Connecting Forensics and Assessment in the Twenty-First Century

A major feature of education in the twenty-first century is assessment. Forensic educators should heighten the importance of learning outcomes and utilize assessment efforts to directly measure how forensic programs develop educational foundations for students. This article focuses on the use of tournaments and noncompetitive educational outcomes, such as engagement within academic communities, service-learning, and the promotion of the value of forensics, to connect the educational benefits of the activity to help define the mission of forensics in the twenty-first century.     

Making It Fit: Reshaping Library Services and Spaces for Today's Students

University course assignments increasingly focus on group work and group projects to help students collaboratively discover more about their fields of study. The Thomas G. Carpenter Library realized the need to investigate means for reimagining itself to better accommodate today's researchers. The complex process of planning for the redesign of both services and space undertaken by the library is described and explained in this first of a planned series of articles.     

How Custom Agents Really Detect Lies

Research has found discrepancies among folk beliefs about lie detection, deception cue utility, and retrospective accounts of detected lies. Elite customs agents (N = 37) were surveyed regarding their overall beliefs about how to detect lies (general strategy), their opinions about best practices (best strategy), and about a successfully detected lie (actual strategy). Responses were coded in three nonexclusive broad categories: (a) behavioral cues, (b) communication content and evidence, and (c) interactive-questioning approaches. Behavioral cues, especially nonverbal cues, were listed most frequently as general beliefs. Opinions about the best approach were evenly split across the three categories. Communication content and evidence was the most frequently reported actual detection method and was mentioned in 97% of the responses. The results are discussed in relation to Truth-Default Theory and their implications for lie detection practice.     

Archipelagic rhetoric: remapping the Marianas and challenging militarization from “A Stirring Place”

Engaging critical rhetorical fieldwork in the Mariana Islands archipelago, this article destabilizes colonial naming projects and US federal control that dispossess island places from Indigenous peoples. On Euro-American and military maps, archipelagoes are depicted as distant, tiny, empty, or merely (is)lands for US geostrategic control. I argue for a remapping of the Marianas as expansive, oceanic sites of resistance to colonial cartographic violence and US militarization. Fieldwork in the Marianas demonstrates how Indigenous epistemologies function as archipelagic rhetoric enacted through a Chamoru sense of place. I examine these fluid relational connections to place and their implications for decolonization.     

Body in Mind: How Gestures Empower Foreign Language Learning

It has previously been demonstrated that enactment (i.e., performing representative gestures during encoding) enhances memory for concrete words, in particular action words. Here, we investigate the impact of enactment on abstract word learning in a foreign language. We further ask if learning novel words with gestures facilitates sentence production. In a within‐subjects paradigm, participants first learned 32 abstract sentences from an artificial corpus conforming with Italian phonotactics. Sixteen sentences were encoded audiovisually. Another set of 16 sentences was also encoded audiovisually, but, in addition, each single word was accompanied by a symbolic gesture. Participants were trained for 6 days. Memory performance was assessed daily using different tests. The overall results support the prediction that learners have better memory for words encoded with gestures. In a transfer test, participants produced new sentences with the words they had acquired. Items encoded through gestures were used more frequently, demonstrating their enhanced accessibility in memory. The results are interpreted in terms of embodied cognition. Implications for teaching and learning are suggested.     

Supervision and evaluation: The Wyoming perspective

The intent of this study was to assess the perceptions and actions of Wyoming principals concerning their role in supervising and evaluating teachers. A survey was sent to all 286 principals in the state of Wyoming, of which, 143 returned surveys, a response rate of 50%. Findings suggested that principals utilized supervisory behaviors more often than evaluative behaviors. Elementary principals perceived their evaluative practices as significantly more prevalent than secondary principals. Furthermore, principals indicated that their greatest frustrations in supervising teachers were time, the evaluation instrument, and teachers’ unwillingness to change. Additionally, findings suggested that Wyoming principals utilized classroom walkthroughs because they provided a snapshot of teaching and provided a medium for providing feedback. In regards to developmental supervision, principals indicated that novice teachers received much more supervision than veteran teachers. However, their reported use of differentiated supervision only applied to teacher autonomy concerning professional development goals. Principals reported that teachers had little input concerning the methods by which they were supervised. Finally, a majority of the Wyoming principals felt that improvement plans were effective at changing mediocre teaching behaviors, but 40% were speculative that such plans truly remediated poor teachers.     

Extended Mixed‐Effects Item Response Models With the MH‐RM Algorithm

A mixed‐effects item response theory (IRT) model is presented as a logical extension of the generalized linear mixed‐effects modeling approach to formulating explanatory IRT models. Fixed and random coefficients in the extended model are estimated using a Metropolis‐Hastings Robbins‐Monro (MH‐RM) stochastic imputation algorithm to accommodate for increased dimensionality due to modeling multiple design‐ and trait‐based random effects. As a consequence of using this algorithm, more flexible explanatory IRT models, such as the multidimensional four‐parameter logistic model, are easily organized and efficiently estimated for unidimensional and multidimensional tests. Rasch versions of the linear latent trait and latent regression model, along with their extensions, are presented and discussed, Monte Carlo simulations are conducted to determine the efficiency of parameter recovery of the MH‐RM algorithm, and an empirical example using the extended mixed‐effects IRT model is presented.