The Circles Network CREDO Project

A ‘circle of support’ is a concept with wide application in a range of circumstances and is developing as an important means of promoting social inclusion. In this article Nadine Jay describes the development of ‘circles of support’ for young people with disabilities. She provides an illuminating account of how they function, and of the powerful part the family and community can play in complementing the work of professionals.     

Bibliometric approximation of a scientific specialty by combining key sources,title words,authors and references

Bibliometric methods for the analysis of highly specialized subjects are increasingly investigated and debated. Information and assessments well-focused at the specialty level can help make important decisions in research and innovation policy. This paper presents a novel method to approximate the specialty to which a given publication record belongs. The method partially combines sets of key values for four publication data fields: source, title, authors and references. The approach is founded in concepts defining research disciplines and scholarly communication, and in empirically observed regularities in publication data. The resulting specialty approximation consists of publications associated to the investigated publication record via key values for at least three of the four data fields. This paper describes the method and illustrates it with an application to publication records of individual scientists. The illustration also successfully tests the focus of the specialty approximation in terms of its ability to connect and help identify peers. Potential tracks for further investigation include analyses involving other kinds of specialized publication records, studies for a broader range of specialties, and exploration of the potential for diverse applications in research and research policy context.     

Structuring Dialogue with Students via Learning Tasks

We discuss a teaching approach that we believe promotes deep learning and diminishes the powerful voice of the teacher, thereby allowing students and the teacher to reason actively and inquire together in the classroom. This teaching approach is based on an integration of the concepts of dialogue and of mediation and utilizes learning tasks to structure dialogue with students during classroom meetings and outside the classroom, when students work independently. Students' experiences of this approach within the two courses reported on in the article were generally positive.     

French DNCG management control versus UEFA Financial Fair Play: a divergent conception of financial regulation objectives

The French Football Federation was the first football governing body to put in place, in 1990, a financial regulation system. It might be expected that UEFA’s Financial Fair Play (FFP) system established in 2010 would be similar to French DNCG (National Direction for Management Control) regulations. However, while FFP is concerned with profitability, DNCG is focused on solvency. Hence, a French club may be loss-making and not compliant with FFP, while at the same time being solvent in accordance with DNCG rules. Our research confirms that most French clubs do not conform to FFP rules. As such, it provides further evidence that DNCG has not prevented poor financial management within French clubs. The coexistence of DNCG and FFP– or any other domestic financial regulation and FFP –may result in disparities between domestic clubs. As a consequence, there should be consistent financial regulation in all European leagues.     

Core Competencies to the Rescue: Taking Stock and Protecting Institutional Knowledge

What happens when the only staff member who knows how to do a particular task is no longer available? Using NASIG’s Core Competencies for Electronic Resources Librarians, the Electronic Resources and Serials Department of Auburn University set out to tackle the problem of the indispensable staff person, and discovered that expertise is never fully achieved, and competence is always a work in progress.     

Identifying and removing duplicate records from systematic review searches

Objective

The purpose of this study was to compare effectiveness of different options for de-duplicating records retrieved from systematic review searches.

Methods

Using the records from a published systematic review, five de-duplication options were compared. The time taken to de-duplicate in each option and the number of false positives (were deleted but should not have been) and false negatives (should have been deleted but were not) were recorded.

Results

The time for each option varied. The number of positive and false duplicates returned from each option also varied greatly.

Conclusion

The authors recommend different de-duplication options based on the skill level of the searcher and the purpose of de-duplication efforts.     

Globalisation,mergers and ‘inadvertent multi-campus universities’: reflections from Wales

Multi-site universities face the challenge of integrating campuses that may have different profiles and orientations arising from place-specific attachments. Multi-campus universities created via mergers seeking to ensure long-term financial sustainability, and increasing their attractiveness to students, create a tension in campuses’ purposes. We explore how mergers in Wales created ‘inadvertent’ multi-campus universities whilst attempting to increase their overall competitiveness. We highlight three tensions that mergers created for contributing to local places, firstly a tendency for internal concentration, investing for growth in metropolitan not peripheral campuses; secondly, to looking beyond traditional local campuses and creating external campuses (in this case in London); and thirdly, to specialise campuses on the basis of attracting external students not local needs. This creates a substantial challenge for managing multi-campus universities if they are to continue to be able to support the prosperity of more remote regions in an increasingly knowledge-based economy.     

High school biology: What makes it a challenge for teachers?

This study contributes to our understanding of the complex issues inherent in dealing with the heterogeneity of current high school science classrooms, by reporting on in-depth interviews with 38 experienced biology teachers. Analyses of teachers' responses revealed complex and occasionally counter-intuitive relationships among: (a) their perceptions of what was distinctive about their school, its biology program, or their students; (b) their allocation of class time; (c) their efforts to individualize instruction and meet the needs of a heterogeneous student population; (d) their student outcome goals; and (e) the methods they used to evaluate student progress. Thus, for example, of the 9 teachers who cited the diversity of their students. 4 also commented on their poor motivation, but another 4 also commented on their high motivation. In addition, teachers reported using a similar range of instructional formats but for different reasons, depending on the characteristics of their students (e.g., cooperative learning groups used to compensate for poor attention spans, to challenge bright students, and to foster social tolerance). Discussion of these findings addresses several points of relevance for science education, teacher preparation, and curriculum reform. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Can the government really help? Online information for women experiencing violence

Domestic violence against women is a significant social and public health problem that requires a varied social service response for abused women and their children. Increasingly, this service response includes online sources and resources. Using content analysis methods, we examined the Canadian provincial E-Government response to providing information to women exposed to domestic violence. Our overarching question was “if an abused woman went to her province’s government website for information and help and used common search strategies, what would she find?”