A structural model of future-oriented climate change optimism in science education: PISA evidence from countries with top Environmental Protection Index

The purpose of this study is to examine the predictive effects of epistemological beliefs about science and informal reading of scientific texts on students’ future-oriented optimism on the issue of climate change. Future-oriented climate change optimism is defined as encompassing hope and anticipation about the climate future. To identify the relationships among variables, structural equation modelling was conducted on the PISA dataset on 15-year-old students from Denmark, the UK and Finland which have the top three Environmental Protection Index. Students of all three countries demonstrated a consistently low optimism about the future of climate change. Also, the findings indicated that students’ epistemological beliefs about science had a significantly negative predicting effect on their future-oriented climate change optimism across all three countries, while their informal reading of scientific texts had a significantly positive predictive effect on their future-oriented climate change optimism in Denmark and the UK. Across all three countries, 15-year-old students’ awareness of the issue of climate change plays a significantly negative mediating role between their epistemological beliefs about science and their optimism in the future climate, as well as their informal reading of scientific texts and their optimism in the future climate. This calls for a new curricular environmental-science education model that addresses how students’ informal science reading and epistemological beliefs about science can address future-oriented climate change optimism which might in turn impact young people’s action competence to address the issues of climate change

Communicating science in the COVID-19 news in the UK during Omicron waves: exploring representations of nature of science with epistemic network analysis

News media plays a vital role in communicating scientific evidence to the public during the COVID-19 pandemic. Such communication is important for convincing the public to follow social distancing guidelines and to respond to health campaigns such as vaccination programmes. However, newspapers were criticised that they focus on the socio-political perspective of science, without explaining the nature of scientific works behind the government’s decisions. This paper examines the connections of the nature of science categories in the COVID-19 era by four local newspapers in the United Kingdom between November 2021 to February 2022. Nature of science refers to different aspects of how science works such as aims, values, methods and social institutions of science. Considering the news media may mediate public information and perception of scientific stories, it is relevant to ask how the various British newspapers covered aspects of science during the pandemic. In the period explored, Omicron variant was initially a variant of concern, and an increasing number of scientific evidence showed that the less severity of this variant might move the country from pandemic to endemic. We explored how news articles communicate public health information by addressing how science works during the period when Omicron variants surge. A novel discourse analysis approach, epistemic network analysis is used to characterise the frequency of connections of categories of the nature of science. The connection between political factors and the professional activities of scientists, as well as that with scientific practices are more apparent in left-populated and centralist outlets than in right-populated news outlets. Among four news outlets across the political spectrum, a left-populated newspaper, the Guardian, is not consistent in representing relations of different aspects of the nature of scientific works across different stages of the public health crisis. Inconsistency of addressing aspects of scientific works and a downplay of the cognitive-epistemic nature of scientific works likely lead to failure in trust and consumption of scientific knowledge by the public in the healthcare crisis

The Crisis of Scale in Contemporary Fiction

The Crisis of Scale in Contemporary Fiction studies how globalization has transformed our relationship with scale and creates a problem of representation in fiction. After the Second World War, new geopolitical, economic, cultural, and technological developments radically changed the form of existing spaces such as the nation-state, while producing new ones like the global city. By the late twentieth century, with the end of the Cold War, the spread of free trade policies like NAFTA, and the start of the Internet Age, these historical developments led to what I term the crisis of scale; that is, humanity’s growing awareness of the planet’s complexity and interconnectedness has called into question established narratives about the spaces we inhabit, necessitating the development of new representational strategies. Analyzing depictions of the global city, nation-state, world, and galaxy in novels by China Miéville, Karen Tei Yamashita, Nalo Hopkinson, and Samuel R. Delany respectively, I uncover the set of narrative strategies they use to account for the way globalization shapes daily life. Turning to popular genre fiction to describe the disorienting and dislocating effects of the crisis of scale, these novelists join a tradition of writers of literary fiction interested in advancing generic traditions such as science fiction and detective fiction. While most critics read the generic turn starting at the end of the twentieth century as a response to the decline of postmodernism, I interpret the literary movement as a formal solution to the problem of representation under the crisis of scale. By self-reflexively and intertextually engaging with their own generic histories, popular genres develop a language for the perspectival experience of the crisis of scale. This dissertation contends that tracking literary developments in genre provides us with a theoretical toolkit not only for articulating and understanding new globalizing conditions, but for developing new subjectivities capable of contending with them

Teaching Democratic Humility to Improve Classroom Discussion

Democratic discussion in the classroom has been viewed as a way to increase consensus, however the spread of false and misleading information through social media and influencers can make classroom discussions problematic. This electronic text analysis study will highlight the social media site of Quora and posts related to the Gulf War. Posts related to the Gulf War will be critically analyzed and their potential impacts will be examined This study will also analyze the posts and potential impacts of a conservative influencer named James Lindsay. The study will analyze specific polarizing posts that Lindsay has made on Instagram and highlight the potential impacts on classroom discussions of some of these posts. A purpose of the study is to analyze negative potential impacts of social media on student’s views and on classroom discussions. The study also highlights two potential solutions to overcoming these negative potential impacts. One solution is to use Stanford History Education Group’s Civic Online Reasoning, and another solution is to explicitly teach Democratic humility. With democratic humility, individuals learn not to make hyperbolic claims about their beliefs. Students could also be taught when learning about democratic humility, the importance of suspending judgement until they have gathered sufficient information on the topic

Buying in: Analyzing the First Fan Adopters of a New National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I Football Program

