Moths,candles and fires: examining dance as creative practice research in a Master's degree

This article reflects on the purposes and functions of examination criteria for Masters' research degrees with creative practice components. With a particular focus on dance projects that incorporate both a performed and a written expression of the research, we consider how a rubric for creative practice research degrees might address formative and summative assessment purposes and clarify goals for learners, supervisors, examiners and academic institutions. Our discussion is situated within a South Pacific postgraduate learning context and is informed by post-colonial and post-Cartesian concerns over how dance knowledge is recognized in global academia. Much current literature has argued how particular research methods and diverse approaches to the presentation of research outputs can destabilize dominant, logocentric methods of valuing knowledge. Our queries extend this argument into the actual quantifiable measuring and evaluation of such knowledge, which Masters' grading necessitates in order to maintain its value as an institutional currency. This leads to the reflections on the rubric for Masters' degrees with Creative Practice components that is currently used within the Dance Studies programme of the University of Auckland, and how this rubric might be seen as contributing to an evolving ‘cultivated’ community of practice within postgraduate examination. The rubric continues to grow through ongoing consultation with postgraduate students, supervisory staff, internal and external examiners and international experts in creative arts academia. Our reflections extend the argument for how creative practice might be further rationalized within academia.     

An Experiment Comparing HBSE Graduate Social Work Classes: Face‐to‐Face and at a Distance

This article describes a quasi‐experimental comparison of two master's level social work classes delivering content on human behavior in the social environment. One class, delivered face‐to‐face, was largely synchronous. The other class, delivered using distance technologies, was more asynchronous than the first. The authors hypothesized that students would learn equally well in both classes, and did not reject that hypothesis. That was so even after accounting for strong explanation of achievement by grade point average adjusted for grade inflation. Though this study indicates that the distance education studied was apparently successful, the findings may not be highly generalizable, and the authors suggest that future studies need to look at achievement in various settings and curricular areas while carefully measuring and accounting for extraneous variables.     

Disruption of latent inhibition by interpolation of task-irrelevant stimulation between preexposure and conditioning

Latent inhibition refers to attenuated responding to a conditioned stimulus (CS) that was repeatedly presented without reinforcement prior to the CS-unconditioned stimulus (US) pairings. Using water-deprived rats as subjects, we observed that interpolating task-irrelevant stimulation between the preexposure and conditioning phases of a latent inhibition procedure attenuated latent inhibition (Experiments 1A, 1B, and 2). Apparently, interpolated stimulation segments the preexposure and conditioning treatments into two separate experiences, much in the same way that a change of context would. Consistent with this view, the interpolated stimulation did not disrupt latent inhibition if it was also presented during both preexposure and conditioning (Experiment 3). We view these results as analogous to those of Escobar, Arcediano, and Miller (2003), who suggested that the difficulty in observing latent inhibition in human adults is related to the segmentation between preexposure and conditioning caused by the usual interpolation of instructions in preparations with humans.