Summary Essay Research Articles

THE USE OF RECIPROCAL TEACHING TECHNIQUE ON STUDENTS' ABILITY TO WRITE A SUMMARY ESSAY

English learners needed to master the four key skills: reading,writing, speaking, and listening. The writing skill wasimportant for students to gather new information fromreading and to express their thoughts in writing.Consequently, teaching students to write paragraphseffectively required a suitable technique. This researchinvestigated the effect of the reciprocal teaching techniqueon students' ability to write summary essays. APre-Experimental method and One Group Pretest Posttestdesign were used in this research. The research targetedeleventh-grade students at SMA Rimba Madya, with asample of 29 students. Data collection involved pretests andposttests in the form of essay tests aimed at producingsummary essays with an introduction, body, and conclusion.Data were analyzed using the t-test. The pre-test resultsshowed that the highest score was 70, representing 17% ofthe sample, with five students achieving this score. Thelowest score was 35, representing 24% of the sample. Incontrast, post-test results improved with the highest scorereaching 90, again representing 17% of the sample, and thelowest score increasing to 55, representing 21% of thesample, with six students scoring at this level. The analysisrevealed a t-test value of 9, exceeding the t-table value of2.05 at the 0.05 significance level, leading to theacceptance of the alternative hypothesis (Ha). It could beconcluded that the reciprocal teaching technique had apositive effect on students' ability to write summary essays.

İNGİLİS DİLİNDƏ ESSE YAZMAQ ÜÇÜN METODİK TÖVSİYƏLƏR

Methodical Recommendations for Writing an Essay in English Summary Essay is a common form of writing that every student encounters during their studies. The article talks about methodological recommendations for writing essays, which play an important role in the development of writing skills in English. These tips cover everything from the basics of essay structure to creating a compelling introduction, creating body paragraphs, logical conclusions, and even refining your essay through editing. After reading this article, you will be able to write an essay in English that will interest your readers, convey your ideas clearly, and leave a lasting impression. Key words: language skills, essay, the structure of the essay, methodical recommendations, connecting words

The Work of Pioneering Amish Studies Scholar Walter Kollmorgen: Annontations of His 1940s Amish Publications

Walter Kollmorgen’s two seminal contributions to Amish studies scholarship include the 1942 report “Culture of a Contemporary Rural Community: The Old Order Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania” published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Agricultural Economics, and his 1943 article “The Agricultural Stability of the Old Order Amish and Old Order Mennonites of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania” published in the American Journal of Sociology. His 1942 report was one of six mixed-methods studies that analyzed the relative in/stability of rural American communities during the Great Depression. The six-part series concluded that the Amish of Lancaster County, PA, weathered the Great Depression with fortitude. In Kollmorgen’s subsequent 1943 AJS article, he consolidated key findings from field research, summarizing why the Old Order Amish and Old Order Mennonite people persist as a distinctive sect. Representing the very first substantial Amish studies scholarship (alongside Bachman’s 1942 The Old Order Amish of Lancaster County), Kollmorgen’s work merits ongoing re-examination, as it defined the conversation and trajectory of Amish studies scholarship. In this essay, I annotate both works, distilling his findings into summary essays that focus on presenting his research as a resource for readers and not necessarily engaging with it. Given the diffuseness of his report’s data, I provide both short summaries of each chapter and full chapter annotations. [Abstract by author.]

Plagiarism as an academic literacy issue: the comprehension, writing and consulting strategies of Portuguese university students

In aiming to frame plagiarism as an academic literacy issue, this paper focuses on the strategies used by firsts years Portuguese university students, when writing from sources, along with the relationship between these strategies and the way students view themselves as readers, writers and users of sources. The study was based on 44 short summary essays written by students as well as their responses to a questionnaire and checklist on citation rules. The evaluation of the essays revealed that students often use copying and patchwriting. In addition, we found that much of the time students changed the meaning of the content expressed in the source. In relation to the way students evaluated themselves, generally their view was they used appropriate strategies. The study did not reveal a relationship between perceptions of using appropriate strategies and the use of those same strategies. Nonetheless, we found an association between performance and perceptions of using copying. Perceived use of a ‘think-then-do’ strategy was also related to changing the meaning when writing from sources. Concerning school achievement, stronger students evaluated themselves as using more appropriate strategies, and those who had not previously failed (a) school year(s) also displayed a better knowledge of citation rules. However, we failed to find any relationship between school achievement and the use of strategies for writing from sources. The main findings of the current research point to the existence of issues concerning how to address academic literacy, findings that go beyond plagiarism and, consequently, indicate the need for pedagogical responses.

