How Ten Stories About Immigrant Leaders Can Move a Community

This article discusses the Partnership between GCIR, the Endowment for Health, and the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation. These three agencies worked together to compile profiles of immigrant and refugee leaders. These profiles were mailed to 3,500 board members, donors, and perspective donors. The results of the distribution of this information are examined

Quality assessment by science teachers: Five focus areas

In order to teach science well, science teachers need to know what to focus on in order to ensure their assessment of student learning is meaningful and useful for the students’ on going learning and development. The diversity and range of content and skills within the subject of science mean that the assessment capabilities required by science teachers are wide ranging and complex, requiring specialist knowledge and skills in the assessment of science learning as part of the teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). Based on a review of the literature this paper proposes a framework for quality assessment in science which focuses on five areas: teaching, students, evidence of learning, future decision-making and impact. This paper advocates a concurrent consideration of all five areas of the framework to provide a substantial, rich, broad, rigorous quality assessment approach on which teachers and students can base teaching and learning

Using electronic resources to support dialogue in undergraduate small‐group teaching: The ASTER project

Learning through dialogue is an important element of UK higher education, supported by tutorial, seminar and workshop classes. Since 1998, the ASTER project has been exploring how Information and Communication Technologies support learning in small groups (http://cti‐psy.york.acuk/aster/). Electronic resources are developed and used in courses to support a wide range of learning needs, from delivery of content to interactive teaching tools and assessment. The manner in which they are integrated into a course dictates the extent to which they support and extend learning. The ASTER survey has identified the use of a range of new technologies to support learning through dialogue in a variety of contexts. Many of the uses are common across disciplines, though we have observed some differences in the range of tools used, and how they are implemented in and beyond the classroom. These differences are partly determined by the subject content of resources, and by the activities that ICT tools support. Another factor influencing this variation seems to be traditions of academic discourse. The findings suggest that educational technology needs to support both generic education practice, and the special needs of particular disciplines

[Review of] Virgil Suarez. Welcome to the Oasis and Other Stories

If one is seeking a text to help expand the multicultural approach in a course on contemporary fiction or literature in general, a new collection of short stories by Virgil Suarez may be a successful addition. Welcome to the Oasis and Other Stories has the virtues of compactness in 124 pages and of variety in the length of the six works included, as well as a reasonable cost. An instructor would have the option of including the entire volume in her syllabus, which would provide an assignment easily encompassed in one or two class meetings. Or she could tuck in any one of the tales, ranging from fifty-four to eight large-print pages, wherever they might fit the design of the course