Center Stage: Performing a Needs Assessment of Campus Research Centers and Institutes

Outreach to research centers and institutes is often overlooked in academic libraries. This article discusses a needs assessment conducted by the Liaison Services Department at the University of Houston Libraries that reviewed library services to centers and institutes at the University of Houston's main campus. The assessment was conducted for two purposes: to build collaborations with centers and to determine how the libraries might create new services and/or market existing services to meet the centers and institutes' growing research needs.     

Managing and Coding References for Systematic Reviews and Scoping Reviews in EndNote

This article describes a novel approach for using EndNote to manage and code references in the conduct and reporting of systematic reviews and scoping reviews. The process is simple and easy for reviewers new to both EndNote and systematic reviews. This process allows reviewers to easily conduct and report systematic reviews in line with the internationally recognized PRISMA reporting guidelines and also facilitates the overall task of systematic or scoping review conduct and reporting from the initial search through to structuring the results, discussion, and conclusions in a rigorous, reproducible, and user-friendly manner.     

Identifying Children with Persistent Developmental Dyscalculia from a 2‐min Test of Symbolic and Nonsymbolic Numerical Magnitude Processing

Developmental dyscalculia (DD) is a mathematical learning disability that occurs in around 5%–7% of the population. At present, there are only a handful of screening tools to identify children that might be at risk of developing DD. The present study evaluated the classification accuracy of one such tool: The Numeracy Screener, a 2‐min test of symbolic (Arabic numerals) and nonsymbolic (dot arrays) discrimination ability. A sample of 222 children who demonstrated persistent deficits (n = 55), inconsistent deficits (n = 51), or typical performance (n = 116) on standardized tests of math achievement over multiple observations was tested. The Numeracy Screener correctly classified children in all three groups. Notably, the symbolic condition has greater sensitivity in discriminating children with persistent DD from the other two groups. Screening tools that assess early numeracy skills may be promising for identifying children at risk for developing severe mathematical difficulties.     

THE CELTIC LANGUAGES AND TELEVISION

The article proposes the subtitling of English television programmes in the Celtic languages and of Celtic language programmes in English in order to serve the Celtic speaking minorities in Britain and to produce an appreciation of the Celtic languages among English speaking viewers. Parallels are drawn between the proposed British bilingual project and those in other countries for deaf viewers and for speakers of minority languages. Results of a survey of English and Welsh viewers are reported, and difficulties such as viewer resistance, cost, etc., of implementing a bilingual subtitling program in Britain are discussed.     

“Blockers” do not block recall during tip-of-the-tongue states

Tip-of-the-Tongue experiences (TOTs) are often accompanied by incorrect answers (blockers) that come to mind persistently and seem to block recall. According to the blocking hypothesis, blockers cause retrieval difficulty during TOTs. We predicted that delay would allow participants to forget their blockers, and thereby enhance TOT resolution. In Experiment 1 participants were asked trivia questions and then retested on the ones that elicited TOTs, either immediately or after a delay. There was an incubation effect overall, with greater TOT resolution after a delay than on an immediate test. Contrary to the blocking hypothesis, however, delay did not enhance resolution of blocked TOTs more than non-blocked TOTs. In Experiment 2, during the retest, participants were reminded of their previous blockers on some questions, but the reminders did not affect TOT resolution. These findings suggest that blockers may be a side effect, not a cause, of retrieval difficulty during TOTs. This paper is based on the first author’s Master’s thesis.     

Lifelong learning and the reform of the teaching practicum in Australia

This paper reports the findings of a project—‘Lifelong learning and teacher education’—undertaken by the Centre for Lifelong Learning, Australian Catholic University, under the auspices of the Australian Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training. The study was designed to investigate the operationalization of lifelong learning in Australian teacher education. The study revealed that there is a range of existing, innovative practices regarding partnerships between schools and higher and further education that are in keeping with emerging ideas about lifelong learning. Moreover, some of these take the form of collaborative action research projects focused on improving the learning occurring in the partnership schools. This paper describes some current approaches in Australia to collaborative action research by teacher educators' and their partnership schools and shows how they contribute to lifelong learning. The approaches are then analyzed to suggest ways of advancing lifelong learning within Australian Education Faculties thus helping to make lifelong learning more of a reality for all.