Have a Legal Question Without the Resources to Get an Answer?

This article explores the Western New York's Library Resources Council's Ask the Lawyer Program. The program provides a timely model for local cultural heritage communities, such as archives, to collectively retain a lawyer in a non-representational capacity to answer both specific and hypothetical questions that arise as a result of their work.     

Oral Communication Skills in Higher Education: Using a Performance-Based Evaluation Rubric to Assess Communication Skills

This study used The Competent Speaker, a rubric developed by the National Communication Association (S. P. Morreale, M. R. Moore, K. P. Taylor, D. Surges-Tatum, & R. Hulbert-Johnson, 1993), to evaluate student performance in general education public speaking courses as a case study of student skills and programmatic assessment. Results indicate that students taking the general education public speaking course are below satisfactory standards on five of the eight competencies defined by the National Communication Association and are above satisfactory standards on two of the eight competencies. Implications for this particular program, other communication departments, and communication across the curriculum in general education are discussed. We also offer suggestions for those in other disciplines or educational settings in the use of performance evaluation rubrics for assessing other student skills/knowledge and for training new teachers.

Alignment and Implications for Test Takers

The use of assessment results to inform school accountability relies on the assumption that the test design appropriately represents the content and cognitive emphasis reflected in the state's standards. Since the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act and the certification of accountability assessments through federal peer review practices, the content validity arguments supporting accountability have relied almost exclusively on the alignment of statewide assessments to state standards. It is assumed that if alignment does not hold, the scores will not provide valid inferences regarding the degree to which test takers have performed. Although alignment results are commonly used as evidence of test appropriateness, Polikoff (this issue) would argue that given the importance of alignment in policy decisions, research related to alignment is surprisingly limited. Few studies have addressed the adequacy of alignment methodologies and results as support for the inferences to be made (i.e., proficient on state standards). This paper uses an example of test taker performance (and common performance indicators) to investigate to what extent the degree of alignment impacts inferences made about performance (i.e., classification into performance levels, estimates of student ability, and student rank order).     

The Viability of Using Rapid Judgments as a Method of Deception Detection

Rapid Judgments (RJs) are quick assessments based on indirect verbal and nonverbal cues that are known to be associated with deception. RJs are advantageous because they eliminate the need for expensive detection equipment and only require minimal training for coders with relatively accurate judgments. Results of testing on two different datasets showed that trained coders were reliably making RJs after watching both long and short interaction segments but their judgments were not more accurate than the expert interviewers. The RJs did not discriminate between truth and deception as hypothesized. This raises more questions about the conditions under which making RJs from verbal and nonverbal cues achieves accurate detection of veracity.     

Introducing critical race theory to archival discourse: getting the conversation started

This article introduces the application of Critical Race Theory (CRT) to archival discourse in order to demonstrate how such a critical and analytical approach can help identify and raise social and professional consciousness of implicit racial bias. To demonstrate the potential of CRT, the paper discusses how the terminology and methodological structures of CRT might be applied to some aspects of archival theory and practice. The paper concludes that CRT can contribute to a diversified archival epistemology that can influence the creation of collective and institutional memories that impact underrepresented and disenfranchised populations and the development of their identities.     

Fostering empathy in undergraduate health science majors through the reconciliation of objectivity and subjectivity: An integrated approach

The demand for empathetic health care practitioners requires an academic curriculum suited to that need. Here we describe a series of integrated activities that were designed to foster empathy in undergraduate health science majors. By combining content and pedagogical approaches from the humanities and sciences, we asked students to reconcile objective and subjective modes of understanding the human body as a learning object. Preliminary evaluations of student behavior, written student responses, and survey results are offered as support for our conclusion that the integration of a humanities perspective into the Anatomy classroom at University of Minnesota Rochester can facilitate the process of developing student empathy through the reconciliation of objective and subjective modes. Furthermore, students were able to apply this understanding to images on the page or screen, to living human learning objects and human cadavers. Although to claim that these activities in themselves can stymie the stasis/decline of empathy that health science students report would be patently false, we conclude that similar approaches could offer an avenue by which other educators might develop similar activities that, in aggregate, might have a lasting effect from the undergraduate through the graduate level of training in the health sciences. Anat Sci Educ. © 2012 American Association of Anatomists.     

Learning to Count: Structured Practice With Spatial Cues Supports the Development of Counting Sequence Knowledge in 3-Year-Old English-Speaking Children

Research Findings: Children who speak English are slower to learn the counting sequence between 11 and 20 compared to children who speak Asian languages. In the present research, we examined whether providing children with spatially relevant information during counting would facilitate their acquisition of the counting sequence. Three-year-olds (n = 54) who played a 1–20 number board game in which numbers were grouped by decade into 2 rows learned significantly more of the counting sequence than children who played a linear version of the game or those who were in the control group. Both the row and linear versions of the game helped children improve their performance on an object counting task. Children’s performance on a number line task did not show an effect of either game intervention. Practice or Policy: These results suggest that counting practice that includes spatially informative cues can facilitate young English-speaking children’s learning of the challenging number sequence from 11 to 20.