Education on the appalachian trail: What 2,000 miles can teach us about learning

Rather than dwelling on why too many men don't succeed in college, trekker Karen Arnold examines the features of an experience in which many men do excel: the long hike from Georgia to Maine. Educators can learn why accomplishing this feat may be more rewarding than college.     

Planning for the Budget-ocalypse: The Evolution of a Serials/ER Cancellation Methodology

The University of North Texas (UNT) Libraries are funded almost entirely by undergraduate student use fees. As the undergraduate enrollment has plateaued in recent years, the libraries have not been able to keep up with rising costs, resulting in a series of cuts to the materials budget totaling around $3.25 million. While some of these cuts took the form of reductions in firm orders and dissolution of approval plans, for the past three years the bulk has come from cancellations of serials and electronic resources. With each year’s cuts, the UNT Collection Development department has been forced to modify and refine their deselection process. This article will show the development of UNT’s strategy for determining cancellations using a variety of methods (overlap analysis, usage statistics, faculty input) and tools (EBSCO Usage Consolidation, Serials Solutions 360).     

Child and Adolescent Predictors of Personality in Early Adulthood

This study investigated development of the Big Five personality traits from early childhood into adulthood. An initial group of 137 Swedish children were assessed eight times between ages 2 and 29 years. Initial decreases in extraversion leveled off in early adulthood; agreeableness and conscientiousness increased from ages 2 to 29; neuroticism initially increased, leveled off in later childhood and adolescence, and decreased throughout early adulthood; while openness to experience showed an initial increase, then decreased and leveled off in early adulthood. Individual developmental trajectories varied significantly, particularly in relation to gender. Personality traits became increasingly stable, and the fact that childhood scores predicted scores in adulthood indicated that personalities are fairly stable across this portion of the life span.     

When practice takes precedence: conceptions of inquiry and the link to ethical posture

Using participatory action research (PAR), this paper explores the ethical practice of students engaged in practitioner research in a higher education context. Using narrative enquiry, the paper explores the participants’ experiences of practitioner research, including ethical dilemmas that resulted from a conflict of values between the practitioner and research roles. We postulate a multi-dimensional approach to ethical practice known as ‘ethical posture’ emerging from our consideration of conceptions of inquiry that resulted in contrasting ethical behaviour.