Research studies on higher education: A content analysis

This paper reports the results of a content analysis of a comprehensive set of abstracts of ongoing research projects in the United States and Canada in 1972. The questions asked were: What kind of research is being done on higher education? Who does this research? Secondary questions were: How are the research projects financially supported? How are the research results to be disseminated? The results are presented and interpreted in relation to some of the less data-based literature on the field of higher education as an emerging area of systematic study.     

Correlates of Citizenship Behaviour of Nigerian Secondary School Students

This paper examined the extent to which gender, academic achievement in social studies and the occupation of the parents of the students may be intervening variables in the citizenship behaviour of students within the school purview. An observational scheme, using Mehlinger's and Okunrotifa's posit, was used to observe 60 students for 3 weeks by trained raters. While the general picture appears satisfactory and gender has no significant influence, academic achievement in social studies and the occupation of parents are significant variables associated with student degree of citizenship behaviour. Therefore, in all school work dealing with civic competence, moral education concepts should be used and students should be associated heterogeneously across sex, intellectual capability and parents’ status.     

Supplemental instruction in introductory biology I: enhancing the performance and retention of underrepresented minority students

Supplemental instruction classes have been shown in many studies to enhance performance in the supported courses and even to improve graduation rates. Generally, there has been little evidence of a differential impact on students from different ethnic/racial backgrounds. At San Francisco State University, however, supplemental instruction in the Introductory Biology I class is associated with even more dramatic gains among students from underrepresented minority populations than the gains found among their peers. These gains do not seem to be the product of better students availing themselves of supplemental instruction or other outside factors. The Introductory Biology I class consists of a team-taught lecture component, taught in a large lecture classroom, and a laboratory component where students participate in smaller lab sections. Students are expected to master an understanding of basic concepts, content, and vocabulary in biology as well as gain laboratory investigation skills and experience applying scientific methodology. In this context, supplemental instruction classes are cooperative learning environments where students participate in learning activities that complement the course material, focusing on student misconceptions and difficulties, construction of a scaffolded knowledge base, applications involving problem solving, and articulation of constructs with peers.     

Thinking about the future because of the past: young children's knowledge about the causes of worry and preventative decisions

Two studies investigated 3- to 6-year-olds' and adults' (N= 128) knowledge about emotions and behaviors caused by thinking about the future because of the past. Participants listened to stories featuring characters that experienced negative events, and then, many days later, felt worried or changed their behaviors upon seeing an entity associated with the prior harm. Results revealed a significant increase between 3 and 5 years in the frequency that participants explained characters' reactions as caused by anticipating the reoccurrence of a negative past event. Across age, females more often marked future events as uncertain, as well as predicted that people in ambiguous risk situations would feel worried due to past-to-future connections.     

Calculated democracy—Explorations in gerrymandering

This paper describes a lesson centered around a metric for measuring partisan gerrymandering: the efficiency gap. We situate the efficiency gap in the current US political climate, describe the activity itself, and then provide recommendations for readers interested in adapting the lesson for their own classrooms.     

Enacting Cultural Identities in Conversation: Managing Collaboration in Two Nonprofit Organizations

As they conduct the practical work of collaborating during meetings, nonprofit stakeholders construct, negotiate, and manage identities. In this article we use membership categorization analysis to explore how meeting participants avow and ascribe cultural identities during collaborative meetings in two nonprofit organizations. Examination of identification practices, including employing labels for ethnic categories and implicating cultural identities through category-relevant predicates—which are part of the practical work of collaborating in nonprofit organizations—can serve as an aid to understanding how stakeholders negotiate interorganizational collaboration in social interaction.     

From a Means to an End: Patenting in the 1999 Danish ‘Act on Inventions’ and its Effect on Research Practice

This paper examines the potential pitfalls for academic research associated with goal displacements in the implementation of goals and indicators of research commercialization. We ask why patenting has come to serve as the key policy indicator of innovative capacity and what consequences this has for the organization of academic research. To address these questions, the paper presents a case study from Denmark on, firstly, why and how the 1999 Danish ‘Act on Inventions’ introduced patenting as a central instrument to Danish science policy and, secondly, the effects the Act has had on Danish university organization and research practices. We trace why and how commercialization was introduced as an important objective in Danish science policy since the 1980s. The increased focus on patents is explained as an isomorphic adjustment to an international ‘science policy field,’ manifested in particular through OECD statistics, where patenting has come to serve as a key metric in international rankings. In a second step, we examine what effects the patenting requirements have had on organization and research practice at a Danish university. We show that in practice ‘number of patents’ changed from serving as an indicator of innovative capacity to being a policy goal in itself, thus in effect producing a goal displacement that is potentially damaging for both academic research and innovation capacity of the surrounding society. As a consequence of this goal displacement, active scientists now increasingly engage in patenting primarily as a means to fulfill organizational targets and to increase their ‘fundability,’ rather than to promote commercial applications of their research. In conclusion, we discuss how these unfulfilled policy ambitions have led to a retrospective redefinition of policy goals rather than an adjustment of the actual policy tools.