Assessing Student Attitudes Toward Sexual Assault by Using a Mock Trial

Despite the prevalence of sexual assault on college campuses, college students’ views regarding rape continue to be an understudied area. Using criminal justice and sociology students who either attended a mock sexual assault trial or viewed the trial video in their class, this study examined students’ attitudes toward rape and rape myth acceptance. Surveys assessed what students believed the verdict should be and why, along with questions surrounding rape myths and beliefs regarding women. Results indicate that female students were more likely to find the defendant guilty. None of the attitudinal variables or plans to work in the criminal justice system, however, had an effect on the verdict. Multiple factors such as gender, race, and hostility toward women influenced attitudes regarding rape myths. These findings suggest that attitudes may be less important when determining sexual assault defendants’ guilt than the facts of the case. Policy implications are discussed.     

Missing friendships: understanding the absent relationships of local and international students at an Australian university

In recent years, research on higher education has increasingly examined the realities of internationalisation, with a particular focus on international students’ experiences and internationalisation at home programs. These studies have explored the friendships of international students, including their relationships with both locals and internationals from other countries. However, local students’ perspectives and experiences of friendship are largely absent from this literature. The few accounts examining local students’ lives explicitly focus on improving their cross-cultural knowledge and engagement, or on rare cases of local–international student friendships. The overriding assumption in this literature is that the understandings and social practises of local students are major barriers to their relationships with internationals. This paper addresses this gap by exploring local students’ perspectives on the absence of friendships with their international peers. We utilise findings from a research project on internationalisation at home, involving interviews and focus groups with local and international students and staff at an Australian university. Focusing on locals’ discussions of potential friendships with internationals, we propose that these missing friendships are an important area of study. We find that these friendships are missing for several interrelated reasons: local–international friendships are considered unnecessary and are therefore unimagined by locals, who tend to assume that similarity and affinity naturally lead to friendships, and the structures and spaces that might facilitate friendships are absent. Ultimately, uncovering why these friendships are missing sheds fuller light on how relationships might be facilitated, potentially informing and improving universities’ internationalisation initiatives.     

The Effects of Personal and Social Uses of Mobile Health Applications on Healthy Behaviors

In the face of America’s obesity epidemic, mobile health applications (MHAs) offer solutions for motivating users to be healthier. MHAs include both personal features for the individual user (e.g., calorie tracking) and social features, which connect the user to others (e.g., for support or competition). The present study explores the connection between both personal and social uses of MHAs and healthy behaviors. Findings indicate that the use of MHAs is positively associated with healthier overall behaviors: Personal aspects were related to healthier eating and workout behaviors, and social aspects were positively associated with only healthier workout behaviors. Perceptions of social support from others predicted healthier overall behaviors and were related to increased body satisfaction. Implications for the role of social support in MHAs are discussed.     

Linguistic and pedagogical factors affecting children's understanding of arithmetic word problems: A comparative study

2493 children aged from 5 to 15 years in 114 classes in 25 primary schools were asked to do a similar set of 22 arithmetic word problems. 1195 of the children were in Grades K through 6 in Victorian schools (Australia) and 1298 were in Grades 4 through 6 in Papua New Guinea (PNG) schools. For both samples the questions were posed in English. This was the first language for most children in the Victorian sample but, for the PNG sample, English was usually the second, third, or even fourth language (even though it is the language of instruction in PNG schools). While the test instrument was based on widely accepted information processing models of how children solve arithmetic word problems, the data obtained were not so much in accord with these models as with psycholinguistic theories on children's acquisition of polarised comparative pairs (like more and less). The data also indicate that children from the two samples used similar strategies and made similar errors, with the order of relative difficulty being the same for both samples, the main factor determining difficulty being the semantic structure of the questions. Differences in performance between corresponding grades from the two samples can be attributed to differences in the degree of English language competence rather than to numerical facility.     

Classifying Data Displays with an Assessment of Displays Found in Popular Software

This article provides a scheme for classifying data tables and graphs and then uses this scheme to organize and assess the tables and graphs found in three commonly used software packages: Microsoft Excel, Minitab and SPSS. The classification and assessment is of one–, two– and three–dimensional displays.     

Children's Activity Levels and Lesson Context during Third-Grade Physical Education

Abstract

Little is known about children's activity levels during physical education classes and how they relate to the national health objectives for the year 2000 (U.S. Public Health Service, 1991). We systematically observed students' physical activity and associated variables in 293 third-grade physical education lessons in 95 schools in 4 Child and Adolescent Trial for Cardio-vascular Health (CATCH) centers in California, Louisiana, Minnesota, and Texas. The influence of independent variables was assessed simultaneously by analysis of variance. Significant differences among study centers were evidenced for both physical activity and lesson context variables. Additionally, there were differences among variables for lesson location and teacher specialty, but not for teacher gender. Boys were more active than girls, but only during free play opportunities. The findings have widespread implications for educators responsible for developing and implementing health-related physical education programs, as well as for designing and conducting staff development.     

Multilingual Information Access (MLIA) Tools on Google and WorldCat: Bi/Multilingual University Students’ Experience and Perceptions

Abstract

This article reports on the results of an exploratory user-centered study that examined how technological advancements in natural language processing (NLP) such as the availability of multilingual information access (MLIA) tools impact the information searching behavior of bi/multilingual academic users. Thirty-one bi/multilingual students participated in a controlled lab-based user experiment in which they carried out two assigned tasks each on Google and WorldCat for a total of four tasks, and then completed a post experiment questionnaire. The captures from the experiment showed 86.7% of the participants using multilingual information access tools. Further analyses of the captures also showed that participants were more likely to use MLIA tools when the instructions for the task were stated in their native language. An independent samples t-test revealed that participants spent less time on their searches when they used MLIA tools. The study revealed considerable diversity in the information searching behavior of the participants, even within the same pair of languages, and even for the same user. Diversity was noted for instance, on which tasks MLIA tools were used and in how these tools were used. User-centered designed, personalized multilingual information retrieval (PMLIR) models could hold promise for best representing the information searching behavior of bi/multilingual users.     

Agricultural management education in Australia: genesis of a new degree programme in ecological agriculture

While the science community continues to ask how its responsibility to society needs to be expressed in the modern world, higher education grapples with issues of its own, including issues embroiled in the perennial tug‐of‐war between principle and economic pragmatism. In this paper, the authors give an account of the origins and development of a new undergraduate course in ‘ecological agriculture’ at a regional Australian university campus. In this story, the tug‐of‐war is dragged strongly back to central issues of purpose and philosophy. Supplementary pragmatic information included are summaries from the feedback from students who have undergone the course and members of the relevant industry obtained through the course evaluations done in the years 2002–2005; moreover, a brief explanation as to how the obstacles faced were met in launching the programme has also been included.     

The coordination role in research education: emerging understandings and dilemmas for leadership

Changes in expectations of research education worldwide have seen the rise of new demands beyond supervision and have highlighted the need for academic leadership in research education at a local level. Based on an interview study of those who have taken up local leadership roles in four Australian universities, this paper maps and analyses different dimensions of the emerging leadership role of research education coordination. It argues that while there is increasing clarity of what is required, there are considerable tensions in the nature of the coordination role and how coordination is to be executed. In particular, what leadership roles are appropriate and how can they be positioned effectively within universities? The paper draws on the Integrated Competing Values Framework to focus on the activities of coordination and on ideas of distributed leadership to discuss the leadership that characterises coordination. It is argued that without acknowledgement of the influences that coordinators need to exert and the positioning and support needed to achieve this, the contemporary agenda for research education will not be realised.