Unlocking the potential of the Internet to improve college choice: a comparative case study of college-access Web tools     

Nathan Daun-Barnett  Dilip Das 《Journal of Marketing for HIGHER EDUCATION》2013,23(1):113-134

Students and parents rely on Web-based tools to navigate the college-choice process, yet little research has been done to understand this environment. While this shift has made the process easier to navigate for some, we contend that the move will grow an already large digital divide in the USA. We use Hossler and Gallagher's college-choice framework to examine the substance and function of three college-access Web portals. Our findings suggest these tools are likely to serve many students well in the process, but may exacerbate the digital divide with consequences for low-income students.  相似文献   

Functions of aggressive behavior and future functional impairment     

Emily J. Hart  Jamie M. Ostrov 《Early childhood research quarterly》2013

The present study investigated relations between proactive and reactive functions of physical and relational aggression and functional impairment across early childhood. It was hypothesized that reactive functions of aggression would be associated with functional impairment. Hypotheses with regard to proactive functions of aggression were exploratory. Participants were 36 children (22 girls) from a longitudinal study. At Time 1 (M = 50.31 months old, SD = 10.97), observations of aggressive behavior were collected during preschool free-play. At Time 2 (M = 73.33 months old, SD = 10.88), parent-report of functional impairment was collected. Reactive physical aggression was a significant and unique predictor of future impairment when controlling for gender and all other types of aggression. Implications of these findings are discussed from a developmental perspective.  相似文献   

Explaining urban–rural differences in educational achievement in Thailand: Evidence from PISA literacy data     

《Economics of Education Review》2013

Using the Thai PISA 2009 literacy test, this paper offers two contributions to the literature on the achievement gap between students in urban and rural areas. The first contribution relates to the estimation of the student-level education production function at different points along the achievement distributions. With the use of Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition, the second contribution demonstrates how much of the achievement differential between urban–rural students can be explained by unmeasured school characteristics. It has been found that the impact of student, family as well as school characteristics on student achievements vary along the test achievement distributions. Decompositions exercises at the mean find that about 45–48 percent of urban–rural achievement gaps are accounted for by the unmeasured characteristics of schools. The disaggregated decomposition exercise along the achievement percentile shows that these characteristics account for about 12–15 percent low-performing students and increase to about 61–69 percent for high-performing students.  相似文献   

Doctoral conceptual thresholds in cellular and molecular biology     

David F. Feldon  Christopher Rates  Chongning Sun 《International Journal of Science Education》2013,35(18):2574-2593

ABSTRACT

In the biological sciences, very little is known about the mechanisms by which doctoral students acquire the skills they need to become independent scientists. In the postsecondary biology education literature, identification of specific skills and effective methods for helping students to acquire them are limited to undergraduate education. To establish a foundation from which to investigate the developmental trajectory of biologists’ research skills, it is necessary to identify those skills which are integral to doctoral study and distinct from skills acquired earlier in students’ educational pathways. In this context, the current study engages the framework of threshold concepts to identify candidate skills that are both obstacles and significant opportunities for developing proficiency in conducting research. Such threshold concepts are typically characterised as transformative, integrative, irreversible, and challenging. The results from interviews and focus groups with current and former doctoral students in cellular and molecular biology suggest two such threshold concepts relevant to their subfield: the first is an ability to effectively engage primary research literature from the biological sciences in a way that is critical without dismissing the value of its contributions. The second is the ability to conceptualise appropriate control conditions necessary to design and interpret the results of experiments in an efficient and effective manner for research in the biological sciences as a discipline. Implications for prioritising and sequencing graduate training experiences are discussed on the basis of the identified thresholds.  相似文献   

Reaching Out to International Students: A Focus-Group Approach to Developing Web Resources and Services     

Ligaya Ganster 《College & Undergraduate Libraries》2013,20(4):368-384

Librarians at the State University of New York at Buffalo implemented the Resources for International Students Web guide to support library outreach to a multicultural and multilingual audience. A focus group helped librarians to understand the needs of new international students and tailor Web resources accordingly. In addition to creating awareness of international student cultural challenges, this article presents focus-group guidelines to assist in the planning process of library services and resources.  相似文献   

