Organization Of Course Research Articles

Poetry as Deep Intelligence

In this article, the authors argue that poetry provides a valuable if overlooked resource to the organizational behavior professor. The authors describe a workshop designed to evoke students’ innate poetic metaphors to enable a more lively engagement with course material. Because many of students’ personal, private, and emotionally charged experiences parallel the various topics in the text, the authors find that the organizational behavior course is particularly amenable to this approach. Finally, the authors present a qualitative assessment, conducted by them, in which students assess the workshop experience in their own words. Students find that the workshop adds complexity, surprise, and excitement to personal issues, transforms the climate of the classroom, and provides an energized backdrop against which the course makes sense in terms that are both personal and deep.

The importance of course design, feedback, and facilitation: student perceptions of the relationship between teaching presence and cognitive presence

The Community of Inquiry framework has become a useful instrument for exploring learning in online classes; however, the interactions between the constructs of teaching presence and cognitive presence remain relatively unexplored. This study investigated student perceptions of cognitive presence as explained by three teaching presence elements; instructional design and course organization, direct instruction, and facilitated discourse, in both online and face-to-face classes. Results indicate that student perceptions of cognitive presence and teaching presence do not differ between face-to-face and online classes and that discourse facilitation is a key to engendering critical thinking or cognitive presence. Qualitative data indicated certain aspects of teaching presence that students felt related to critical thinking. Students felt critical thinking was positively influenced when an instructor designed an organized course with clear goals and relevant assignments, provided direct feedback that was encouraging, timely, and specific, and actively facilitated discussions that kept everyone focused and participating at a meaningful level.

The Duality of Courses and Students

Significant attention has been given to how students become grouped or “tracked” through the courses they share in common. However, this work has yet to be connected to a targeted analysis of the way in which courses are grouped with other courses through the students they co-enroll. Drawing on insights from field theory, the author examines this duality with special attention to the social organization of courses and the curricular discourses they contain. Multidimensional scaling and multiple correspondence analysis are used to analyze course-taking data for a cohort of students (2005-2009, n = 494) at a comprehensive high school in the midwestern United States. The results illustrate a “field” of courses that are distributed vertically according to a principle of status that opposes different forms of curricular discourse and horizontally according to oppositions between symbolic and material forms, artistic and technical skills, and the “inner” work of the household to the “outer” work of certain occupations. While the vertical dimension of courses is associated with a racial and social class hierarchy of students, the horizontal dimension passes through a division of the sexes.

Implementing Service Learning into a Graduate Social Work Course: A Step-by-Step Guide

Service learning is a powerful pedagogical tool linking community service to academic learning. Several steps are necessary to implement service learning effectively into the curriculum. This study uses a case example as an exploratory study to pilot-test data on how service learning impacts student outcomes. The paper will (1) provide an overview of the literature on service learning, (2) explain a model for incorporating service learning into graduate social work courses, (3) identify specific student issues in implementation, and (4) demonstrate how service learning can enhance the outcomes for educational policy and accreditation standards competencies in an advanced organization and community practice course.

The Fritz Roethlisberger Memorial Award Goes to “Using Leadered Groups in Organizational Behavior and Management Survey Courses”

The Fritz Roethlisberger Memorial Award Goes to “Using Leadered Groups in Organizational Behavior and Management Survey Courses”

Comparison of Levels of Satisfaction with Distance Education and On-campus Programs

Introduction The study compared the level of satisfaction of 101 graduates with a distance education versus an on-campus program. Methods A self-administered anonymous survey was used to gather information about satisfaction from the recent graduates of a university personnel preparation program in visual impairments (response rate = 57.7%). The survey measured graduates’ satisfaction with their programs in six subareas: (1) faculty-student interaction, (2) student-student interaction, (3) fairness of evaluations, (4) organization of courses, (5) adequacy of the difficulty of courses, and (6) practicum or internship experience. Results The program modality was not a significant predictor of overall satisfaction with a program once we controlled for the confounding variables, including age, program area, and presence of visual impairments (—.277 – .226, 95% CI). However, it was a significant independent predictor of faculty-student interaction (—.616 – —.012, 95% CI) and student-student interaction (—.875 – —.073, 95% CI). Discussion There was no significant difference in the two groups of graduates’ overall satisfaction with the program, but although the findings are preliminary in nature, the graduates from the on-campus program indicated a higher level of faculty-student and student-student interactions. Implications for practitioners Given the findings of this study, prospective students who are interested in university personnel preparation programs in visual impairments may consider distance education programs an option that may satisfy them. Similarly, these programs may consider continuing their distance education programs as a satisfactory option for many students. However, the lower level of faculty-student and student-student interactions perceived by the distance education graduates may suggest a need to ensure a mechanism that facilitates such interactions more effectively.

