(2007). Federal Civil Rights Policy and Mental Health Treatment Access for Persons with Limited English Proficiency. American Psychologist, v62 n2 p109-117 Feb-Mar. As noted in the supplement to the U.S. Surgeon General's report on mental health (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2001), overcoming language access barriers associated with limited English proficiency (LEP) should help to eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in mental health care access and quality. Federal policy requires remedial action to overcome language barriers: Under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Medicaid and other federally funded programs must provide assistance to LEP persons. Some state-level public and mental health authorities have responded by instituting "threshold language" policies. The history and terms of federal civil rights policy, and of threshold-language-policy-inspired initiatives, should be understood by everyone concerned with overcoming ethnic disparities in mental health services use. Concerned parties should promote implementation of required measures for language assistance and help to evaluate their… [Direct]
(2011). Transforming High Schools: Performance Systems for Powerful Teaching. Policy Brief. Alliance for Excellent Education This policy brief examines standards-based approaches that hold promise for shaping a common vision of skilled teaching commensurate with the national goal of preparing all students for college and careers. Numerous studies confirm that teachers are the most significant school-based factor in improving student achievement, particularly for the most challenging students. Yet, while the current mantra is that "teachers make the difference", John Hattie, professor of education and director of the Visible Learning Labs at the University of Auckland, contends that this notion is not quite right. "Not all teachers are effective, not all are experts, and not all teachers have powerful effects on students… The important consideration is the ways that teachers differ in their influence on student achievement–what it is that makes the most difference?" "Some" teachers who undertake certain teaching acts with appropriately challenging curricula while also… [PDF]
(2011). What Women Want: (Among Other Things) Quality Art. Journal of Aesthetic Education, v45 n3 p88-102 Fall. Toward the end of \Of the Standard of Taste,\ Hume summarizes what it means to be \a true judge in the finer arts.\ He says: \Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character.\ Hume is essentially right about what it means to be a good critic. Good critics need strong cognitive skills to develop sound arguments. They need to be perspicacious in discerning the finer sensuous details in artworks. They need to be thoroughly practiced in the art of their choice. They need a broad knowledge of their field in order to make salient and significant comparisons, which, in turn, will place their subject matter in its proper thematic and historical contexts. And finally, perhaps most difficult of all, they need to perform their acts of criticism, if not with an innocent eye, at least as free as possible from those prejudices that would distort or deform the object of… [Direct]
(2011). LdShake: Learning Design Solutions Sharing and Co-Edition. Computers & Education, v57 n4 p2249-2260 Dec. Two important challenges that teachers are currently facing are the sharing and the collaborative authoring of their learning design solutions, such as didactical units and learning materials. On the one hand, there are tools that can be used for the creation of design solutions and only some of them facilitate the co-edition. However, they do not incorporate mechanisms that support the sharing of the designs between teachers. On the other hand, there are tools that serve as repositories of educational resources but they do not enable the authoring of the designs. In this paper we present LdShake, a web tool whose novelty is focused on the combined support for the social sharing and co-edition of learning design solutions within communities of teachers. Teachers can create and share learning designs with other teachers using different access rights so that they can read, comment or co-edit the designs. Therefore, each design solution is associated to a group of teachers able to work… [Direct]
(2010). Reduction in Public Funding for Postsecondary Education in Colorado from 1970 to 2010: A Study Documenting Change and the Resulting Shift from Public to Private Good. ProQuest LLC, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. This study examines and chronicles the change in public funding for postsecondary education in Colorado from 1970 to 2010. Colorado was ranked sixth among states in per capita funding for public higher education in 1970 and declined to 48th in 2010. The study analyzed state appropriations over this time period in five broad categories of spending: K-12 education, health and human services, courts and criminal justice, higher education, and the category entitled "other" combining all remaining functions of state government. Findings demonstrate that since 1970, after adjusting for inflation, the total state general fund budget appropriations have increased by 231%, K-12 appropriations increased by 314%, health and human services increased by 662%, the courts and criminal justice program increased by 712%. Public higher education general fund appropriations increased 8.9% over this time period and other parts of state government declined by 55%. Since 1970, higher… [Direct]
