Peer-Mediated Tootling with a Standardized Form and a Mystery Motivator in High School Classrooms

Peer-mediated tootling with a standardized procedure was implemented along with a mystery motivator component to determine the effects on academically engaged and disruptive behavior in three general education high school classrooms. The intervention used an A/B/A/B design across all classrooms. The goal of the study was to determine if these components would increase academically engaged behavior and decrease disruptive behavior. Students were trained on tootling procedures with a standardized format, which included reporting on peers’ positive, prosocial behavior on a premade tootling slip with various behaviors that they could select as being observed, reading five random slips aloud, totaling the number of slips to determine if the class reached its goal, and then drawing out of the chance envelope to determine if the class earned the reward for the day. As opposed to traditional tootling where a teacher facilitates the components of the intervention, a student appointed interventionist fulfilled the role instead. The results indicated that increases in academically engaged behavior and decreases in disruptive behavior were evident in two of the classrooms, while the third classroom had inconclusive data during the withdrawal and re-implementation phases. Social validity measures indicated acceptability in effectiveness and utility by the teachers and acceptability by the students. Overall, this study provides evidence for the use of peer-mediated standardized tootling in conjunction with a mystery motivator in high school classrooms; however, more research is needed to determine which, if any, of these additional components are necessary for future tootling studies

Natural Resources / Graduate Students / Wright & Andrews / Cornell University / 2013

This case study describes a 6 week for credit Data Information Literacy course taught at Cornell University for students in Natural Resources. Subject covered include: data management, data organization, data analysis and visualization, data sharing, and data quality and documentation. Materials include a book chapter describing the case study, a rubric for developing a data management plan, a class exercise in finding and evaluating data repositories, and the evaluation form used for the course

Introduction : contemporary orientations in African cultural studies

Abstract: This paper offers a glimpse of work generated by the 2014 John Douglas Taylor conference on ‘Contemporary Orientations in African Cultural Studies’. The conference generated a number of inquiries into the time and place of contemporary African cultural work, many of which theorized beyond the frameworks that postcolonial and globalization studies frequently offer. Under the shifting paradigms of cultural studies, the work of this conference, as well as the current project, moves away from reading the African everyday as exclusively a construction out of a series of colonial histories and relationalities, or global cultural flows. In line with Jean and John Comaroffs’ Theory From the South, this issue is instead dedicated to relocating the global centres from which cultural studies emanates and positing African work’s challenge to normative zones of cultural critique. ‘Contemporary orientations’ attempts to relocate the time and space of critique in African studies, but it resists the gesture to posit a stable trajectory through which time moves. Rather, the terms of the contemporary and the orientation depend on how they are read in relation to a multitude of other temporalities, orientations, and objects