The Teaching Study of Different Steps in Flow Process Construction

Flow process construction is the basic theoretical course and key knowledge of construction organization, and also is not easily understood by students in teaching. When n activities and m construction sections in differ-step flow process construction is chosen, if among randomly three continuous steps, the middle step is the minimum step, then the non-interval project flow duration (T’) is less than the non-idleness project flow duration (T) , and the time variation can be calculated, the deviation of the non-interval project flow duration (T’) with the non-idleness project flow duration (T) is the sum of the product of any many (m-1)×(the maximum flow step from another side minus the minimum flow steps among three continuous flow steps), otherwise, T’=T.

‘Magical and fanciful theories’: sports psychologists and craft coaches

Victorian and Edwardian coaches and athletes often referred to their training regimes as ‘scientific.’ However, the impact of experimental science on coaching programmes was minimal, and coaching was considered an art as much as a science. Coaching operated as a trade or a craft with the typical coach relying on traditional practices, experience, intuition, and the ability to innovate. In particular, experiential learning taught these craft coaches much about psychological issues. During the early twentieth century, however, American academics began to explore sport as a site for psychological experimentation. Many psychologists promoted their work strenuously, and by 1921 had created a professional organization, professional journals, research laboratories and university courses. Stimulated by work in Eastern Europe, sport psychology gradually became a disciplinary subculture and similar structural controls were established to enable sports psychologists to become the gatekeepers of their specialist and increasingly esoteric knowledge. This paper utilizes a historical approach to explore, firstly, what coaches traditionally learnt about psychological issues. It then briefly considers both the process by which sports psychology was institutionalizsed, and how this professionalization of sports psychology led inexorably to the exclusion of craft coaches from the knowledge transfer process.

Exploring essentially three-turn courses of action: An institutional case study with implications for ordinary talk

This article describes an adjacency-pair organized course of action in the institutional context of customers calling an electronics repair facility to request the status of equipment they have previously sent in for repair. Relative to the majority of adjacency-pair sequences described in previous research, this course of action is rare in that it is essentially (vs contingently) composed of three (vs two) turns, including status solicitation, status response, and acceptance/rejection of status response. After defending this finding, we situate and discuss its significance relative to prior research – in both ordinary and institutional contexts – on adjacency-pair sequence organization, including implications for sequence-based relevance rules, such as preference organization. Finally, we outline a possible general explanation for why some initiating actions set in motion essentially three-turn (vs two-turn) courses of action, and offer a candidate example in ordinary conversation.

Perceived Organizational Problems in Health Care

Our objective was to test whether the Structured Problem and Success Inventory (SPI) instrument could capture mental representations of organizational and work-related problems as described by individuals working in health care organizations and to test whether these representations varied according to organizational position. A convenience sample (n = 56) of middle managers (n = 20), lower-level managers (n = 20), and staff (n = 16) from health care organizations in Stockholm (Sweden) attending organizational development courses during 2003-2004 was recruited. Participants used the SPI to describe the 3 most pressing organizational and work-related problems. Data were systematically reviewed to identify problem categories and themes. One hundred sixty-four problems were described, clustered into 13 problem categories. Generally, middle managers focused on organizational factors and managerial responsibilities, whereas lower-level managers and staff focused on operational issues and what others did or ought to do. Furthermore, we observed similarities and variation in perceptions and their association with respondents' position within an organization. Our results support the need for further evaluation of the SPI as a promising tool for health care organizations. Collecting structured inventories of organizational and work-related problems from multiple perspectives may assist in the development of shared understandings of organizational challenges and lead to more effective and efficient processes of solution planning and implementation.

Calling Dr. Fun: The struggle to implement a motivating reward system in a small S-Corporation1

Susan works for a small S-Corporation that is experiencing issues with its incentive program. Specifically, employees find that the company's incentive program is rather ambiguous and confusing. Susan is in a position to do something about it but she is not sure what to do. Students are challenged to design an incentive program for the small company. This case exercise is appropriate for undergraduate students in Organizational Behavior or Management courses and should coincide with discussions of motivation and employee incentives. This case is based on the author's personal experiences.

How do students misunderstand number representations?

We used both student interviews and diagnostic testing to reveal students’ misconceptions about number representations in computing systems. This article reveals that students who have passed an undergraduate level computer organization course still possess surprising misconceptions about positional notations, two's complement representation, and overflow. Contrary to common opinion, these misconceptions are widespread and reveal the need for instruction that specifically targets these misconceptions. In addition, these misconceptions will serve as the basis for the creation of a standard assessment tool called the digital logic concept inventory. This concept inventory will provide a rigorous and quantitative metric to assess the effectiveness of new teaching methods.

