Library Marketing on a Small Liberal Arts Campus: Assessing Communication Preferences

As part of a newly created library marketing plan, librarians at the College of Wooster undertook a study of the communication preferences of students, faculty, and staff in early 2015. The results of the survey helped to develop a comprehensive picture of what library resources and services these constituencies are interested in learning about, as well as when, where, and how they prefer to learn about them. This article describes the development, distribution, results, and analysis of the survey, and highlights the importance of campus-specific library marketing practices.     

Teacher education programmes delivered at a distance: An examination of distance student perceptions

Recent technological developments have greatly influenced the ways American universities deliver educational course offerings to students at a distance. The perception of pre-service teachers in distance education programmes is germane to the planning and delivery of distance education courses in teacher education departments in the future. The results of this American study revealed a differing perception between male and female students in the area of course structure, student/teacher interaction, overall course satisfaction and peer interaction. As a result of this study, recommendations are provided for teacher preparation programmes to improve distance education course offerings for prospective teachers in the USA and implications for educators involved in teacher preparation internationally.     

Mobilising the Modern Industrial Landscape for Sports and Leisure in the Early Twentieth Century

By the 1930s, it was common for large corporations to construct recreation parks for employee sports and other outdoor leisure activities. These were designed according to developing theories of sports and recreation and the kinds of recreation space required for modern industrial nations. Some companies provided recreation grounds for their employees of a similar or superior scale and sophistication to those provided by municipal authorities, including state-of the art pavilions and swimming pools, pleasure gardens and picnic areas. In Britain and the USA, from 1890–1940 the park designs of two companies – Cadbury Brothers at Bournville, UK and the National Cash Register Company, Dayton, Ohio, USA – became role models for the development of corporate recreation and industrial sports that remained influential through the 1960s. Landscape architects added value to the companies by creating useful and effective recreation parks. These parks were modern in that they served the more leisured societies of modern industrial nations in a rational way. The design, construction and maintenance of these parks also reveals that industrial sports policies in Britain and the USA made a distinctive and significant contribution to the industrial landscape as well as to the sporting ‘revolution’ of the period.     

Joining Forces for Families: an embedded response to neighborhood poverty

The authors reflect on how they, as social work practitioners, support the school systems in supporting homeless youth and families. They emphasize the importance of relationships and trust in working with this vulnerable population. The reflexive vignettes highlight the challenges and success of developing community-based programming for homeless and highly mobile students.     

Information world mapping: A participatory arts-based elicitation method for information behavior interviews

Participatory, arts-based methods generate rich data with which researchers can explore information behavior in context, and may be particularly apt when engaging with youth or participants with low literacy levels. Information world mapping (IWM) is an innovative and interactive drawing-based interview technique for data elicitation. Initially developed for use in a study of young parents’ health information practices, IWM guides participants in depicting their personal social information worlds, including items, places, and relationships. Maps are then used to facilitate critical incident elicitation of participants' stories about, and interpretations of, their information practices. Within the young parent study, three styles of map were commonly seen: the directional map, the mind map, and the symbolic map. Use of IWM requires time and ethical care, but the method enables researchers to center participants’ own perspectives on information practices, triangulate data obtained via more traditional methods, and enrich understanding of social information worlds.     

Examining Hispanic Student Mathematics Performance on High-Stakes Tests: An Examination of One Urban School District in Colorado

Hispanic students, born both inside and outside the United States, comprise over 80% of the US English language learner population. The difference in mathematics achievement among Hispanic students and other populations has been well documented. As a result, it is important to understand the effects of using standards-based mathematics curriculum with high school Hispanic students. Mathematics achievement scores from the Colorado Student Assessment Program and Measurement of Academic Progress for Hispanic 9th and 10th grade students (n = 1,318) who used the Core-Plus Mathematics Program were compared to the progress of other student demographics (n = 2,003) who used the same curriculum. In following the recommendations of the National Research Council (On evaluation curricular effectiveness: judging the effectiveness of K-12 mathematics evaluations. National Academies Press, Washington, DC 2005), a meta-analysis (Glass in Educ Res 5:3–8, 1976) of Hispanic students using National Science Foundation Funded (NSFF) curricula was conducted to contextualize this study’s findings within the findings of previous studies. The results of this study indicated that Hispanic students have shown modest gains; however, their relative position compared to other ethnic groups is unremarkable. The meta-analysis Cohen’s d results ranged from +.673 (SE = .131) to −.670 (SE = .045) with slightly positive effects for Hispanic students using an NSFF curriculum when compared to those not using an NSFF curriculum (.043, SE = .012).