(2011). The Local Beneath the National and Global – Institutional Education, Credentialed Natural Resource Management (NRM) and Rural Community (Un) Sustainability. Education in Rural Australia, v21 n2 p55-70. The implementation of strategies for national and global outcomes has in some instances left rural community resources and practices devalued and disturbed and rural people demoralised with the result that local community sustainability has been compromised. Formal education in Australia is about many things, but is rarely sympathetic towards rural community sustainability beyond providing specific human resources to meet difficult to fill industry and service needs. The move from a state to a national curriculum for high school students and the nationalizing of Vocational Education Training (VET) credentials reflects a commitment by governments to deliver educational "equity and excellence", for "Australian sustainability" and "the global agenda for change". Education is in practice focused on the preparation of students for the attainment of credentials to conform to national or even regional industry and service delivery needs, but is not often… [Direct]
(2017). The Effects of Primacy on Rater Cognition: An Eye-Tracking Study. ProQuest LLC, Ph.D. Dissertation, Michigan State University. Rater scoring has an impact on writing test reliability and validity. Thus, there has been a continued call for researchers to investigate issues related to rating (Crusan, 2015). Investigating the scoring process and understanding how raters arrive at particular scores are critical "because the score is ultimately what will be used in making decisions and inferences about writers" (Weigle, 2002, p. 108). In the current study I answer the call for continued research on rating processes by investigating rater cognition in the context of rubric use in writing assessment. This type of research is especially important for rater training and rubric development because, despite efforts to guide raters to a common understanding of the rubric criteria and to help raters converge on a common understanding of scoring bands, variance in rater scoring and rater behavior persists. The goal is not to eliminate the variance (which can't be done when using human raters), rather the goal is… [Direct]
(2009). Driving American Economic Renewal. New England Journal of Higher Education, v24 n1 p28 Sum. Surmounting a national–indeed global–recession in the wake of war is not new to America or its leaders. Born out of one of the nation's darkest moments of the 20th century were bold initiatives to empower those who served their country as well as all who sought to enter the American middle class. The GI Bill of Rights was one such measure, as was the remarkable expansion of publicly financed postsecondary education systems throughout the U.S. The unfolding story of the current recession will again include the need to increase the educational attainment of the nation's citizens as a core theme. The dismantling and restructuring of the domestic automakers is symbolic; the time for America to compete strictly on brawn has faded. America must instead compete on talent nurtured as part of a systematic and public policy-driven mandate to "grow" human capital. As was true after World War II, it is institutions of the knowledge economy–the colleges and universities–that will… [PDF] [Direct]
(2006). Amygdala Activation during Masked Presentation of Emotional Faces Predicts Conscious Detection of Threat-Related Faces. Brain and Cognition, v61 n3 p243-248 Aug. It has been argued that critical functions of the human amygdala are to modulate the moment-to-moment vigilance level and to enhance the processing and the consolidation of memories of emotionally arousing material. In this functional magnetic resonance study, pictures of human faces bearing fearful, angry, and happy expressions were presented to nine healthy volunteers using a backward masking procedure based on neutral facial expression. Activation of the left and right amygdala in response to the masked fearful faces (compared to neutral faces) was significantly correlated with the number of fearful faces detected. In addition, right but not left amygdala activation in response to the masked angry faces was significantly related to the number of angry faces detected. The present findings underscore the role of the amygdala in the detection and consolidation of memory for marginally perceptible threatening facial expression…. [Direct]
