Information research, practice, and education continue to invite and benefit from philosophy

It has become easy to make a case for the relevance, richness, and importance of philosophical thinking for information research and practice. [Introduction to a special issue

IMPACT: The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning. Volume 5, Issue 2, Summer 2016

Impact: The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning is a peer-reviewed, biannual online journal that publishes scholarly and creative non-fiction essays about the theory, practice and assessment of interdisciplinary education. Impact is produced by the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning at the College of General Studies, Boston University (www.bu.edu/cgs/citl)

Developing researchers in the arts and humanities: lessons from a pilot programme to develop discipline-specific research skills

Although increasing emphasis is placed on the provision of research training for doctoral students, much of the support currently available is generic in nature, rather than tailored to the student’s particular field(s) of study. In this paper, I briefly review UK graduate education for arts and humanities research students, and some of the ways in which the distinctive demands of their discipline(s) shape the research student experience and hence their development needs. I describe the design and delivery of a pilot programme of discipline-specific research skills development, co-ordinated by the Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies, which aims to address such needs; and I evaluate its success. I conclude with some recommendations for future practice; in particular, I argue that doctoral training provision is more effective when it involves a subject-specific approach in which practising academics from the discipline(s) play a significant role – both in terms of fostering an improved level of student engagement with the programme, and of delivering training and development opportunities which are tailored to the student’s particular context and needs

Forming collaborative parent-teacher relationships to increase parental involvement

This document reviews and summarizes the importance of parentteacher relationships and parental involvement in education. Both benefits and barriers will be discussed. Strategies and plans are provided as suggestions for teachers working with diverse populations. The importance of collaborative relationships and parental involvement are discussed for parents and teachers of children who are deaf or hard of hearing

Metacognition and Reflection by Interdisciplinary Experts: Insights from Cognitive Science and Philosophy

Interdisciplinary understanding requires integration of insights from different perspectives, yet it appears questionable whether disciplinary experts are well prepared for this. Indeed, psychological and cognitive scientific studies suggest that expertise can be disadvantageous because experts are often more biased than non-experts, for example, or fixed on certain approaches, and less flexible in novel situations or situations outside their domain of expertise. An explanation is that experts’ conscious and unconscious cognition and behavior depend upon their learning and acquisition of a set of mental representations or knowledge structures. Compared to beginners in a field, experts have assembled a much larger set of representations that are also more complex, facilitating fast and adequate perception in responding to relevant situations. This article argues how metacognition should be employed in order to mitigate such disadvantages of expertise: By metacognitively monitoring and regulating their own cognitive processes and representations, experts can prepare themselves for interdisciplinary understanding. Interdisciplinary collaboration is further facilitated by team metacognition about the team, tasks, process, goals, and representations developed in the team. Drawing attention to the need for metacognition, the article explains how philosophical reflection on the assumptions involved in different disciplinary perspectives must also be considered in a process complementary to metacognition and not completely overlapping with it. (Disciplinary assumptions are here understood as determining and constraining how the complex mental representations of experts are chunked and structured.) The article concludes with a brief reflection on how the process of Reflective Equilibrium should be added to the processes of metacognition and philosophical reflection in order for experts involved in interdisciplinary collaboration to reach a justifiable and coherent form of interdisciplinary integration. An Appendix of “Prompts or Questions for Metacognition” that can elicit metacognitive knowledge, monitoring, or regulation in individuals or teams is included at the end of the article

Multi-disciplinary research ethics review: is it feasible?

This paper reviews the currently rapid changes in research ethics governance affecting many kinds of social research. Arguments for and against single‐discipline and multidisciplinary research ethics committees will be considered, with examples of how medical and social research ethics can inform one another. We conclude that the use of multidisciplinary research ethics committees, guidance and governance can be an effective and necessary part of social research methodology

For-Profit Charter Schools and Threats to the Publicness of Public Schools

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A lesson learned in time: Advice shared by experienced sport psychologists

Through experience, sport psychologists will learn countless valuable lessons. Some lessons, however, are likely to stand out vividly to a psychologist because they made a valuable difference to how they practise. The present project focuses on these outstanding lessons. In essence, sport psychologists who had been practising for between 11 and 28 years (mean ± SD = 19 ± 5) were asked to share their most valuable advice about any aspect of sport psychology client work with other sport psychologists. This publication presents participants' full responses