Perils of perfectionistic concerns among teachers

The current study examined how teachers’ perfectionism (personal standards [PS] and concern over mistakes [COM]) relates to their achievement goals for teaching, instructional practices (creation of mastery vs. performance classroom goal structures), job satisfaction, and flow experience during teaching. The data were collected from teachers (N = 143; mean age = 43.5; 70% female; 100% European American) practicing in the Midwestern U.S. Path analyses indicated that teachers’ high personal standards predicted endorsement of mastery goals for teaching, creation of mastery goal structure emphasizing personal progress and learning, high job satisfaction, and frequent flow experience during teaching. On the contrary, teachers’ high concern over mistakes predicted endorsement of performance-approach and -avoidance goals, creation of classroom performance goal structure emphasizing competition among students, low job satisfaction, and infrequent flow experience during teaching. A significant interaction between PS and COM was found for fluency (subscale of flow) experience, indicating that PS can buffer the harmful effects of COM. Therefore, the study evidenced the benefits of PS and the drawbacks of COM.     

Teachers’ epistemic cognition in situ: Evidence from classroom assessment

Assessment tasks require the coordination of multiple knowledge-related goals for various audiences, and therefore provide an authentic context to observe teachers’ epistemic cognition in practice. In this instrumental case study, we investigated seven, fifth grade English Language Arts teachers’ epistemic cognition as they evaluated students’ classroom assessments. Our analyses revealed that the components of epistemic cognition identified in the literature emerged in these teachers’ assessment processes. Moreover, we found evidence that teachers’ epistemic cognition was iterative and nuanced, and required shifts in aims and reliable processes. This resulted in teachers forming new kinds of “epistemic matters” and questions beyond those ideas noted in existing models of epistemic cognition. Significance and implications are discussed.     

Information retrieval in the workplace: A comparison of professional search practices

Legal researchers, recruitment professionals, healthcare information professionals, and patent analysts all undertake work tasks where search forms a core part of their duties. In these instances, the search task is often complex and time-consuming and requires specialist expertise to identify relevant documents and insights within large domain-specific repositories and collections. Several studies have been made investigating the search practices of professionals such as these, but few have attempted to directly compare their professional practices and so it remains unclear to what extent insights and approaches from one domain can be applied to another. In this paper we describe the results of a survey of a purposive sample of 108 legal researchers, 64 recruitment professionals and 107 healthcare information professionals. Their responses are compared with results from a previous survey of 81 patent analysts. The survey investigated their search practices and preferences, the types of functionality they value, and their requirements for future information retrieval systems. The results reveal that these professions share many fundamental needs and face similar challenges. In particular a continuing preference to formulate queries as Boolean expressions, the need to manage, organise and re-use search strategies and results and an ambivalence toward the use of relevance ranking. The results stress the importance of recall and coverage for the healthcare and patent professionals, while precision and recency were more important to the legal and recruitment professionals. The results also highlight the need to ensure that search systems give confidence to the professional searcher and so trust, explainability and accountability remains a significant challenge when developing such systems. The findings suggest that translational research between the different areas could benefit professionals across domains.     

COVID-19, digital privacy,and the social limits on data-focused public health responses

The implementation of digital contact tracing applications around the world to help reduce the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic represents one of the most ambitious uses of massive-scale citizen data ever attempted. There is major divergence among nations, however, between a “privacy-first” approach which protects citizens’ data at the cost of extremely limited access for public health authorities and researchers, and a “data-first” approach which stores large amounts of data which, while of immeasurable value to epidemiologists and other researchers, may significantly intrude upon citizens’ privacy. The lack of a consensus on privacy protection in the contact tracing process creates risks of non-compliance or deliberate obfuscation from citizens who fear revealing private aspects of their lives – a factor greatly exacerbated by recent major scandals over online privacy and the illicit use of citizens’ digital information, which have heightened public consciousness of these issues and created significant new challenges for any collection of large-scale public data. While digital contact tracing for COVID-19 remains in its infancy, the lack of consensus around best practices for its implementation and for reassuring citizens of the protection of their privacy may already have impeded its capacity to contribute to the pandemic response.     

Chinese university EFL teachers’ beliefs and practices of classroom writing assessment

This study investigates the extent to which university teachers’ beliefs about classroom writing assessment are congruent with their self-perceived practices in English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) contexts, and what factors contribute to belief-practice inconsistencies. Drawing on data from a survey of 136 Chinese university EFL writing teachers and ten teacher interviews, results showed a degree of belief-practice alignment regarding assessment for learning (AfL) practices that make learning explicit, but belief-practice discrepancies were more salient. AfL practices that empower students to take responsibility in writing assessment were perceived to be more important than assessment of learning practices; however, the reverse was found in teachers’ practice. Impacts of micro-level factors including assessment training, teaching experience, student attributes, meso-level school factors, and macro-level assessment culture are discussed, and implications are drawn.     

第五种人的五项修炼

历史上管理理论对人的本质及其人性的哲学认识，经历了从“经济人”、“社会人”、“自动人”、“复杂人”、“学习人”的认识深化过程，并产生出相应的管理范式。对于第五种的“学习人”来讲，必需进行自我超越、改善心智模式、建立共同愿景、团体学习和系统思考五项修炼。     

Transparency in Maternity Care: Empowering Women to Make Educated Choices

The author of this guest editorial calls for a higher level of transparency in maternity care. The public should have access to information about hospital and provider policies and practices so that women and their families can determine where and with whom to birth. Currently, many grassroots-level projects, including The Birth Survey, are addressing this need.     

关于可加测度上的一类容度及其乘积的注

讨论D.kulj所提出的来自可加测度上的一类容度及其乘积的性质,给出了在凸函数的复合作用下,该类容度保留了某些相应的性质,同时给出了在一定条件下该容度上限乘积的等价形式。