The New Melville Studies ed. by Cody Marrs

Reviewed by: The New Melville Studies ed. by Cody Marrs Timothy Marr CODY MARRS, ED. The New Melville Studies Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. xii + 280 pp. “Some substances, without undergoing any mutations themselves, utterly change their color, according to the light thrown upon them.” – White-Jacket The New Melville Studies is the first book published in the Cambridge University Press series Twenty-First-Century Critical Revisions, which released seven other editions in 2019, including books on Dickinson and Whitman. The mission of the series is twofold: to explore both “changing critical interpretations” and “substantial scholarly shifts” (ii). This volume shares the series’ focus by “analyzing Melville as a writer who was keenly interested in the pleasures, limits, and possibilities of various reading practices” and by approaching him “as a theorist as well as a writer” (i). The collection’s fifteen essays provide a vital examination of what editor Cody Marrs calls “Melville’s formal commitments, philosophical entanglements, and cultural exchanges” (3). Marrs explains the innovation that informs this book as a shift away from a deductive, distant, and ironic act of privileged diagnosis toward a postcritical practice of creative interpretation that integrates critical reading with imaginative experience. He calls this “reading adjacently” or “with the grain . . . alongside Melville as he writes” (3), a practice that Robert Levine cites in his summary essay as reading “horizontally, immanently” (227). Going beyond categorical binaries and opposing dualisms, this approach dramatizes the varied and mutually constitutive ways that apparently contradictory poles imaginatively and dialectically correspond. The emphasis on “multiple, juxtaposed perspectives” (8) reflects the diverse sociality of Melville’s symposium of Mardi, the gams of Moby-Dick, the colloquy of The Confidence-Man, and the pilgrimage of Clarel. The mode also exhibits how Melville’s literary formulations instigate their readers’ critical confabulations through a processual enterprise of co-creation. Some of the supposed oppositions made to combine [End Page 121] in this collection’s experiments are the old and the new, fiction and philosophy, prose and poetry, voice and silence, the organic and the intentional, sense and style, and, as marked by the two sections around which the essays are grouped, “Thinking with Melville” and “Feeling with Melville.” Melville’s imagination moved beyond dualities, akin to how he conceived of the sperm whale’s brain as coalescing a dynamic tension between two oppositional lines of sight. He poetically voiced this creative process in his poem “Art” as an active “wrestling” during which “unlike things must meet and mate” and then “fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart.” In this volume, this dialectic entanglement often generates paradoxical inversions, such as when fiction reveals truths, the distant and ancient informs present theory, and imaginative invention becomes the vehicle for philosophy. Melville called this method “the great Art of Telling the Truth,” through which serious meditation can take the form of humorous wordplay. It is in the fluid conjunctions of these fertile formulations—and their privileging of unresolved interpenetration—that these essays refract bracing and complex insights into the liveliness and profundity of Melville’s creative art. This review assesses the essays in this collection in order of Melville’s composition to relate a chronological sense of the volume’s scope, though the fact that the book’s own organization tacks back and forth through Melville’s career shows its inventiveness. Edward Sugden inaugurates Melville’s experience in Polynesia as a transgression into a “marginal state” (67), a terra incognita in the transcultural chasm between world systems that is more incommensurable than permeable. Engaging Nan Z. Da’s notion of intransigence, Sugden suggests that Typee’s protagonists, Tommo and Toby, experience the rupture of dissolution, leaving them adrift and vulnerable in ways that generate a “radical freedom” (78). This liberty opens an affiliation with the underclass that generates an amorphous potential to reverse allegiances, such as when Tommo becomes Typee in the nomadic adventures of the sequel, Omoo. Levine points out how Tommo’s use of humor is another manifestation of the statelessness of such perspectivism. Samuel Otter’s essay on “Melville’s Style” expands Sugden’s argument about Tommo’s “curtailed crossing” (68) by averring that “Something happened to Melville on Nuku...

