Bridge over troubled waters? Connecting research and pedagogy in composition and business/technical communication

Although different writing courses exist because of the different forms and purposes of writing they teach, some continuity between composition and business/technical communication would allow students to move more readily from one course to the next, while clarifying for them that writing is primarily a system of options based on analyses of situations, readers, obstacles, and goals. In this article, I call for that kind of continuity not only in pedagogy but also in research. Explaining the value of connections in pedagogy and research between composition and professional communication studies, I conclude with various questions and avenues for further research.     

COMMUNITY COLLEGE RETENTION: DIFFERENTIATING AMONG STOPOUTS,DROPOUTS, AND OPTOUTS

One fact often overlooked in discussing the retention issue is that not everyone who fails to return to school is a dropout. Some persons return after an absence of a semester or more; they can be called stopouts. Some intended to take only a few classes and stop attending when they accomplish their educational goals; they can be called optouts. The only persons who should be labeled dropouts are those who failed to accomplish their educational goal and have no definite plans to accomplish it later.

During the 1990‐91 school year, Del Mar College (DMC) and the Texas A&M Adult and Extension Education program developed and executed a plan to identify, count, and interview nonreturnees at DMC. The purposes of the study were toprovide DMC with baseline data on its nonreturnees and to test the feasibility of gathering interview information by telephone.

Stopouts far outnumbered dropouts and optouts among respondents, with 303 of 399 nonreturnees identifying themselves as such.

In this article, we define relevant terms, outline the data‐gathering process and describe the findings of the present study, and present recommendations regarding data gathering and the focus of retention efforts.     

Successful Community College Transfer Students Speak Out

The community college as the entranceway into the baccalaureate degree is becoming a prevalent choice for students. This study was a qualitative approach to understanding attitudes, behaviors, and knowledge acquisition by successful community college transfer students. University students who transferred from a community college and were making successful progress toward completing the baccalaureate degree participated in focus groups to answer questions about the transfer process. Successful transfer students are highly motivated, persistent, engaged, believe they were well prepared by the community colleges for university junior level studies, and have recommendations for community colleges and universities in improving the transfer process.     

Peter Effect in the Preparation of Reading Teachers

The Peter Effect (Applegate & Applegate, 2004 Applegate, A. J. and Applegate, M. D. 2004. The Peter Effect: Reading habits and attitudes of teacher candidates. The Reading Teacher, 57: 554–563. [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) claimed that one cannot be expected to give what one does not possess. We applied this notion to reading teacher preparation and hypothesized that teacher educators who do not possess an understanding of basic language constructs would not prepare teacher candidates with an understanding of these constructs considered essential for early reading success. Results from a survey of basic language constructs revealed similar patterns in performance between teacher educators and their respective teacher candidates, which served as initial validation of the Peter Effect in reading teacher preparation.     

Advocating for Young Children: A Preservice Teacher Education Project

As experts on the nature and needs of young children, early childhood educators are in prime positions to advocate for the health and well-being of young children. Advocacy can take the form of personal, public, or private-sector endeavors. Personal advocacy is usually informal and involves educating others on an issue about early childhood education. Similarly, public advocacy involves educating policy makers, and private-sector advocacy is directed toward businesses. The project described here is a course assignment for undergraduate teacher candidates in which they learn about advocacy strategies and design and implement authentic advocacy projects. Sample projects are discussed. Engaging in this project has raised awareness for teacher candidates about the importance of and strategies for being advocates. The response from early childhood teacher candidates has been positive.     

Decision Science and Applied Neuroscience: Emerging Possibilities

Recent neuroscientific research describes how the brain and extended nervous system make decisions. This article depicts current theory as it relates to decision‐making strengths, shortcuts, simplifications, biases, and serious data restricting habits of the brain. This information demonstrates that the brain, both individually and collectively, can be a deceptive guide for decision making in emergent situations when information is based on preexisting, subconscious frames of reference. Training is proposed to strengthen conscious information‐processing capacity.     

Addressing the complexities of literacy and urban teaching in the USA: strategic professional development as intervention

This study was undertaken in order to get some sense of the role of life experiences in preservice and inservice teachers' conceptions of the purpose(s) and practices of education. Content analysis of narratives written by graduate students in education at one college was utilized to ascertain how they view the field and their (current or prospective) role as teachers. We found that the majority of students saw teaching as an opportunity to make a difference, and as reflective of who they were rather than as "just a job". This finding provided the opportunity to address the strengths and vulnerabilities of such an idealistic conception of teaching, and the corresponding possibilities vis-à-vis teacher educators' roles. We conclude by noting the study's limitations and making several recommendations for future action and research based on our findings.     

Stability of switching linear systems with switching signals driven by stochastic processes

This paper presents conditions to assure the exponential stability in probability for autonomous switching linear systems. The switching signal acting on the autonomous system produces intervals that follow independent, identically distributed stochastic processes—the stability then follows by verifying simple-to-check linear matrix inequalities.     

The current state of human performance technology: A citation network analysis of Performance Improvement Quarterly, 1988–2010

This study conducted a citation network analysis (CNA) of human performance technology (HPT) to examine its current state of the field. Previous reviews of the field have used traditional research methods, such as content analysis, survey, Delphi, and citation analysis. The distinctive features of CNA come from using a social network analysis approach to see relational and network patterns in the citation data. This CNA found that the Performance Improvement Quarterly network showed more widely but loosely connected and less centralized structural attributes than the human resource development network; the 10 most influential articles in the field were identified; frequently co‐cited articles were recognized as having a strong relationship by subsequent researchers; and five cohesive subgroups showed key topics in the field (performance, instructional design, performance support, organization/workplace, and transfer of training). Implications from the results of the CNA were elaborated on for future research in HPT.     

A New Student Learning Focus for the Academic Library: From Geographical Proximity of the Learning Commons to Organizational Proximity within the Library

In 2015, student learning programs at the University of Saskatchewan moved organizationally to the university library. While these services resided physically in the library as part of the Learning Commons partnership, this recent change presents the library with a new focus and responsibility for broader student learning support and academic skill development. Highlighting examples of organizational integration of student learning support, this article uses a proximity perspective, suggesting that geographical proximity of services in the learning commons does not go far enough to achieve the deeper collaboration and integration necessary for holistic and integrated learning, and that organizational proximity is needed.