(2010). Generative Models of Disfluency. ProQuest LLC, Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Minnesota. This thesis describes a generative model for representing disfluent phenomena in human speech. This model makes use of observed syntactic structure present in disfluent speech, and uses a right-corner transform on syntax trees to model this structure in a very natural way. Specifically, the phenomenon of speech repair is modeled by explicitly modeling the partially completed constituent structure, building up phrasal structure as it is read in, and allowing incomplete constituents as part of the final structure of an utterance. This model is then implemented in a working system for parsing transcribed text. This system maps transformed syntax trees to a hierarchical time-series model, which is able to parse in linear time by implementing a fixed-depth stack. The results of this system dramatically improve parsing and repair detection over standard baselines, and are approaching the performance of models that are not constrained by incremental processing and psycholinguistic… [Direct]
(1998). The Philosophy of Language Rights. Language Sciences, v20 n1 p45-54 Jan. Explores the moral and political issues involved in the concept of language rights. Examines language diversity as well as insights into the relationship among language, human existence, and culture; elaborates the concept of language rights; and discusses the moral and political philosophy of language rights. (34 references) (Author/CK)…
(2011). Evolution/Creationism Controversy: Analysis of Past and Current Policies in Public Schools and the Practice of Allowing Students to Opt out of Learning Evolution Concepts. ProQuest LLC, Ed.D. Dissertation, University of South Florida. Recent anti-evolution legislation, in the form of Academic Freedom bills, has been introduced in many state legislatures over the last three years. The language in the proposed Academic Freedom bills may allow different interpretations of what can be taught in the science classrooms, and possibly spur parents to take advantage of their perceived parental rights to request their child be opted-out of class when the scientific theory of evolution is taught. Five research questions guided the analysis of participant responses to questions and perception statements focusing on secondary school administrators' actions, perceptions, and awareness as they relate to their decision to allow or not allow a student to opt out of academics, specifically evolution, through the collection of data using a web-based survey. Opt out policies are typically invoked to excuse students from activities to which they or their parents may have religious objections (Scott & Branch, 2008). Florida… [Direct]
(2010). The Educational Effectiveness of Historically Black Colleges and Universities: A Briefing before the United States Commission on Civil Rights Held in Washington, D.C. Briefing Report. US Commission on Civil Rights The Black College and University Act defined an historically black college and university (HBCU) as one that existed before 1964 with a historic and contemporary mission of educating blacks while being open to all. An HBCU must either have earned accreditation from a nationally recognized accrediting agency or association or be making reasonable progress toward accreditation. Currently, 103 HBCUs are located mainly in the Southeastern United States, the District of Columbia, and the Virgin Islands. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights conducted a briefing on May 5, 2006, to assess the educational effectiveness of HBCUs. The Commission invited five distinguished panelists to discuss the issue: Louis W. Sullivan, founding dean and first president of Morehouse School of Medicine, as well as a presidential advisor and former cabinet secretary; Earl S. Richardson, president of Morgan State University and a former presidential advisor on Historically Black Colleges and Universities; Jamie… [PDF]
(1999). A Civil Rights Update: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Journal of Intergroup Relations, v25 n4 p58-63 Win 1998-1999. Describes issues currently faced by the U.S. Office for Civil Rights. These include: (1) managed care; (2) implementation of nondiscrimination requirements in adoption and foster care; (3) acquired immune deficiency syndrome issues; (4) national origin nondiscrimination; (5) welfare-reform concerns; (6) children's health insurance; and (7) compliance issues. (SLD)…
(2010). An Introduction to Multicultural Education: From Theory to Practice. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. This book provides a balance between the principles and practice of multicultural education in the K-12 classroom, presenting multicultural education as a learner-centered pedagogy. It projects foundational principles and practices that make multicultural education relevant and appealing, while eliminating ideas and practices that produce negative reactions and outcomes. It utilizes historical data to make the case for equity pedagogy, going further than other books on this topic to provide practical steps and approaches to implementing multicultural education. The person and cultural identity of the teacher is addressed in-depth. The person and nature of the learner and the learning process are addressed as foundational ideas behind equity pedagogy. Such multicultural education topics as gender equity, universal access, religious pluralism, and bilingualism (or multilingualism) are all addressed with much detail. This book provides pre-service and in-service teachers with the… [Direct]