British Idealism and the Concept of the Self, edited by W. J. Mander and Stamatoula Panagakou

Reviewed by: British Idealism and the Concept of the Self ed. by W. J. Mander and Stamatoula Panagakou Adela Pinch (bio) British Idealism and the Concept of the Self, edited by W. J. Mander and Stamatoula Panagakou; pp. xii + 335. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, £89.99, $119.99. It is not often that philosophy books are reviewed in the pages of Victorian Studies. While the authors in this collection of essays, British Idealism and the Concept of the Self, clearly feel they fight an uphill battle in encouraging their colleagues in their own discipline to take seriously what these Victorian writers can contribute to philosophical discussions about the nature of the self, my task is to persuade readers of this journal how relevant this book is to Victorian studies in other fields. Scholars of Victorian cultural history and literature have long pondered what is distinctive about what Victorians thought and felt about being, or having, a self, but recent decades have largely sent us running to empiricist psychology for answers. The work of associationists and physiologists such as Alexander Bain, George Henry Lewes, James Sully, and others has appealed because its principles chime well with our own: the self is located at the intersection of body and experience; it is a bundle of sensations, and hence contingent, fragmented, in flux. British Idealism and the Concept of the Self is a fine gateway drug for readers interested in learning about an alternative, adjacent body of thinking. The outstanding introduction by the editors, W. J. Mander and Stamatoula Panagakou, clearly lays out what is distinctive, intriguing, and challenging about ideas of the self in the major British Idealists treated in the book: James Frederick Ferrier, F. H. Bradley, Edward Caird, T. H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet, R. G. Collingwood, and J. M. E. McTaggart. Mander and Panagakou provide historical background for the flourishing of Idealism in Victorian Britain: it arose not only from the impact of Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel, but also from dissatisfaction with the shriveled understanding of self implicit in empiricist theories of knowledge, and with the narrowed ethical responsibilities for the self under utilitarianism. In response, the Victorian Idealists crafted concepts of a self that—while immanent in the empirical self—exists fundamentally outside of time and space. By positing a self that is "connected with the spiritual world of values which expands before and beyond their immediate existence," they sought above all to provide a new model for the self's relation to community (158). The sequence of the fourteen essays in British Idealism and the Concept of the Self largely follows chronology, and moves as well from historically focused pieces on individual philosophers to broader essays that address the ways the Victorian and early-twentieth-century [End Page 494] British Idealists speak to enduring philosophical issues. Thus, for example, in the first essay, Jenny Keefe explains how and why the earliest Victorian Idealist, Ferrier, devoted An Introduction to the Philosophy of Consciousness (1838–39) to demolishing the notion of the "mind" that was the object of study in the empiricist psychology of the era, and to replacing it with philosophical reflection on the nature of subjectivity. Thence follow several essays each on the central figures of the 1870s and 1880s—Bradley, Caird, Green, and Bosanquet—focusing in many cases on the relation between these writers' metaphysics of the self and their ethical and political thought. They argued that if there is to be an ethics of free will, personal agency, and responsibility, there must be a continuous, non-contingent self. In the last of the author-focused essays, Gary L. Cesarz considers the ways in which McTaggart's account of the self as immaterial substance (in Some Dogmas of Religion [1906], but I would add "The Further Determination of the Absolute" [1890]) solves some logical problems in both materialist and social-constructionist accounts of the self, both then and now. In my view, the chapter that may be most helpful in clarifying what was at stake in the Victorian Idealists' non-empirical self is Mander's penultimate summary essay, "Idealism and the True Self." If one of the surprises in this book...

