How Student Recruitment and Selection Can Impact Reentry Outcomes: Lessons from the Michigan Department of Corrections and Jackson College

In 2013, the Vera Institute of Justice launched the Unlocking Potential: Pathways from Prison to Postsecondary Education Project (Pathways), a five-year multi-state demonstration project aiming to increase educational attainment and employment opportunities for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals by supporting an expansion of educational opportunities in prison. Corrections departments in the states of New Jersey, Michigan, and North Carolina were selected to participate in the initiative. Each college-in-prison program—although executed differently and offering varying programs of study—possessed one common theme: to equip incarcerated persons with the tools necessary to end the cycle of incarceration through high-quality postsecondary education. This paper examines approaches to student recruitment the Michigan site took during its implementation phase and suggests potential outcomes for college-in-prison programs to consider when using the “return communities” approach

Try Anything

Conference Review “Anxiety, Urgency, Outrage, Hope . . . A Conference on Political Feeling.” Franke Institute for the Humanities, University of Chicago, October 19–20, 200

The Cybrary - Seamless for the customer, fine needlework for the staff

The University of Queensland Cybrary delivers high quality customer focused innovative information resources, services and programs that are integrated with and central to the University’s teaching, learning and research activities. The Cybrary website - www.cybrary.uq.edu.au - enables customers to access information more or less seamlessly anywhere anytime. This paper will go behind the seams to discuss some of the technologies that underpin service delivery and some of the implications for the Cybrary’s human, physical and financial resources

Data reuse and scholarly reward: understanding practice and building infrastructure

Recently introduced funding agency policies seek to increase the availability of data from individual published studies for reuse by the research community at large. The success of such policies can be measured both by data input (“is useful data being made available?”) and research output (“are these data being reused by others?”). A key determinant of data input is the extent to which data producers receive adequate professional credit for making data available. One of us (HP) previously reported a large citation difference for published microarray studies with and without data available in a public repository. Analysis of a much larger sample, with more covariates, provides a more reliable estimate of this citation boost, as well as additional insights into patterns of reuse and how the availability of data affects publication impact. A more recent study tracking the reuse of 100 datasets from each of ten different primary data repositories reveals large variation in patterns of reuse and citation. Our findings (a) illuminate ways in which the reuses of archived data tend to differ in purpose from that of the original producers; (b) inform data archiving policy, such as how long data embargoes need to be in order to protect the proprietary interests of producers; (c) and allow us to answer the vexing question of what the return on investment is for data archiving. In conducting these studies, we have become aware of gaps in data citation practice and infrastructure that limit the extent to which researchers receive credit for their contributions. We describe early efforts to bake good data citation and usage tracking into cyberinfrastructure as part of DataONE, the Data Observation Network for Earth. Finally, we introduce total-impact, a tool that allows researchers to track the diverse impacts of all their research outputs, including data, and empowers them to be recognized for their scholarly work on their own terms

Stress, Burnout, Job Satisfaction, and Intent to Leave Among Collegiate Forensic Educators

The purpose of this study is to explore how burnout, stress, and job satisfaction impact coaches‘ intention to leave forensics. Some 111 collegiate forensics educators completed a survey examining workplace stress, burnout, job satisfaction, and perceived intent to leave forensics. Coaches who had thought about leaving forensics reported being more emotionally exhausted than coaches who had not thought about leaving. Female coaches also reported more stress than male coaches. Although many educators feel stressed, burned out, and have thought about leaving, they were still satisfied with their jobs as educators. The article concludes with a discussion of the findings and implications of the research

A Little Help from My Friends: A Relational Health Communication Competence Approach to Social Support for Forensic Educators

The purpose of this study was to examine factors that impact forensic educators’ perceived social support, including communication competence, job stress, and job burnout. Communicatively competent educators reported higher levels of administrative and family support than forensic educators who did not report high levels of communication competence. Educators who reported high levels of stress and burnout report lower levels of support from supervisors, coworkers, and family compared to educators who reported low levels of stress and burnout. Female coaches reported lower levels of support from supervisors, coworkers, and families, compared to male coaches. Educators with a large coaching staff reported high levels of coworker support; educators with small or no coaching staff did not report high levels of coworker support. These findings offer insight into the support networks of forensic educators and the impact of these networks on stress and burnout

Forensics as a Correlate of Graduate School Success

Forensics is an extremely popular extracurricular activity in the communication discipline and often provides competitors with skills required for success in graduate school. This exploratory study examines the relationships between forensics competition and success in graduate school. Through a survey of 169 graduate students, we compare graduate students with a forensics background (n = 35) and those without a forensics background (n = 134). The study generates several important findings. First, graduate students who competed in forensics report higher levels success in graduate school and are more likely to present conference papers and publish in academic journals. Second, the level of participation and level of success in forensics plays a major role in determining graduate student success. Students who participated more in forensics and reported higher levels of success in forensics reported even higher levels of success in graduate school and participation in conferences and publications than their counterparts without a forensics background. The implications of this study as well as how this study can be used by faculty and coaches to help forensics students transition to graduate school are discussed