Disaggregated Effects of Device on Score Comparability

The use of tablets for large‐scale testing programs has transitioned from concept to reality for many state testing programs. This study extended previous research on score comparability between tablets and computers with high school students to compare score distributions across devices for reading, math, and science and to evaluate device effects for gender and ethnicity subgroups. Results indicated no significant differences between tablets and computers for math and science. For reading, a small device effect favoring tablets was found for the middle to lower part of the score distribution. This effect seemed to be driven by increases in performance for male students when testing on tablets. No interactions of device with ethnicity were observed. Consistent with previous research, this study provides additional evidence for a relatively high degree of comparability between tablets and computers.     

Persistence to Graduation among At‐Risk Criminal Justice and Criminology Students: Experiences in Intervening with a Sophomore Cohort∗

A Seminar targeting academically at‐risk sophomores was developed and introduced in 2002 to address weak connectedness to the university and poor academic abilities. We measured changes in approaches taken to college studies by those at‐risk sophomores who enrolled in the course, as well as employed a longitudinal, quasi‐experimental design to track this experimental group (n = 29) and the remainder of the at‐risk cohort as a comparison group (n = 36). Our preliminary findings suggest that the Seminar has had a variety of positive outcomes, the most impressive impact being that the experimental group had dramatically better retention and graduation rates than the comparison group.     

The Rise of Creative Writing Programmes

Creative writing courses are growing in universities and outside them. Publishers and agents even turn to them now as sources of promise and talent. This article describes a particularly successful MA in creative writing at Goldsmiths College in London and makes a case for the popularity and the usefulness to universities, to aspiring writers and to publishers of such courses.     

Annotated Bibliography

This short bibliography is not supposed to be a comprehensive survey of all that has been written about gender and science. Its much more modest aim is to mention a few of the many books that have been published on this subject in recent years, and to give some indication of their contents. By doing this I hope to provide readers with a starting point from which to pursue an interest in any particular aspect of the subject.     

Hybrid Journals: Ensuring Systematic and Standard Discoverability of the Latest Open Access Articles

An important current challenge for research information providers is ensuring the automated discovery of Open Access (OA) content in hybrid journals. We found no evidence of discovery services that are able to systematically identify the crucially important free full-text availability of OA articles regardless of where and how such articles have been published (i.e., in fully OA journals or in hybrid journals). A solution is important because hybrid journals are proliferating and consequently the chances of missing OA articles is real and is happening. Nearly all of the major publishers now provide such journals in order to take advantage of recent changes in research funder requirements, and to be competitive in the new OA business model. By working with a group of scholarly publisher partners and by using standard metadata elements that publishers are already familiar with, we show a systematic and standardized manner to identify OA at the article level. Our proposal is to embed OA-related elements in the metadata freely exposed by publishers for aggregators and discovery services. For example, in the Table of Content (TOC) Really Simple Syndication feeds the publishers use to announce new journal issues and content. Based on the initial results obtained, we discuss the capabilities of our solution, and evaluate the impact produced by our application in the systematic discoverability of OA content from the participating hybrid journals, using an implementation done with the freely available journal current awareness service—JournalTOCs.