Automatic representation of knowledge structure: enhancing learning through knowledge structure reflection in an online course

Summary writing is an important skill that students use throughout their academic careers, writing supports reading and vocabulary skills as well as the acquisition of content knowledge. This exploratory and development-oriented investigation appraises the recently released online writing system, Graphical Interface of Knowledge Structure (GIKS) that provides structural feedback of students’ essays as network graphs for reflection and revision. Is the quality of students’ summary essays better with GIKS relative to some other common approaches? Using the learning materials, treatments, and procedure of a dissertation by Sarwar (Doctoral Thesis, University of Ottawa, 2012) but adapted for this setting, over a three-week period Grade 10 students (n = 180) read one of three physics lesson texts each week, wrote a summary essay of it, and then immediately received one of three counterbalanced treatments including reflection with GIKS, solving physics problems as multiple-choice questions, and viewing video information, and finally students rewrote the summary essay. All three treatments showed pre-to-post essay improvement in the central concepts subgraph structure that almost exactly matched the results obtained in the previous dissertation. GIKS with reflection obtained the largest improvement due to the largest increase in relevant links and the largest decrease for irrelevant links. The different treatments led to different knowledge structures in a regular way. These findings confirm those of Sarwar (2012) and support the use of GIKS as immediate focused formative feedback that supports summary writing in online settings.

Graduate Students' Reflections on Elder and End-of-Life Care for Prisoners.

The focus of this report was graduate nursing students' reflections on elder and end-of-life care for prisoners. The personal reflections of 21 graduate nursing students who attended a presentation by Susan J. Loeb on October 26, 2016 were included in this report. The title of the presentation was "Enhancing End-of-Life Care for Prisoners Through Partnering With the Prison Community." The student essays were synthesized to construct a summary essay, from which four themes were identified: aging in prison, dying in prison, ethical and professional issues in the elder and end-of-life care of prisoners, and ethical and professional issues in research involving elderly and end-of-life care of prisoners. These findings were interpreted from a global perspective in light of two different nursing perspectives: the humanbecoming tradition and the science of unitary human beings.

Effects of Summary and Argument Essay Tasks on the Learning of Multiple Texts

Effects of Summary and Argument Essay Tasks on the Learning of Multiple Texts

Distinguishing complex ideas about climate change: knowledge integration vs. specific guidance

ABSTRACTWe compared two forms of automated guidance to support students’ understanding of climate change in an online inquiry science unit. For specific guidance, we directly communicated ideas that were missing or misrepresented in student responses. For knowledge integration guidance, we provided hints or suggestions to motivate learners to analyze features of their response and seek more information. We guided both student-constructed energy flow diagrams and short essays at total of five times across an approximately week-long curriculum unit. Our results indicate that while specific guidance typically produced larger accuracy gains on responses within the curriculum unit, knowledge integration guidance produced stronger outcomes on a novel essay at posttest. Closer analysis revealed an association between the time spent revisiting a visualization and posttest scores on this summary essay, only for those students in the knowledge integration condition. We discuss how these gains in knowledge integration extend laboratory results related to ‘desirable difficulties’ and show how autonomous inquiry can be fostered through automated guidance.

Demilitarization in the Contemporary World, edited by Peter Stearns

in the Contemporary edited by Peter Steams. Urbana, Chicago and Springfield, University of Illinois Press, 2013. 265 pp. $55.00 US (cloth). Only a book on the imminent outbreak of world peace could be more unexpected than a volume dedicated to the contemporary state of demilitarization. A look at a newspaper in any country, any place in the world carries news of wars of every variety and the growing militarization, particularly in the US, of the police force, of civil society, of the government itself. Yet the editor and essayists in Peter Steams' collection in the Contemporary World make the case that the history of demilitarization is particularly important for the current moment. The word demilitarization can mean no more than demobilization in any given post-war period. Thought of this way it does not have much purchase--for mobilizations follow demobilization with depressing frequency. But a focus on particular cases of demilitarization allows an expanded definition and an analysis of the devolution of the militarization. The case studies include essays on post-war and post-unification Germany by Andrew Bickford and Jay Lockenour and an important discussion of the role of German peace movements by Holger Nehring. A second section focuses on Japan, with a discussion of constrained rearmament by Yoneyuki Sugita, Gerald Hook on the domestic and foreign pressures on Japanese security policies, Christopher Hughes on the push toward constitutional revision and a comparative essay on post-World War II demilitarization by Stephanie Trombley Averill. A concluding set of essays address, surprisingly, Central America. Peter Steams opens and closes the book with summary essays. Germany appears here not singly but doubly, even triply: the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), and the Berlin Republic as Jay Lockenour names Germany after reunification. Under the Allied Occupation all of Germany was demilitarized in the sense that it was demobilized. (However, unlike the recent American occupation of Iraq, a German police force was maintained in all four zones to keep order.) The same was true in Japan. In both places, remilitarization came at the behest of the United States, though both countries acquiesced. In both countries too there was popular resistance based directly on the recent experience of total war. In both, remilitarization was at best partial or, as Sugita puts it about Japan constrained. We can read the cases of Japan and Germany in two ways: how remilitarization is inevitable or how fierce the ongoing resistance to full military mobilization remains. The opening sentences of Stephanie Trombley Averill's essay, Demilitarization and Democracy in the Post-World War II World, evokes what seems a distant historical era when it was axiomatic that democracies did not begin wars, and the words demilitarization and democracy were synonymous (p. …

