Social media in the curriculum and co-curriculum: pre-service teachers and their collegiate peers

2013 Fall.Includes bibliographical references.Although use of social media by students has been shown to be nearly ubiquitous, many K-12 school systems have banned its use on their campuses or use between their teachers and students. In contrast, many collegiate faculty have utilized social media in their teaching. Social media has been shown to assist faculty in engaging with students, helping students engage with content outside of class and sound implementation into the curriculum has been show to have positive educational impacts. Data from a sample of two thousand and fifty-six college students across two land-grant institutions is compared between pre-service teachers and their collegiate peers. Pre-service teachers reported using Twitter in the curriculum more, were more inspired by the use of social media use by their faculty, used social media more on their own for educational purposes and had a stronger belief that social media can be used for educationally relevant purposes than their collegiate peers

Fitting Farm Safety into Risk Communications Teaching, Research and Practice

New safety challenges are emerging as agriculture evolves within the complexity of serving a growing world population. The nation’s most hazardous industry is struggling to provide safe working environments in the face of demographic changes in the agricultural work force, new technologies, new kinds of enterprises, pushback against regulation, and other forces. Such changes introduce new forms of occupational risk and create greater need for appropriate safety communications. This study examined potentials for improving engagement of the agricultural media, which serve as primary information channels for farmers. Those who teach agricultural communications are key gatekeepers in preparing skilled professional agricultural journalists and other agricultural communicators. Therefore, the study focused on potentials for strengthening skills in farm safety communications through teaching programs in agricultural journalism and communications. The second and related purpose involved advancing understanding of conceptual linkages between farm safety communications and risk communications, using a safety-oriented framework of risk communications. A mixed methods research design involved quantitative and qualitative approaches using an online survey among faculty representatives in 23 agricultural communications programs at universities throughout the nation. Responses identified encouraging potentials and useful direction for integrating farm safety into agricultural communications courses. Findings also shed helpful light on conceptual linkages between risk communications and a seemingly “lost cousin” — farm safety communications. They pointed to new potentials for agricultural communications teaching and scholarship in strengthening connections between theory and practice in risk communications (including farm safety communications) related to agriculture

The influence of personal characteristics on drop out from therapy

The influence of certain personality characteristics (i.e., hostility, anxiety, satisfaction with life, and self-esteem) on drop out from therapy was examined. Participants of this study consisted of individuals who sought services from the Iowa State University Marriage and Family Therapy Clinic for individual, couples, or family therapy. A total of 501 individuals began therapy in the years between 2000 and 2004; of these, 91 were reported by the respective therapists to be drop outs. Prior to the initial therapy session, all clients signed release forms indicating their assessment materials may be used for future research. Data from the Brief Symptom Inventory, Satisfaction with Life Scale, and Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale were examined, and hypotheses were tested using chi-square tests for independence and discriminant analyses. Although the previously mentioned personality characteristics were found to have no association with likelihood to drop out from therapy, several demographic variables were found to have a statistically significant association (i.e., modality of treatment, marital status, occupation, income, and previous therapy experience.) These findings indicate that regardless of a client\u27s disposition at the onset of therapy, he or she is not more likely to drop out of treatment based on these characteristics alone

Design of Diverging Stacked Bar Charts for Likert Scales and Other Applications

Rating scales, such as Likert scales, are very common in marketing research, customer satisfaction studies, psychometrics, opinion surveys, population studies, and numerous other fields. We recommend diverging stacked bar charts as the primary graphical display technique for Likert and related scales. We also show other applications where diverging stacked bar charts are useful. Many examples of plots of Likert scales are given. We discuss the perceptual and programming issues in constructing these graphs. We present two implementations for diverging stacked bar charts. Most examples in this paper were drawn with the likert function included in the HH package in R. We also have a dashboard in Tableau