Beyond transition: a comparison of the employment experiences of American and Canadian adults with LD

With the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in the United States and the Canadian Chartre of Rights and Freedoms, there is a new work environment for individuals with learning disabilities (LD) in North America. This qualitative study sought to compare the employment experiences of 25 U.S. adults with LD and 24 Canadian adults with LD. Areas of comparison were job getting, experiences on the job, and job advancement. Remarkably, the U.S. and Canadian adults with LD had nearly the same employment experiences. In essence, each set of data mirrored the other despite marked differences in U.S. and Canadian federal disability legislation.     

There’s No Such Thing as a Scientific Controversy

We examine 81 rhetoric and technical communication studies of “scientific controversy.” Our praxiographic analysis reveals that “scientific controversy” is not one thing but three, each staged according to a radically different ontology; yet the literature continues to handle these ontologies the same and to privilege scientists’ demarcation claims in their analysis. We conclude the modifier scientific should be abandoned entirely in controversy studies and recommend an antilogical rather than dialectical approach to controversy.     

OUTLIERS,CHEESE, AND RHIZOMES: VARIATIONS ON A THEME OF LIMITATION

All research has limitations, for example, from paradigm, concept, theory, tradition, and discipline. In this article Lynda Stone describes three exemplars that are variations on limitation and are “extraordinary” in that they change what constitutes future research in each domain. Malcolm Gladwell's present day study of outliers makes a statistical term into a sociological concept. Carlo Ginzburg's study of a sixteenth‐century miller who challenges Church doctrine initiates the field of microhistory. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's philosophy of the rhizome offers a poststructuralist study of the doing of philosophy and the form of philosophical text. Although Gladwell's study is the only one specifically on the topic of outliers, the other two investigations are outliers as well. Overall the three studies demonstrate what can be revealed and learned when limitation is transgressed. This is an important lesson for educational research—wherein heretofore unimagined societal possibility and reform of education might result.     

A comparison of student profiles based upon composite scale scores of the WISC-R

The purpose of this study was to investigate the similarity in the pattern of strengths and weaknesses between those students evaluated and placed in special education programs and those students evaluated and not placed in special education programs. The two groups were compared on the basis of 18 composite scale scores obtained from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R). The sample consisted of 585 students in grades 1–6 located in eastern Kentucky schools. A test for parallelism of the two profiles was conducted with a multiple-profile analysis using a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA). The results revealed that the two profiles were parallel. The authors concluded that the two groups have a similar pattern of relative strengths and weaknesses.     

INTERGENERATIONAL SHARING SEMINARS: THEIR IMPACT ON YOUNG ADULT COLLEGE STUDENTS AND SENIOR GUEST STUDENTS

A 3‐month intergenerational program was developed on the premise that it is important for young adults, who are in the formative period of career development and direction, to experience the benefits of positive interaction with older persons. Program evaluation findings showed that participation not only influenced the young adults’ interest in gerontology, but also increased their willingness to accept older persons on social and academic levels. Positive changes were documented for the Senior Guest students and included more favorable attitudes toward young adult family members as well as toward the younger generation of college students in general.     

The NICE OECD countries' geographic search filters: Part 2—validation of the MEDLINE and Embase (Ovid) filters

Objective:We previously developed draft MEDLINE and Embase (Ovid) geographic search filters for Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries to assess their feasibility for finding evidence about the countries. Here, we describe the validation of these search filters.Methods:We identified OECD country references from thirty National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidelines to generate gold standard sets for MEDLINE (n=2,065) and Embase (n=2,023). We validated the filters by calculating their recall against these sets. We then applied the filters to existing search strategies for three OECD-focused NICE guideline reviews (NG103 on flu vaccination, NG140 on abortion care, and NG146 on workplace health) to calculate the filters'' impact on the number needed to read (NNR) of the searches.Results:The filters both achieved 99.95% recall against the gold standard sets. Both filters achieved 100% recall for the three NICE guideline reviews. The MEDLINE filter reduced NNR from 256 to 232 for the NG103 review, from 38 to 27 for the NG140 review, and from 631 to 591 for the NG146 review. The Embase filter reduced NNR from 373 to 341 for the NG103 review, from 101 to 76 for the NG140 review, and from 989 to 925 for the NG146 review.Conclusion:The NICE OECD countries'' search filters are the first validated filters for the countries. They can save time for research topics about OECD countries by finding the majority of evidence about OECD countries while reducing search result volumes in comparison to no filter use.     

Bridging the “Bayley-Binet GAP”

This study demonstrated that encountering children ages 18-23 months whose performance is not scorable by standard methods for either the Stanford Binet Intelligence Test or the Bayley Scales of Infant Development mental scale is a relatively frequent occurrence. However, the results of this study bring into question Sternlicht's (1965) suggestion that an 18-month basal level on the Stanford-Binet may be assumed, given success by a child on only one item at the two-year level. The study indicates that a child must succeed on at least two, or more conservatively, four items at the two-year level on the Stanford-Binet in order to assume an 18-month basal level.     

On domain expertise-based roles in collaborative information retrieval

Collaborative information retrieval involves retrieval settings in which a group of users collaborates to satisfy the same underlying need. One core issue of collaborative IR models involves either supporting collaboration with adapted tools or developing IR models for a multiple-user context and providing a ranked list of documents adapted for each collaborator. In this paper, we introduce the first document-ranking model supporting collaboration between two users characterized by roles relying on different domain expertise levels. Specifically, we propose a two-step ranking model: we first compute a document-relevance score, taking into consideration domain expertise-based roles. We introduce specificity and novelty factors into language-model smoothing, and then we assign, via an Expectation–Maximization algorithm, documents to the best-suited collaborator. Our experiments employ a simulation-based framework of collaborative information retrieval and show the significant effectiveness of our model at different search levels.