Extended Test Time and postsecondary Students with Learning Disabilities: A Model for Decision Making

The most frequently requested accommodation among students with learning disabilities (LD) in postsecondary settings is extended test time. The frequency with which this accommodation is requested and granted compels disability service providers to become knowledgeable about the factors that influence the need for, and appropriateness of, the accommodation. Moreover, the synthesis of these factors becomes the basis for determining if the accommodation is reasonable under federal law. The purpose of this article is to present a step‐by‐step model to be used as a decision‐making process when considering the accommodation of extended test time for postsecondary students with LD. The model is designed to assist disability service providers in the analysis and synthesis of information collected from (1) the student's diagnostic evaluation, (2) the course or classroom test to be accommodated, and (3) student interviews. A list of diagnostic tests from the four most frequently administered test batteries used with adults is provided, along with a concise explanation of how characteristics of LD impact reading, writing, and math, and relate to the need for extended time. This information can be used to determine if extended test time is a reasonable accommodation and to estimate how much additional time to provide.     

All I really needed to know I learned during gastrulation

Note from the Editor     

Analysis of the urban/rural broadband divide in Canada: Using GIS in planning terrestrial wireless deployment

Millions of Canadians residing in Canada's northern, isolated, rural, and remote communities do not have broadband Internet access. This situation has led to a national “broadband divide.” That is, the deployment of wireline broadband is very limited in Canada's northern, isolated, rural, and remote areas because of the significant expense of installation and maintenance of the wired infrastructure needed to reach dwellings in these locations.Terrestrial broadband wireless technology, on the other hand, does not entail the same kind of physical infrastructure. As a result, there are dramatic changes in how spatial considerations affect the provision of broadband Internet services (BIS) to areas beyond the urban zone. In particular, the spatial question is now focused on assessing the capacity for different technological solutions to reach profitable population bases, and brings to the forefront organizations that are developing non-line-of-sight (NLOS) technologies that would permit wireless Internet access over much greater distances than current solutions.We begin this paper by establishing the importance of broadband connectivity to Canada's northern, isolated, rural, and remote communities. This discussion comments on the role of the Government of Canada in the provision of broadband connectivity to residents of these communities, and outlines the current regulatory issues that govern wireless services and policy formulation.The second part of the paper illustrates the use of geographic information system (GIS) approaches in the study of wireless broadband planning and deployment. Case study findings suggest that GIS applications can make a significant contribution to the analysis of wireless deployment planning, to the understanding of the relationships between wireless signal sources and consumers, and to the spatial configuration of terrestrial wireless broadband networks. We conclude the paper by discussing how the GIS approach employed could be used to inform the public policy process with regard to increasing access to broadband Internet services in all regions of the country, and thereby providing the opportunity for all Canadians, regardless of location, to fully participate in the Information Society.     

Anonymous personalization in collaborative web search

We present an innovative approach to Web search, called collaborative search, that seeks to cope with the type of vague queries that are commonplace in Web search. We do this by leveraging the search behaviour of previous searchers to personalize future result-lists according to the implied preferences of a community of like-minded individuals. This technique is implemented in the I-SPY meta-search engine and we present the results of a live-user trial which indicates that I-SPY can offer improved search performance when compared to a benchmark search engine, across a variety of performance metrics. In addition, I-SPY achieves its level of personalization while preserving the anonymity of individual users, and we argue that this offers unique privacy benefits compared to alternative approaches to personalization.     

Spaces of emergent memory: Detroit’s 8 Mile wall and public memories of civil rights injustice

This article introduces emergent memory, a conceptual extension to rhetorics of public memory, to describe memory’s genesis in sites built without commemorative commitments. Examining Detroit’s “8 Mile Wall,” a site built to reinforce segregated housing, this project argues the rhetorical tenets of emergent memory present in this space. As a relic of segregated history, the wall symbolically recalls the city’s controversial past, but has recently been the subject of a local mural project to redefine the wall’s purpose. Some consider this a step toward reclamation, as it visually repositions the disturbing remnant. For others, the murals simply cannot overwrite troubling memories of the city’s discriminatory history. This essay uses emergent memory to describe how the wall’s complicated mnemonic legacy simultaneously harkens to a difficult history and how the mural additions use that same legacy to convey an optimistic future for Detroit and those marked by this urban space.