Beyond a warming fingerprint: individualistic biogeographic responses to heterogeneous climate change in California.

Understanding recent biogeographic responses to climate change is fundamental for improving our predictions of likely future responses and guiding conservation planning at both local and global scales. Studies of observed biogeographic responses to 20th century climate change have principally examined effects related to ubiquitous increases in temperature - collectively termed a warming fingerprint. Although the importance of changes in other aspects of climate - particularly precipitation and water availability - is widely acknowledged from a theoretical standpoint and supported by paleontological evidence, we lack a practical understanding of how these changes interact with temperature to drive biogeographic responses. Further complicating matters, differences in life history and ecological attributes may lead species to respond differently to the same changes in climate. Here, we examine whether recent biogeographic patterns across California are consistent with a warming fingerprint. We describe how various components of climate have changed regionally in California during the 20th century and review empirical evidence of biogeographic responses to these changes, particularly elevational range shifts. Many responses to climate change do not appear to be consistent with a warming fingerprint, with downslope shifts in elevation being as common as upslope shifts across a number of taxa and many demographic and community responses being inconsistent with upslope shifts. We identify a number of potential direct and indirect mechanisms for these responses, including the influence of aspects of climate change other than temperature (e.g., the shifting seasonal balance of energy and water availability), differences in each taxon's sensitivity to climate change, trophic interactions, and land-use change. Finally, we highlight the need to move beyond a warming fingerprint in studies of biogeographic responses by considering a more multifaceted view of climate, emphasizing local-scale effects, and including a priori knowledge of relevant natural history for the taxa and regions under study

Translating Learners, Researchers, and Qualitative Approaches through Investigations of Students’ Experiences in School

This article uses the conceptual framework offered by ‘translation’ to argue for transforming students into authorities and agents in research on educational practice. Drawing on various definitions of translation and highlighting the influence of recent feminist perspectives on translation studies, the article presents two cases that illustrate how learners can be translated into co-researchers of educational experiences, researchers translated into partners with students in making meaning through the research process, and qualitative research’s approaches and modes of presenting findings translated into new versions of those processes and products

Participatory instructional redesign by students and teachers in secondary education: effects on perceptions of instruction

Könings, K. D., Brand-Gruwel, S., & Van Merriënboer, J. J. G. (2011). Participatory instructional redesign by students and teachers in secondary education: effects on perceptions of instruction. Instructional Science, 39(5), 737–762.Students’ perceptions of instruction are important because they direct the learning of students. The fact that teachers have only limited knowledge of these perceptions is likely to threaten the effectiveness of learning, because congruence between interpretations of an instructional intervention is necesarry for its optimal use. This study examines participatory design as a strategy for taking student perceptions into account in instructional re/design. Participatory design meetings of groups of teachers and seven co-designing students in a secondary education setting identified changes to improve the regular education process. The results on changes in student perceptions, perceived-desired discrepancy, and teacher-student disagreement showed some improvement for the co-designers but, unexpectedly, limited or even negative effects for the non-co-designing students. Possible causes are discussed. Participatory design seems to have potential for improving education, but further research is needed

Triangulating Judicial Responsiveness: Automated Content Analysis, Judicial Opinions, and the Methodology of Legal Scholarship

The increasing availability of digital versions of court documents, coupled with increases in the power and sophistication of computational methods of textual analysis, promises to enable both the creation of new avenues of scholarly inquiry and the refinement of old ones. This Article advances that project in three respects. First, it examines the potential for automated content analysis to mitigate one of the methodological problems that afflicts both content analysis and traditional legal scholarship—their acceptance on faith of the proposition that judicial opinions accurately report information about the cases they resolve and courts‘ decisional processes. Because automated methods can quickly process large amounts of text, they allow for assessment of the correspondence between opinions and other documents in the case, thereby providing a window into how closely opinions track the information provided by the litigants. Second, it explores one such novel measure—the ―responsiveness‖ of opinions to briefs—in terms of its connection to both adjudicative theory and existing scholarship on the behavior of courts and judges. Finally, it reports our efforts to test the viability of automated methods for assessing responsiveness on a sample of briefs and opinions from the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Though we are focused primarily on validating our methodology, rather than on the results it generates, our initial investigation confirms that even basic approaches to automated content analysis provide useful information about responsiveness, and generates intriguing results that suggest avenues for further study