Social Influences on Terrestrial and Satellite Mobile-TV Adoption in Korea: Affiliation,Positive Self-Image,and Perceived Popularity     

Kyounghee Hazel Kwon  Bum Soo Chon 《媒体管理杂志》2013,15(2):49-60

Mobile TV is a representative product of media convergence. In South Korea, the diffusion of mobile TV has been in high gear, which provides an exemplary case study of mobile-TV adoption. The study examines the relation between the social influence, adopters' individual factors, and the adoption of the 2 different forms of mobile TV: terrestrial and satellite. Factor analysis identified 3 dimensions of social influences, defined respectively as “affiliation,” “positive self-display,” and “perceived popularity.” Results suggest that these 3 social influences differ in degree in relation to the adopters' demographic characteristics and innovativeness. Adoption of terrestrial or satellite mobile TV was predicted by social influence and, in particular, driven by the motivation to maintain a positive self-image. Because of the implications this may have on media management, the article calls for future research on the social construction of new media technology use to assess how individuals become susceptible to social influences and how social influences affect the diffusion of the technology.  相似文献   

Financing Higher Education in Kenya: Student perceptions and experiences     

Ngolovoi  Mary S. 《Tertiary Education and Management》2008,14(2):141-150

Tertiary Education and Management - In response to declining governmental funding, cost-sharing in higher education and dual-track tuition policies were introduced in the 1990s in Kenya. The...  相似文献   

The social field(s) of arts education today: living vulnerability in neo-liberal times     

Greg Dimitriadis  Emily Cole  Adrienne Costello 《Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education》2009,30(4):361-379

The arts are often seen as peripheral to the ‘real business’ of school and schooling. While this has been the case for some time now, the increasing pressures of high-stakes testing and ever-more draconian public funding schemes (particularly in the wake of 9/11) have created something of a ‘perfect storm’ for those working in the arts. Arts proponents today live and operate within a culture of scarcity, having to justify their increasingly marginalized vocations while competing for continually shrinking resources. The result is an often deep-bodied sense of vulnerability, one which saturates the social field (both micro and macro) of arts education in ways not often publicly acknowledged. In this article, I explore this notion of ‘vulnerability’ as a framework for understanding qualitative data which emerged from a three-year arts and education project I conducted in a large, northeast city in the USA beginning in 2003. In so doing, I look to open up a broader discussion about the oft-ignored intersection(s) between the material and aesthetic in arts and education – a discussion which is sober about the future of such work in times of economic scarcity and conservative retrenchment.  相似文献   

Is there “white flight” into private schools? New evidence from High School and Beyond     

Mingliang Li 《Economics of Education Review》2009

In the U.S., white parents may choose to send their children to private schools in response to the local concentration of minority schoolchildren, commonly referred to as “white flight”. This paper contributes to the existing literature by providing new evidence on white flight from the data set High School and Beyond (HSB). I find that a one-percentage-point increase in the county (metropolitan area, or MA) level minority share of school-age population increases the private schooling probability of white students by 0.2 (0.27) percentage points. White flight appears to be more sensitive to the concentration of black schoolchildren than to any other minority concentration. White families also appear to respond more strongly to the concentration of poor minorities than to non-poor minorities. Results also suggest substantial variation in the rate of white flight across different areas of the country. Finally, when minority shares are measured at the county level, there is some evidence of increasing rate of white flight from the local concentration of black schoolchildren as the black share increases.  相似文献   

Gravity-oriented microfluidic device for uniform and massive cell spheroid formation     

Lee K  Kim C  Young Yang J  Lee H  Ahn B  Xu L  Yoon Kang J  Oh KW 《Biomicrofluidics》2012,6(1):14114-141147

We propose a simple method for forming massive and uniform three-dimensional (3-D) cell spheroids in a multi-level structured microfluidic device by gravitational force. The concept of orienting the device vertically has allowed spheroid formation, long-term perfusion, and retrieval of the cultured spheroids by user-friendly standard pipetting. We have successfully formed, perfused, and retrieved uniform, size-controllable, well-conditioned spheroids of human embryonic kidney 293 cells (HEK 293) in the gravity-oriented microfluidic device. We expect the proposed method will be a useful tool to study in-vitro 3-D cell models for the proliferation, differentiation, and metabolism of embryoid bodies or tumours.  相似文献