The Anatomy Of Program Design For An On-Line Business Management Course

How does one design an on-line course to bridge theory and practice? How can the feedback of on-going stakeholder (student and administration) be incorporated into the design process to enhance quality? This paper presents the theoretical underpinning of designing an on-line management course recognized as best practice for a well organized course by an external panel review. Three models are reviewed as well as the final program design, the choices made, and competencies for designing a course on-line.

Blended-learning for courses in Pharmaceutical Analysis

The complex organization of courses in Pharmaceutical Analysis which also include practical lessons held in chemistry laboratories and the need to reduce the number of hours for each course due to the organization of degree courses in semesters, makes blended-learning techniques optimal tools to significantly improve the quality of teaching. This work describes the teaching experiences used to supplement the first modules of Medicinal Analysis I and Drug Analysis in the Master’s degree courses in Pharmacy and Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Technology at the Faculty of Pharmacy, the University of Torino.

Use of a New Moodle Module for Improving the Teaching of a Basic Course on Computer Architecture

This paper describes how a new Moodle module, called CTPracticals, is applied to the teaching of the practical content of a basic computer organization course. In the core of the module, an automatic verification engine enables it to process the VHDL designs automatically as they are submitted. Moreover, a straightforward modification of this engine would make it possible to extend its application to other programming languages. The module provides students with real-time knowledge of the state of their work by their accessing the result of the automatic assessment or feedback messages. Teachers have a constant global view of the status of their class and have available multiple options such as sending feedback messages to students, obtaining statistics, launching additional verifications in batch, and so on. Likewise, the module substantially improves some organizational aspects, and its design may help teachers to encourage teamwork. Its use partially frees teachers from certain routine work, saving time that can be devoted to teaching objectives and tutoring activities.

United-Continental Merger

This case study discusses the nature and likely effects of the proposed merger between United and Continental. It is intended as a lecture for instructors teaching undergraduate courses in Industrial Organization or Antitrust Economics

Persuasive and Informative Advertising: A Classroom Experiment

The authors outline a pair of classroom activities designed to provide an intuitive foundation to the theoretical introduction of advertising in monopoly markets. The roles of both informative and persuasive advertising are covered. Each student acts as a monopolist and chooses the number of (costly) advertisements and the price. The experiments are intended for intermediate microeconomics or industrial organization courses, but might be used in any course that covers advertising models.

Emerging trends in knowledge organization and information organization course curriculum

In this panel we will discuss the importance of knowledge organization and information organization in library and information science curricula and the emerging trends both inside and outside of library and information science which will affect the curriculum in coming years.

Knowledge organization landscape: A content analysis of introductory courses

This paper presents the results of a study examining the subject content of knowledge organization courses taught in ALA-accredited Library and Information Science (LIS) programmes. Close to 2000 course readings of introductory-level knowledge organization courses from 34 LIS schools in the USA and Canada were analysed and indexed. Results indicate that traditional bibliographic methods and practices remain at the core of knowledge organization courses. Findings also show that metadata has become a central component of course content and new topics from information architecture to markup languages and semantic web are becoming part of introductory-level knowledge organization education.

The Fourth Year of Medical Education: A Literature Review

To identify expert recommendations and examples of programs that could be incorporated into curricular renewal of the fourth year of medical school. In 2009, the authors searched the relevant literature published from 1974 to 2009 using PubMed; they then searched bibliographies and related articles. They consulted clerkship and residency program directors at their institution and accessed recommendations from national organizations. Of the 66 publications reviewed, 40 focused on aspects of fourth-year education and 26 included the fourth year in general reviews. Long-standing concerns included clarifying the purpose of the year, the optimal type and organization of courses, and academic quality of courses. Specific concerns included excessive focus on securing residency positions ("preresidency syndrome"), uncertainty about the optimal ratio of required and elective courses, and grade inflation. Despite representing a substantial proportion of the student experience, the fourth year has received significantly less attention than other phases of the curriculum. The authors conclude that goals for the year should be clarified, reflect the mission of the school, and be designed to both complete the medical school experience and facilitate the transition to residency. Schools should decide the types of courses and organization of the year based on these goals. Organizational strategies for the fourth year should incorporate the requirements of the United States Medical Licensing Examination examinations and the residency application process. Fourth-year curricula and their constituent courses should be well designed and stringently evaluated to ensure educational goals are met and appropriate grades awarded.