Toward a Model of Strategies and Summary Writing Performance

This study explores the construct of a summarization test task by means of single-group and multigroup structural equation modeling (SEM). It examines the interrelationships between strategy use and performance, drawing on data from 298 Taiwanese undergraduates’ summary essays and their self-reported strategy use. Single-group SEM analyses indicated that the task required multiple constructive strategies of comprehension and composition, including planning, evaluating, discourse synthesis, and source use strategies. The planning and evaluating strategies provided administrative control over other strategies used at varying degrees to improve summarization performance. Multigroup SEM analyses showed that the effects of the planning and evaluating strategies on the discourse synthesis and source use strategies appeared to be invariant across the high (n = 127) and low (n = 122) groups. However, the effects of the discourse synthesis and source use strategies on summarization performance varied across groups. The findings offer insight into the nature of summarization tasks and provide useful validity information for the test task. Implications of the findings are discussed in relation to second language writing assessment and pedagogy.

Testing Three Myths of Public Policy Reform

On occasion, titles oF books do indeed indicate precisely what they are about. This remark ably collaborative volume oF essays tests three persistent myths about government and public policy reForm. These myths assert that institutional structures, through lock-in efFects, path dependencies, and entrenched policy paradigms, can efFectively block reForms; that crises are a necessary prerequisite For Fundamental reForm; and that strong leadership is required to shepherd reForms into being. These myths are tested using nine case analyses oFsuccessFul, significant reForms?Fundamental, intended, and enForced changes (4)?in public policies and/or organizations. The nine case analyses are ably intro duced by an essay on the myths oF reForm by Duco Bannink and Sandra Resodihardjo. The book ends with two summary essays: a review oFthe case findings by Liesbet Heyse, Berber Lettinga, and Martijn Groenleer and a comment by Frank Baumgartner looking at the findings in terms oF punctuated equi librium theory.

