage intent for mobile learning

Mobile information technology is changing the education landscape by offering learners the opportunity to engage in asynchronous, ubiquitous instruction. While there is a proliferation of mobile content management systems being developed for the mobile Web and stand-alone mobile applications, few studies have addressed learner expectations and usage intent in consuming digital documents from online content providers and digital libraries with specific emphasis on formal instruction. Understanding usage intent and actual usage of a mobile learning agent as a result of ease of use and usefulness of mobile devices will be addressed in this study. A research framework for instructional technology usage is proposed to help better articulate critical success factors in implementing formal learning using a mobile device, specifically an electronic reader or a tablet computer.     

The impact of an alternative professional development model on teacher practices in formative assessment and student learning

Among contemporary means of enhancing student learning, formative assessment is perhaps one of the most important and effective. While formative assessment ideas and practices have been shown to have a proven record enhancing student learning, these practices are slow to be fully integrated into teachers’ day-to-day classroom practices. This study describes a collaborative effort among university faculty and public school partners to train teachers in the skills and practices of formative assessment. Regarding teachers’ involvement in the formative assessment professional development, findings highlight that 1) teachers’ participation in the professional development efforts did strengthen their understanding of both general knowledge of formative assessment and the use of formative assessment practices, 2) teachers’ plans to use the strategies in the future were related to their understanding of these strategies, and 3) in-depth and comprehensive understanding of formative assessment practices were critical to concrete applications of such practices in their classrooms. With respect to the impact on student learning, an overall effect size of .41 was found for teachers who utilized a formative assessment strategy compared with district averages for similar learning objectives when the practices were not used.     

Occupy All the Dispositifs: Memes,Media Ecologies,and Emergent Bodies Politic

This article assesses Occupy Wall Street as an amalgamation of mediated processes of subjectivation associated with marginal popular culture (memes, meme-platforms, Anonymous operations). This accumulation, I argue, is part of a broader convergence of agencements, of subjectifying processes that took place on and offline, in and out of concentrated occupied zones. OWS gives us one example in response to Toni Negri's call for a genealogy of dispositifs of subjectivation from the perspective of resistance. In addition to examining the accumulation of mediated subjective apparatuses, I propose we think of OWS as an ecology, one that engenders an antagonistic response by a militarized biopolitical state subject (itself an accumulation). I end with some preliminary thoughts on OWS' recomposition after the state's decompositional dispositifs.     

Maximal Oxygen Intake and its Relationship to Endurance Capacity on a Bicycle Ergometer

Abstract

The relationship between maximal oxygen intake (Max V0₂) and the capacity for endurance performance was investigated in a sample of 30 male university students. Each subject performed two work capacity tests on a bicycle ergometer from which continuous, minute-by-minute oxygen intake values, the amount of work performed (kilopond-meters), and the length of the ride (seconds) were obtained. In addition, lean body weight and percent body fat were measured in order to ascertain their importance in the above relationship. The results indicate a fairly high correlation (r = .84) between Max VO₂ (liters/min.) and endurance capacity, but this relationship was reduced considerably when Max VO₂ was expressed relative to body weight (r=.37) and lean body weight (r = .18). However, when the influence of body weight and lean body weight were held statistically constant, the correlations of endurance capacity with Max VO₂ (ml/kg per min.) and Max VO₂ (ml/LBW/ min.) increased to r=.78 and r = .64 respectively. Thus, it was concluded that there is a substantial relationship between endurance capacity and Max V0₂ which is essentially independent of the form in which Max VO₂ is reported providing the influence of body weight and lean body weight on both variables are taken into account.