Is Knowing Half the Battle? The Effects of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Compared to Psychoeducation on Stigma Towards Mental Illness

Both Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Psychoeducation have been shown to reduce stigmatizing thoughts towards individuals with mental illness. The present study compared the effects of a 50 minute ACT and 50 minute psychoeducation workshop on levels of stigma in college students (N = 76). Psychological flexibility and knowledge about mental illness were examined as potential mechanisms by which the workshops generated stigma reduction. Participants were randomly assigned to either workshop with pre and post scores on the Community Attitudes Towards the Mentally Ill scale used as the primary dependent variable. Both workshops were effective in reducing levels of stigmatizing attitudes towards individuals with psychological difficulties. However, psychological flexibility and mental health knowledge did not mediate changes in stigma. Implications for clinical significance and further research directions are discussed

A Faculty-Friendly Framework for Improving Teaching and Learning through Service-Learning

This manuscript highlights benefits of service-learning (SL) as a promising pedagogical approach to improving teaching and learning in college classrooms. Drawing on the collective experiences of integrating SL projects in university courses, the authors share a framework aimed at assisting faculty in higher education in designing, implementing, and evaluating SL projects across diverse higher education courses. A case example illustrating how SL projects can be infused in a graduate course is offered, and recommendations are provided for faculty who wish to integrate SL projects with the goal of improving teaching and learning in their college courses

Selector’s Guide for Resources in the Humanities: An Open Access Student Publication

Students in the Master of Library and Information Science degree program at Valdosta State University who completed the elective course in Humanities Information Services in 2014 produced bibliographies on sub-disciplines of the humanities. These example bibliographies are compiled into the document titled Selector’s Guide for Resources in the Humanities: An Open Access Student Publication. The student authored sections of the Selector’s Guide focus on narrowly defined humanities areas and contain resources representative of professional organizations, major serials, online indexes and databases, primary sources, classic and contemporary monographs, standard reference works, vetted websites, media, and open access resources. The compilers of this guide offer it as a companion to the document entitled Teaching Guide for Resources in the Humanities: An Open Access Publication. The Teaching Guide references two tutorials, one on WorldCat and one on the Gale Literary Index. Copies of both tutorials are found in here. The authors of these materials invite professors seeking a guide to the providers and formats of information in the humanities to use the bibliographies therein as a starting point for creating assignments and to use materials from the teaching guide as class exercises, if appropriate

Drivers of the composition and diversity of carabid functional traits in UK coniferous plantations.

Functional diversity (FD) is increasingly used as a metric to evaluate the impact of forest management strategies on ecosystem functioning. Management interventions that aim to maximise FD require knowledge of multiple environmental drivers of FD, which have not been studied to date in temperate coniferous production forests. We quantified the relative importance of abiotic (forest management) and biotic (ground vegetation community) drivers of carabid FD and trait distribution in 44 coniferous plantation forest stands across the UK. Carabid FD declined with canopy cover and carabid body length correlated negatively with the percentage of open semi-natural area surrounding a plot. We conclude that forest management could enhance carabid FD through initiatives that emulate natural disturbance regimes through gap creation. We found that neither functional nor taxonomic metrics of vegetation diversity correlated with carabid FD, suggesting that restoration of plant communities, a major goal of forest restoration efforts, will not necessarily enhance carabid FD in coniferous plantations

A Strategic Orientation Model for the Turkish Local e-Governments

Increased environmental uncertainty and complexity along with budget constraints requires public organizations to manage strategically as never before. The environments of public organizations have become increasingly turbulent and more firmly interconnected. During the past two decades, governments have innovated new management tools such as strategic planning, outsourcing, and performance measurement to deal with complex governance and networks to provide their public services. Meanwhile, the drive to implement e-government has resulted in the formulation of many e-government visions and strategies, driven by their own sets of political, economic, and social factors and requirements. With this regard, recent developments in e-service provision of Turkish Local e-Governments deserve empirical and well-structured research. Building on the recent literature, this study draws a strategic orientation framework and tests it by analyzing the contents of strategic documents of 114 Turkish Local e-Governments

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A SELECT-AND-FILL-IN CONCEPT MAP ASSESSMENT OF HUMAN GEOGRAPHY KNOWLEDGE

Abstract. The purpose of this paper is to report the decision process in choosing a concept mapping task to assess the human geography knowledge of middle school students participating in an after-school college reach-out program, Pre-Collegiate Connections Program. Research is presented supporting construct-a-map and fill-in concept mapping tasks. The final map, a select-and-fill-in task, was developed and field-tested with 43 students during the first week of May 2010. Analyses indicated that, across all three grades, the omitted concepts were moderately difficult and exhibited a Cronbach’s alpha of.84.