A Phenomenological Study Of The Lived Experience Of Secondary World Language Teachers Who Use Proficiency-Based Rubrics For Assessment

The purpose of this qualitative transcendental phenomenological study was to explore the lived experience of Massachusetts public secondary (middle school/high school) world language teachers who utilized the ACTFL proficiency-based rubrics to evaluate student performance environments (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, 2012). This study was guided by the research question, “What are the lived experiences of secondary world language teachers who used Proficiency-Based Rubrics to evaluate student performance?” Husserl’s (1964) transcendental phenomenology served as the study’s conceptual framework, and Andrade and Brookhart’s (2020) classroom assessment theory served as the theoretical framework. Semi structured interviews were used to gather data from eight participants. The emergent themes which evolved from this data were that performance feedback focuses on students’ individual growth, that environment dictates the level of adherence to the ACFTL rubrics, and that the proficiency-based classroom creates a safer and more collaborative learning environment. The findings of the study suggest that there was inconsistent implementation and usage of the ACTFL proficiency-based rubrics by participants and that only some of the expected changes to instruction occurred as a result of the adoption of these rubrics

A Charisma Model of Telepathic Communication

This paper opened by making some general criticisms of the state of parapsychological research: that it suffered from a lack of external validity and from uncritical acceptance of a flawed paradigm. The charisma model was offered as an attempt to rectify these problems. It allows for laboratory experiments to be designed which closely approximate genuine human interactions by shifting the paradigm for telepathy from that of energy transfers to one of communication events

Civilian Immunity and the Rebuttable Presumption of Innocence

Terrorist is a word that at once vilifies and justifies, serving the same function in today\u27s politics and popular imagination as was served by the term Nazi a half century ago, or communist thereafter, or witch in our colonial days, in that it is always, or even necessarily, wrong. Few appellations today are as effective to ostracize a person, movement, or organization from civilized company, and an astonishing array of actions and reactions can be fully warranted when having as their intent a response to the mere threat -- much less an actual act -- of terrorism. This Essay does not defend terrorism, or argue, as others have done, that in specific circumstances terrorism can be morally justified. It argues instead that many criminally violent acts are mistakenly labeled terrorism because the innocent victims, the sine qua non to find prototypical terrorism, were not innocent in a required sense. From this analysis the article seeks to distinguish the term\u27s use as a tool of political propaganda from its utility as a category of moral and social philosophy. The analysis begins with a description of the phenomenological impact upon the American psyche from terrorist acts. I use that foundation to identify the elements that render an act identifiable as terrorism, particularly the presumed innocence of the targeted victims. Having isolated the elements of terrorist acts that underlie their psychological impacts, I will be in a better position to critically reexamine the events of 9/11, and to suggest what duties this understanding places upon citizens of a participatory democracy, in which each person accrues collective responsibility for acts of its representative government

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Faculty and Access Services Librarian James Donovan provides a cost-conscious guide for online legal resources

Leave the Books on the Shelves: Library Space as Intrinsic Facilitator of the Reading Experience

Library literature frequently reports projects to remove print collections and replace them with other amenities for patrons. This project challenges the untested assumption that the physical library itself serves no useful function to users unless they are actively consulting books from the shelves. The alternative hypothesis is that readers benefit from the mere act of studying while in a book-rich environment.To test this possibility, ten subjects completed SAT-style reading comprehension tests in both a traditional library environment, and a renovated chapel that strongly resembles library space except for lacking books. Results provide a reasonable basis to support an expectation that readers perform better on reading comprehension tasks performed in book-rich environments