Capturing the Visitor Profile for a Personalized Mobile Museum Experience: an Indirect Approach

An increasing number of museums and cultural institutions around the world use personalized, mostly mobile, museum guides to enhance visitor experiences. However since a typical museum visit may last a few minutes and visitors might only visit once, the personalization processes need to be quick and efficient, ensuring the engagement of the visitor. In this paper we investigate the use of indirect profiling methods through a visitor quiz, in order to provide the visitor with specific museum content. Building on our experience of a first study aimed at the design, implementation and user testing of a short quiz version at the Acropolis Museum, a second parallel study was devised. This paper introduces this research, which collected and analyzed data from two environments: the Acropolis Museum and social media (i.e. Facebook). Key profiling issues are identified, results are presented, and guidelines towards a generalized approach for the profiling needs of cultural institutions are discussed

Elementary Teacher Knowledge of and Practices for Teaching Reading to African American Students

State standardized tests results indicated that between 2012 and 2016, fewer African American students at a rural, Title I elementary school met state standards in reading compared with other racial/ethnic groups of students. A gap in practice existed because the school and district had not conducted studies to understand teacher knowledge and practice as they related to teaching reading to African American students. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to address the problem and gap in practice by exploring elementary teacher knowledge and understanding of the learning needs in reading among African American students. Tomlinson\u27s theory of differentiated instruction served as the conceptual framework for this study. Interview data were analyzed from 10 experienced elementary teachers using 2-cycle provisional coding and pattern coding, which revealed the themes that constituted the findings of my study: (a) teachers understanding of factors that contribute to underachievement in reading of some African American students, (b) professional development and preparation of teachers for teaching African American students, (c) classroom pedagogy for teaching African American students, (d) challenges that teachers encounter when teaching reading to African American students, and (e) resources and supports that teachers perceive as necessary for teaching reading to African American students. The findings indicated that elementary teachers would benefit from participating in professional development, which would help them better teach reading to African American students. The study and resulting project may affect local positive social change by increasing teacher knowledge about the learning needs in reading among African American students, leading to an eventual increase in reading achievement among African American students at the study school

Adolescent Literacy and the Achievement Gap: What Do We Know and Where Do We Go From Here?

Reviews research and program initiatives focused on improving adolescent academic achievement by targeting literacy. Provides ideas for collaboration and coordination of funding efforts to improve the literacy achievement of under-performing adolescents