Editor's Introduction

You look at the blank screen. Soon it will be filled with words. You’ll move words around, adding some, deleting others. In the end, if you are like me, you’ll think aloud, “Surely I will escape punishment in the hereafter for the penance paid writing these pages.” Perhaps you are one of the lucky ones. Maybe writing comes easily to you. For many of us, however, writing is akin to wearing a hair shirt. An argument could be made that writing sociology is a particularly onerous task. I suspect some of the difficulty we experience as writers is related to what we write about. After all, who among us has ever seen a “role,” a “status,” or a “society” for that matter? Our task in writing sociology is to convey abstractions in words that make them real, tangible, knowable. Science fiction writers also struggle to make abstract, imaginary worlds probable and believable. But our challenges in writing sociology are more complex than those faced by fiction writers. Unlike the writer of fiction, the writer of sociology cannot—in good conscience—confabulate. Chained to the wheel of realism, we must write in a manner that accurately resembles real social things. So, we must represent something that is hidden from most people and do it in a manner that convinces them it is, albeit unseen, nevertheless real. How do we accomplish this artful yet realist goal? Some of us retreat to the safe house of science. Here, we temporarily impound our imaginations and write as if we are members of a secret society whose manuscripts are intelligible only to fellow followers of social science esoterica. Some of us, in short, abandon the artful side of writing. But there are others amongst us who eschew the caged prose of science and seek some balance between the literary and the concrete. Gathered in this collection of short essays are some of the best examples of what we might call artful realism in sociology. Read them and you will encounter writers who struggle to find ways to join clever, subtle, and tasteful prose on the one hand, to life-like representations of real people and their lived experiences on the other. This Special Section on Writing Sociology is special in several ways, not the least of which is the list of contributors. Included among them are Kai Erikson, Howard Becker, Dorothy Smith, Ben Agger, and Hana Brown. I suspect most of you have heard of the first four contributors. Each one has made an indelible contribution to our discipline. Hana is a doctoral student in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. We are likely to hear much from her in the near future. Kai Erikson provides the lead essay. Read this and you might find yourself thinking anew the way you write sociology. Kai's essay conveys the idea of artful realism in two ways: in his prose and in the topics he addresses. Following Kai's article are four response essays. Read them carefully, they too address the topic of writing sociology. Moreover, like Kai's essay, they are good examples of how artful prose can make the abstractions at the heart of our discipline tangible, real, some might say, empirical. Importantly, not one of our four response essays is anything close to an “ode to Erikson.” Howard Becker, Dorothy Smith, Ben Agger, and Hana Brown each offer a different critique of Kai's assumptions about writing sociology. Read together, these varying evaluations of Erikson's article disclose a simple truth: there is no one trick to artfully writing society into existence. We can and do learn from others, surely; but our quest, some might say ordeal, is to find our own writing voice. Following this exchange, Kai provides a response to his four interlocutors. This is no shrill rebuttal, but a patient and thoughtful reply. It both sharpens points made in his lead essay while allowing for the real possibility that not everyone will write sociology as he does. A summary essay is written by Bill Knox, an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. I asked Bill to bring this exchange to a close for two reasons. He writes in the genre of artful realism and he cares deeply about teaching good writing to students of sociology. There is one thing common to these several essays. To paraphrase Chekov, each refrains from telling us the moon is shining, preferring instead to describe the glint of light on broken glass. Welcome to writing sociology.

Central Michigan University by Jack R. Westbrook

Book Reviews 169 eighteenth century, which owed much to increased transatlantic contact and exchange. As such, her work should be welcomed. Alex Murdoch University of Edinburgh Jack R. Westbrook. Central Michigan University. Mt. Pleasant, S.C.: Arcadia Publishing, 2007. Pp. 128. Introduction. Photographs. Paper, $19.99. Jack R. Westbrook's Central Michigan University is an arresting and eye-catching work of visual biography that charts the spatial evolution of CMU's Mount Pleasant campus. Beginning with the university's origins as the Central Michigan Normal School and Business Institute, which first held classes above a drugstore inMount Pleasant in 1892, Westbrook provides a visual tour of the institution's growth to the present day, with photographs that include campus buildings, portraits of former presidents and faculty members, and snapshots of student life. Billed as a companion piece to Westbrook's other pictorial histories on Michigan's oil and gas industry and the city of Mount Pleasant, Central Michigan University sweepingly demonstrates the many changes the university's expansion had on the cultural and physical landscape of mid-Michigan. The success or failure of Westbrook's book rests on his selection of photographs, and in this respect he succeeds admirably. Using the resources of CMU's Clarke Historical Library, Westbrook has found shots that convey both the physical presence of CMU's campus and the students and faculty who lived and worked in those buildings. Although the physical plant is the primary focus of Westbrook's book, it also includes intriguing photos that emphasize the lived element of CMU's history. The photo depicting students from the Central Michigan Normal School enjoying a marshmallow roast along the Chippewa River in 1906 or the one of CMU president William Boyd speaking to antiwar students who had occupied the ROTC building in 1970 (renaming it "Freedom Hall") are some of the striking snapshots peppered throughout the book. The main weakness of the work is relatively minor and ismore a function of the book's format than any fault of Westbrook's. Although the photos are visually interesting and the caption information well written, the photo-caption format is short on systematic analysis. The information presented seems disconnected, 170 Michigan Historical Review with little sense of why the institution developed in the way that it did over the years. One can argue that this was not Westbrook's intent, but it is unfortunate that the fixed Arcadia format did not allow him to include short, summary essays at the beginning of each chapter. Such essays would have gone a long way toward contextualizing the images in this book. Andrew D. Devenney Center for Transnational and Comparative History Central Michigan University ...

