Knowledge translation and research careers: Mode I and Mode II activity among health researchers

Defining knowledge translation activities using Gibbons and Nowotny's Mode I and II forms of knowledge production, health researcher (N = 240) characteristics are compared with their knowledge translation activities. Applied researchers (n = 168) engaged in more Mode II activity (p < .001), perceived their work as having more impact (p < .001), and reported higher levels of relational capital (p < .001) when compared to basic researchers (n = 72). Those from medical schools (n = 128) had more publications (p = .004) as did applied researchers in medical school compared to applied researchers from other faculties (p = .001). These findings provide early empirical insights into emerging tensions in environments where Mode I and Mode II activities co-exist; tensions that may extract unintended costs from researchers. Such costs may be paid in the currency not only of tenure and promotion, but also of successful grant and career scientist award acquisition.     

The Value of a Programme-wide Approach to Assessment

Reliability is important in the academic judgements that higher education institutions pass to employers, graduate schools and other stakeholders. However, there are well-known limits to the levels of reliability that can be reached at reasonable cost and without sacrificing validity. It is argued that a systemic approach to the assessment of student learning shows how resources may be freed up to invest in securing more reliable assessments where they are desirable and might reasonably be had.     

Futures for Children's Literature: Evolution or radical break?

As electronic media increasingly dominate narratives for children, not merely the form or the content but the very nature of narrative is changing. Future narratives for the 'computer reader', using the Internet and multimedia may seem to be no more nor less than individual, unassessable chaos. But these readers still need to subsist in a linear educational system and teachers will have to negotiate the profound intellectual shift that the mediation between old and new narratives implies. At the most basic level this will involve revising what we mean to be 'literate' and to be a 'good reader'.     

Caution: Classroom under observation

In this article, it is argued that there are serious difficulties in observing someone else teach for the purpose of providing evaluation or corrective feedback on their teaching. The article reports on responses from a group of teacher educators who watched a videotaped classroom lesson. Their written critiques were surprisingly contradictory, so much so as to call into question the reliability of lesson critiques. It is suggested that, where observation and critique of classroom teaching are used, summative judgements be avoided, and that a major goal of observations be to stimulate debate about different teaching styles and individual and cooperative reflection. Most importantly, observers must acknowledge the variety of intentions and perspectives of classroom teachers.     

Phonological skills and comprehension failure: A test of the phonological processing deficit hypothesis

Shankweiler and colleagues argue that text comprehensionproblems in young children arise from phonological processingdifficulties. Their work has focused on children with poor wordreading ability. We investigated this hypothesis for children whoexperience comprehension difficulties in the presence of age-appropriate word reading skills. We found that good and poorcomprehenders performed comparably on various measures ofphonological processing and differed on a task that made greaterdemands on working memory, Bradley and Bryant's odd-word-outtask. In a final study, hierarchical regression analyses supportedthis distinction: the odd-word-out task was a strong predictor ofreading comprehension performance even after IQ, vocabulary and single word reading had been controlled for, but a lessmemory-dependent phonological task was not. These studiessupport previous work which indicates that poor comprehenders'problems arise from higher-level processing difficulties.     

Investigating the causes of reading comprehension failure: The comprehension-age match design

The reading-level (or reading-age) match design has become a widely-used tool for investigating the possible direction of the relation between particular skills and word reading ability: Cause or consequence. This paper outlines an analogous method for identifying candidate causes of reading comprehension failure, the `comprehension-age match design' and discusses the strengths and limitations of this design.