Mentoring interdisciplinary undergraduate students via a team effort

We describe how a team approach that we developed as a mentoring strategy can be used to recruit, advance, and guide students to be more interested in the interdisciplinary field of mathematical biology, and lead to success in undergraduate research in this field. Students are introduced to research in their first semester via lab rotations. Their participation in the research of four faculty members-two from biology and two from mathematics-gives them a first-hand overview of research in quantitative biology and also some initial experience in research itself. However, one of the primary goals of the lab rotation experience is that of developing teams of students and faculty that combine mathematics and statistics with biology and the life sciences, teams that subsequently mentor undergraduate research in genuine interdisciplinary environments. Thus, the team concept serves not only as a means of establishing interdisciplinary research, but also as a means of incorporating new students into existing research efforts that will then track those students into meaningful research of their own. We report how the team concept is used to support undergraduate research in mathematical biology and what types of team-building strategies have worked for us.     

“Us and them”: towards intercultural competence among Jewish and Arab graduate students at Israeli colleges of education

The present study aims to examine the impact of encounter between two different ethnic groups, Jews and Arabs, of Israeli first-year graduate students who study in four colleges of education, on the development of their intercultural competence: (1) knowledge regarding the “other,” (2) change in attitudes and behavior towards the other, and (3) multicultural educational practice. The findings point to two clear factors affecting the development of intercultural competence: the formal and informal college experience as reported by respondents, particularly the contents and tools that both Jews and Arabs acquired at the college in addition to personal characteristics and off-campus encounters. The second factor is the difference between the experiences of Jewish and Arab students: while Arab students are more knowledgeable regarding the Jewish culture and are more willing to change attitudes and educational practices in light of multiculturalism, Jewish students are less prone to make such changes. Thus, according to our findings, intercultural encounters among educators during their graduate studies could create a unique opportunity to turn the college experience transformational in terms of intercultural competence, particularly in the segregated structure of Israeli society.     

Combining Cultural Analytics and Networks Analysis: Studying a Social Network Site with User-Generated Content

Humanities and social sciences require new research approaches to deal with and to benefit from the explosion of digital media. Thanks to large scale data storage and processing, close reading of individual items can be supplemented with analysis of broader trends from massive amounts of data. Cultural Analytics (CA) is a recently developed methodology for the exploration of content and visual form in large image and video collections. It has already been applied to a variety of media types, including TV programs, feature films, newspapers, and video games. However, until now these applications did not take into account the social context of media. In many cases, media artifacts under scrutiny are generated or used by people in a social setting, either in forms of (digital) communities, or in terms of social relations, which can be also analyzed as a valuable source of information. Social network analysis (SNA) is a set of methods for the analysis of human networks, including massive online social networks. In this article, we argue that CA and SNA can be combined synergistically, using data and images from deviantArt, the leading online network of user-created art, as a case study.     

Teacher‐Learner Interaction in the Process of Operating DL (Distance Learning) Systems

Abstracts

English: The analysing of students’ achievements shows a significant gap between schools in different areas. One of the main factors which influenced the students’ achievement is the level of teaching. The Distance Learning System can help in bridging the gap between what is needed and what the school can supply today     

Role Taking Ability,Nonverbal Sensitivity,Language and Social Adjustment of Deaf Adolecents

The relationships between social‐cognitive processes, language, and social‐behavioural skills were evaluated by analyzing the data of 68 deaf students, aged 14 to 2o years, who attended special education classes with vocational orientation. The social‐cognitive processes included Role Taking Ability (RTA) and Non‐Verbal Sensitivity (NVS). Language was evaluated by the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) and by a test of Emotional Vocabulary (EV). Social‐behavioural skills were assessed by Goldstein, Sparfkin, Greshaw and Klein's (1980) Social Skills Checklist. The social‐behavioural skills were used as indicators of social adjustment. The results revealed low performance in all the social‐cognitive abilities. Language played a major role in social adjustment. However, the availability of specific emotional vocabulary was not a better predictor of social adjustment than general language ability. Although RTA was associated with social adjustment, this association was related to language ability, and RTA did not add a unique contribution to the explanation of social adjustment. NVS emerged as an important, special and independent social‐cognitive ability. The results were discussed in relation to the function of language in social cognition.