Teaching the Nitrogen Cycle and Human Health Interactions

An overview of components of the nitrogen cycle with Internet resources for students to explore is presented to discuss the ways this important cycle affects life. Beneficial uses include fertilizers, explosives, aerosol propellants and food packaging, and anesthetics; problems associated with nitrogen include NOx emissions, water pollution, and potential health effects. A learning cycle lesson on the nitrogen cycle is provided, along with pretest-posttest data (N-cycle drawings and responses to a 25-question test) from rural sixth grade students and urban high school students who participated in the activities. Both groups were enthusiastic about the lessons and showed significant improvement, although final scores of the sixth graders were low. Results of an additional experimental group-control group pretest-posttest study with undergraduate preservice elementary teachers indicated that students learned more when using the hands-on nitrogen cycle cards with objects and by writing related poetry (experimental condition) than by creating a nitrogen cycle diagram online through Internet searches for information and writing summary essays of cycle interactions. The high school and college students were highly motivated by the lessons and showed larger gains than sixth graders, indicating that the lessons are most appropriate for older students.

One Genome, One Piece of the Puzzle

The publication of species genomes is becoming almost commonplace--almost. In the last few months, the genomes of the honeybee (Wilson, 2006), the black cottonwood tree, a poplar (Stokstad, 2006), and the bacteria living in the gut of a parasitic worm (Stahl & Davidson, 2006) have been published. I must admit that I don't attend to this deluge of information too carefully. I do read summary essays that often accompany these publications, but that's about it. With so many other areas of biology to explore, I can't spend too much time on genomics. However when the genome of the purple sea urchin, Stronglyocentrotus purpuratus, was published in November (Sea Urchin Genome Sequencing Consortium et al., 2006), I did pay a little more attention to the results for a number of reasons. First, my interest was whetted by the Science cover photo of sea urchin larvae which caught my eye with their colors and delicacy. Also, when I was in high school I had a teacher who was involved in research on an anti-cancer drug derived from sea urchins. I don't think anything came of this work, but she woke me up to the beauty and mystery of these creatures. Finally, the summary of the findings on this genome made me want further information; this publication was more than just another run-of-the-mill genome-if such a thing exists. It is only a half dozen years since the publication of the human genome, and the number of species that have sequenced genomes is still minuscule relative to the diversity of life. The black cottonwood, Populus trichocarpa, was only the third plant to be sequenced, after Arabidopsis and rice. And though there are hundreds of thousands of named insect species, the honeybee is only the third insect to have its genome sequenced, along with fruit flies and mosquitoes: With such rarity, genome sequencing is still news, and as in any field where there is a scarcity of information, there is a wealth of surprises. Every article describing a new genome sequence highlights the unexpected in the findings: Honeybees have fewer genes for immunity than do other insects, even though bees live in close quarters, and the cottonwood sequence has been duplicated at least three times. This element of surprise is what makes genome exploration fun: there are wonders lurking around every genetic corner. Humans love to make generalizations from limited data, for example extrapolating all insects' genetic characteristics based on a couple of genomes. The only good thing about this dangerous habit is that it makes for a lot of wonderful surprises as assumptions are ripped to shreds by each new genome publication. The sea urchin genome is no exception, but it also has special importance for other reasons. Though u might seem surprising, this work provides crucial insights into the human genome. This is because, like the chordates--the taxon that humans belong to--the sea urchin is a deuterosome. And as its genome sequence verifies, this makes the sea urchin and other echinoderms more closely related to humans and other chordates than to other invertebrates such as insects, mollusks, and crustaceans (Pennisi, 2006). Finding out about sea urchin genes is another step in making sense of the human genome because it provides information about the genetic makeup of early chordates. and about where these genes might have originated. The sea urchin serves as a valuable outgroup for evolutionary comparisons. While the publication of the chimpanzee genome shed great light on the human genetic sequence, it is also important to have information about more distantly related species as points of comparison (Bottjer, Davidson, Peterson & Cameron. 2006? This made the mouse genome particularly useful, relative to that of the primates, but still more distant relatives, like the sea urchin, are also crucial for filling in the picture. History Yet another reason why the sea urchin genome merited a special section in the November 10. …

Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Region Centennial Forum: Summary Essay

Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Region Centennial Forum: summary essay. DOI:10.2458/azu_rangelands_v27i3_marston

Useful bodies Humans in the service of medical science in the twentieth century

In September 1998 a group of papers was presented at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London. This collective work was presented as a workshop on the history of experimentation on humans. Now, Jordan Goodman, Anthony McElligott, and Lara Marks have edited these eight papers into the new book Useful bodies: humans in the service of medical science in the twentieth century. The opening essay, “Making human bodies useful: historicizing medical experiments in the twentieth century,” makes two key points: first, that there is very little historical information available on the history of human experimentation; and second, that the focus for the papers in the book is the role of the state in nontherapeutic human experimentation. The authors argue that during the period from 1900 to 2000, the state held the position that it could use the bodies of individuals to meet its needs without explicit consent. This chapter is hard work for the lay reader who is not a historian. In fact, many readers would probably find it more interesting to return to the essay after reading the rest of the book. The following essays are grouped according to three questions: What is a human experiment? Who performs the experiments? Whose body is experimented on? Unfortunately, these questions are not specifically addressed within the essays, so, for the casual reader, the organizing principle is rather obscure. Four of the eight chapters deal with infectious agents, focusing on the study of germ warfare methods in Great Britain; the study of jaundice in mentally retarded children or in persons with rheumatoid arthritis in the United States and England, respectively; and the use of malaria to treat neurosyphilis in the United States. The remaining essays discuss experiments involving some form of radiation, ranging from atom bomb testing by Great Britain in Australia to the development of radiation therapy and the use of radioisotopes in the United States. As individual case studies, these chapters make fascinating reading. It would, however, have been helpful to include a brief summary essay that made explicit how the themes presented in the introductory essay were supported by the case reports. Useful bodies could have been titled Beyond Tuskegee, as it describes other less-well-known cases of highly debatable human research done in the last century. Aside from medical historians and fans of biomedical history, I can see this book being of interest to either journal clubs or teachers of science, ethics, and/or research methods. The well-documented essays cite a rich body of sources, though the inclusion of an index would have made the book more user friendly. There is some discussion of the research done in Nazi Germany in the initial essay, but the remainder of the book is devoted to studies in Great Britain, the United States, and, in one case, Australia (although that research was performed by the British Ministry of Defense). It would have been useful to include information on what nontherapeutic research was being done by states in the rest of the world during the same period. One issue that readers of the book will confront is how to evaluate the research that it documents from an ethical point of view. There is no doubt that the studies discussed in Useful bodies would never have been approved in the year 2004. Even though the focus of the book is history, not ethics, the approaches taken by the essayists — all academicians from diverse fields including science policy, science and medical history, internal medicine, and humanities — clearly range between judging the science according to the time in which it was done and judging it by current-day standards. Each reader must decide for him- or herself which standards to use. How will our work be judged by those who follow us?

:Documents from the History of Lutheranism 1517-1750

A unique resource: from the Reformation to Pietism This unique collection of excerpts from Lutheran historical and theological documents - many translated here for the first time - presents readers with a full picture of how the Lutheran movement developed in its thought and practice. The volume proceeds chronologically from Luther's lifetime to the beginnings of the Enlightenment. Each chapter begins with a summary essay and proceeds thematically. Covering not only theology but also church life, popular piety, and influential historical events, the more than 200 primary documents excerpted here show not only the evolution and development of Lutheran doctrine but also its devotional writings, hymns, liturgical texts, letters and diaries, satire, political documents, woodcuts, and pamphlet literature. Lund's judicious selection, careful translation, and helpful introductions acquaint readers with the turbulence and fervor of this revolutionary Christian movement, its struggles for survival and consolidation, its flowering in the age of orthodoxy and pietism, always with an eye to how it affected and was experienced by ordinary people.