Agile Instructional Design for Learning: A Case Example of Agile Master Course (AMC) Development

Today’s higher education institutions need to “produce quality and relevant learning materials, capable of being reused and adapted in different learning situations” (Arimoto & Barroca, 2015). Agile principles and practices are being used by instructional design teams and are geared toward being adaptive and creative.https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/btp_expo/1008/thumbnail.jp

Rural children’s work and school education in the context of rapid economic growth in South Korea

This paper explores how children’s work, in its broadest sense, and the related values and attitudes concerning childhood, have evolved in the context of rapid economic growth in South Korea. It discusses how ideas about children’s main activities, and their status and relationships within the family, have changed and how children’s roles and responsibilities are seen by members of different generations. It interrogates the changing ideas of work in contemporary children’s lives and presents data from a relatively under-researched part of the world

The effects of an intensive training and feedback program on investigative interviews of children

In the present study, we assessed the effectiveness of an extensive training and feedback program with investigative interviewers of child victims of alleged abuse and neglect in a large Canadian city. Twelve investigative interviewers participated in a joint training initiative that lasted eight months and involved classroom components and extensive weekly verbal and written feedback. Interviewers were significantly more likely to use open-ended prompts and elicited more information from children with open-ended prompts following training. These differences were especially prominent following a subsequent ‘refresher’ training session. No negative effects of training were observed. Clear evidence was found of the benefits of an intensive training and feedback program across a wide variety of investigative interviews with children. Although previous research has found benefits of training with interviewers of child sexual assault victims, the current study extends these findings to a wide range of allegations and maltreatment contexts

Using Spaced Learning Principles to Translate Knowledge into Behavior: Evidence from Investigative Interviews of Alleged Child Abuse Victims

The present study assessed the progress of 13 investigative interviewers (child protection workers and police officers) before, during, and after an intensive training program (n = 132 interviews). Training began with a 2-day workshop covering the principles of child development and child-friendly interviewing. Interviewers then submitted interviews on a bi-weekly basis to which they received written and verbal feedback over an 8-month period. A refresher session took place two months into training. Interestingly, improvements were observed only after the refresher session. Interviews conducted post-refresher training contained proportionally more open-ended questions, more child details in response to open-ended questions, and proportionally fewer closed questions than interviews conducted prior to training and in the first half of the training program. The need for ‘spaced learning’ may underlie why so many training programs have had little effect on practice

Children’s episodic and generic reports of alleged abuse

With the present data, we explored the relations between the language of interviewer questions, children’s reports, and case and child characteristics in forensic interviews. Results clearly indicated that the type of questions posed by interviewers – either probing generic or episodic features of an event – was related to the specificity of information reported by children. Further, interviewers appeared to adjust their questioning strategies based on the frequency of the alleged abuse. Children alleging single instances of abuse were asked more episodic questions than those alleging multiple abuses. In contrast, children alleging multiple incidents of abuse were asked a greater proportion of generic questions. Given that investigators often seek forensically-relevant episodic information, it is recommended that training for investigators focus on recognition of prompt selection tendencies and developing strategies for posing non-suggestive, episodically focused questions

A Compendium of Core Lexicon Checklists

Core Lexicon (CoreLex) is a relatively new approach assessing lexical use in discourse. CoreLex examines the specific lexical items used to tell a story, or how typical lexical items are compared with a normative sample. This method has great potential for clinical utilization because CoreLex measures are fast, easy to administer, and correlate with microlinguistic and macrolinguistic discourse measures. The purpose of this article is to provide clinicians with a centralized resource for currently available CoreLex checklists, including information regarding development, norms, and guidelines for use

The use of paraphrasing in investigative interviews

Objective Young children’s descriptions of maltreatment are often sparse thus creating the need for techniques that elicit lengthier accounts. One technique that can be used by interviewers in an attempt to increase children’s reports is ‘paraphrasing’, or repeating information children have disclosed. Although we currently have a general understanding of how paraphrasing may influence children’s reports, we do not have a clear description of how paraphrasing is actually used in the field. Method The present study assessed the use of paraphrasing in 125 interviews of children aged 4 to 16 years conducted by police officers and social workers. All interviewer prompts were coded into four different categories of paraphrasing. All children’s reports were coded for the number of details in response to each paraphrasing statement. Results ‘Expansion paraphrasing’ (e.g., “you said he hit you. Tell me more about when he hit you”) was used significantly more often and elicited significantly more details, while ‘yes/no paraphrasing’ (e.g., “he hit you?”) resulted in shorter descriptions from children, compared to other paraphrasing styles. Further, interviewers more often distorted children’s words when using yes/no paraphrasing, and children rarely corrected interviewers when they paraphrased inaccurately. Conclusions and Practical Implications Investigative interviewers in this sample frequently used paraphrasing with children of all ages and, though children’s responses differed following the various styles of paraphrasing, the effects did not differ by the age of the child witness. The results suggest that paraphrasing affects the quality of statements by child witnesses. Implications for investigative interviewers will be discussed and recommendations offered for easy ways to use paraphrasing to increase the descriptiveness of children’s reports of their experiences

An Unfinished Canvas: Teacher Preparation, Instructional Delivery, and Professional Development in the Arts

Based on surveys, interviews, and secondary data analyses, identifies deficiencies in teacher preparation, instruction, and development in the arts in California, and recommends minimum training requirements and support for professional development

A structural VAR model of the New Zealand business cycle

This paper develops a new open economy structural VAR model of the New Zealand economy. The model adopts techniques introduced by Cushman and Zha (1997) and Dungey and Pagan (2000) to identify international and domestic shocks and dynamic responses to these shocks in a small open economy. The international variables are block exogenous and the model includes restrictions on contemporaneous and lagged variables. Novel features include the introduction of an expanded set of domestic financial variables not captured in previous New Zealand VAR models, the use of a forward looking Taylor Rule to identify monetary policy, and the introduction of a climate variable to capture the impact of climatic conditions on the business cycle. Key results to emerge are the significant influence of international variables on the New Zealand business cycle, the importance of separately identifying import price and export price shocks, and the significant influence of climate.Open economy; structural VAR models; business cycles; climate; commodity prices; international linkages; financial conditions.

Weaving Open Dialogue Using Canada’s Open Science Roadmap Framework

Open science (OS) as a movement has transformative potential in making the process of scientific research transparent and collaborative as well as the outputs freely accessible to all in society. However, these opportunities and challenges are subject to biases and entrenched in power disparities. In addition, the very broad nature of open science also invokes challenges in having meaningful discussions. In 2020, the Government of Canada unveiled a national framework, Roadmap to Open Science, which provided overarching principles and recommendations to allow federal science to be open to all. The University of Toronto (U of T) used this national open science framework to guide an international group of researchers and librarians to discuss open science in practical terms and engage the audience in being part of the dialogue. The five high-level principles of People, Transparency, Inclusiveness, Collaboration, and Sustainability were used as the structure in order to guide discussions into the current state of open science practices on-the-ground in academia. The University of Toronto Library (UTL) partnered with the Centre for Research & Innovation Support (CRIS) to host engaging conversations in a series of five virtual panels, Open Science: Following the Roadmap for Research, held in November 2021. The panelists consisted of librarians, faculty, and researchers from local, national as well as international institutions and organizations. Two core considerations on developing the make-up of the panels were to ensure diversity amongst panelists and have librarians included in every panel. The conversations were thought-provoking and touched-on aspects such as who is included and excluded in the various stages in research, implications of funding and control, infrastructure, power dynamics, and preservation of information. This paper will discuss the open science panel series and common themes which emerged from the conversations