Establishing a strong fan base within the inaugural year of a National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I Football Program presents many challenges. Tracking consumers and their behavior becomes imperative as sport marketers seek to better understand the first fan adopters of a new program. With new NCAA football programs being established every year, sport marketers of a new program are challenged to not only find a loyal fan-base who will continue to support the program despite win or lose, but find new and innovative ways to grow their fan base. The purpose of this study was to examine attendance demographics and consumer behavior for the inaugural football season at a NCAA Division 1 program. Data were collected (n = 914) from a relatively equal distribution of fan groups (students- 34.8%, alumni- 32.9%, and other- 32.3%) via an in-person survey completed on a tablet interface. Results demonstrate that the level of fandom (temporary, devoted, or fanatic) impacts certain consumer behaviors, including; overall support of the program, media consumption, and game day behaviors

Analisis Perbandingan Keakuratan Memprediksi Financial Distress dengan Menggunakan Model Grover, Springate dan Altman Z-Score pada Perusahaan Pertambangan yang Terdaftar di Bursa Efek Indonesia pada Tahun 2013-2017

Penelitian ini dilakukan dengan tujuan untuk melihat pengaruh dan menganalisis perbandingan keakuratan dari Model Grover, Springate dan Altman Z-Score dalam memprediksi Financial Distress pada perusahaan pertambangan yang terdaftar di BEI pada tahun 2013-2017. Pengambilan sampel dilakukan menggunakan teknik purposive sampling dengan jumlah sampel yang diperoleh sebanyak 14 perusahaan dan jumlah keseluruhan data 70 dari populasi 41 perusahaan. Peneliti menggunakan teknik analisis regresi logistik biner yang diambil dari program IBM SPSS Statistics versi 23 dan juga analisis dari hasil perhitungan masing-masing model. Hasil dari penelitian ini adalah Model Grover, Springate dan Altman Z-Score dapat digunakan untuk memprediksi financial distress karena berpengaruh signifikan. Kesimpulan yang diperoleh dari penelitian ini adalah Model Springate merupakan model yang paling sesuai dan akurat digunakan untuk memprediksi financial distress pada perusahaan pertambangan yang terdaftar di BEI pada tahun 2013-2017

Drawing metro maps in concentric circles: A designer‐in‐the‐loop approach with visual examples

This article presents a proof-of-concept designer-in-the-loop schematic map drawing tool, based on the marriage of two approaches—manual and automated, which provides the technical interactivity of drawing tools between the user and the computer. We focus on concentric circle maps as opposed to the commonly used orthogonal mode representation, which is suggested by previous studies that it could promote better network learning. In comparison with existing methods, the proposed method is more compatible with the framework of effective map design from psychological and aesthetic perspectives, and a range of options can be provided in conjunction with users' preferences. We evaluated our approach on a set of iterations with case studies of Hong Kong metro with a group of three co-authors from the fields of geography, transport engineering, and education

Watering the Emerald Triangle: Irrigation sources used by cannabis cultivators in Northern California

Water use by cannabis cultivators represents an emerging threat to surface flows in Northern California's sensitive watersheds. To date, however, no data has been available to formally assess where cannabis sites source their water. This study analyzed data from annual reports, covering the year 2017, submitted by 901 cannabis cultivators enrolled in the Cannabis Waste Discharge Regulatory Program administered by the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board. The analysis identified cannabis cultivators' most common sources for water extraction, monthly patterns for each water source and differences between sites compliant and not compliant with the cannabis program. The most commonly reported source of water was wells (58% of sites), with most extraction from wells occurring during the growing season (April through October). Surface water diversions (22% of sites) and spring diversions (16% of sites) were the most common sources after wells, with extractions from these sources distributed much more evenly across the year. Although nearly one-third of noncompliant sites (33%) used wells, this source was more than twice as frequently reported among compliant sites (68%), indicating that wells may become increasingly common as more sites become part of the regulated cannabis industry

Exploring a new Division 1 football program on a university campus: An application of collaborative action research in higher education

Purpose - This paper is an account of collaborative action-based research that centered on a new NCAA Division I football program at a regional southeastern university, and the positive impacts the collaboration had on the multiple stakeholders involved in the research, which were the university’s sport management faculty, the athletic department, and sport management students. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach - During the action research, these stakeholders moved through a cyclical process that involved reflection, planning, action, and evaluation. Through the action-based cyclical process that was utilized, each of these stakeholders were able to learn, adapt, participate, and make positive change. Findings - Positive change occurred with the athletic department’s marketing efforts and game day operations, opportunities for sport management students to participate and learn, and development of relationships between two departments. Research limitations/implications - The cyclical nature of this research model often leads to original hypotheses and research foci to be highly altered during various stages. Another limitation within collaborative action research can be the breakdown in communication among the many parties involved in carrying out this type of research. Practical implications - While the significance of this study was initially to capture fan information surrounding a new NCAA Division I football program, the stakeholders quickly realized that the action-based research study had more to offer than producing marketing reports for the university athletic department. Inclusion of the students as equal stakeholders in this project proved vital to student learning and involvement. Having the students play such an important role throughout each cycle of the project allowed for additional networking outside the classrooms with potential employers, as well as in-depth discussions and involvement in the classroom when synthesizing and disseminating the marketing information that had been gathered. Originality/value - The collaboration between two separate departments within a higher education institution was vital to the overall success of the research project. The overall intent of this paper is to provide a practical approach to collaboration among individuals working in different departments of an organization, as the findings from this research project revealed the overall success of the project was only possible through the collaborative effort and joining resources, abilities, areas of expertise, and capabilities