How do children use informant niceness, meanness, and expertise when choosing between informant claims and crediting informants with knowledge? In Experiment 1, preschoolers met two experts providing conflicting claims for which only one had relevant expertise. Five-year-olds endorsed the relevant expert's claim and credited him with knowledge…

This paper presents the results of a Delphi study conducted over a two-month period in 2011. The purpose of the study was to identify reference sources that should be covered in basic reference courses taught in LIS programs in the United States. The Delphi method was selected for its appropriateness in soliciting expert opinions and assessing the…

Purpose: In this study, the authors investigated how well experts can adjust the settings of a commercial noise-reduction system to optimize the intelligibility for naive normal-hearing listeners. Method: In Experiment 1, 5 experts adjusted parameters for a noise-reduction system while aiming to optimize intelligibility. The stimuli consisted of…

Introduction: The paper discusses the often-repeated assertion that digitization makes libraries and librarians redundant by giving everyone access to the information they need without having to rely upon librarians as information middlemen. Method: Relevant articles both from research literature and from discussions in the public sphere…

Information spreads fast, but even faster with the use of social media. For instance, if one goes to twitter and searches "Farm Bill" it can be seen that many people have tweeted about the recent passing of the Farm Bill and re-tweeted information about this. This increased the attention given to this bill as seen by the hundreds of tweets on this…

This study explored the factors that are critical to the success of public (government) sector knowledge management initiatives and the lessons from private sector knowledge management and organizational learning that apply in the public sector. The goal was to create a concise guide, based on research-validated success factors, to aid government…

This article examines policy making processes in the area of teacher education (TE) in Finland and Norway. Particular attention is given to the roles different actors play in these processes and the potential effects of their involvement on the TE programs in the two countries. Contemporary policy processes are analyzed through a set of interviews…

The aim of this paper is to discuss different approaches to the quality (or uncertainty) of measurement data considering both historical examples and today's students' views. Today's teaching of data analysis is very much focussed on the application of statistical routines (often called the "Gaussian approach" to error analysis). Studies on…

This paper explores the interactions of a groupwork team composed of both local and exchange students, with heterogeneous competence in English, in an English-medium CLIL context at a technical university in Catalonia. Plurilingual and multimodal conversation analysis is used to trace how the students jointly complete an academic task. The…

Teacher in Australia is determined as an active participant of professional community with high level of collaboration, professional development coherent activities and collaborative learning practice. Thus, teacher quality is one of critical factors affecting student outcomes. The article touches upon the issue of the potential to improve…

The paper reports on an empirical study based on qualitative interviews with staff from four Australian universities. These universities are shown to be undergoing significant social change as processes of marketisation impact on the everyday practices of academic workers. The universities are analysed as sites of contestation between the new…

In this paper, in order to pursue the conversation begun by Fages and Albe ("Cult Stud Sci Educ" 2014), I highlight three conceptual contributions that could be made by familiarizing nanoscience and nanotechnology researchers and engineers with the work being carried out in science and technology studies and public understanding of…

This article concerns a study that examines the attitudes of parents, who have had babies in neonatal care, to sharing their babies' routinely collected health data for research purposes. A participatory methodology was applied to the design of the study; a group of eleven parents who had all previously had babies in neonatal care were involved in…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the benefits of higher education in mid-life from the perspective of life course agency. Studies concerning the benefits of degree-oriented higher education have been mainly conducted using survey questionnaires and quantitative methods. In order to gain a more comprehensive picture, this qualitative…

Teaching students with severe disabilities is a complex endeavor, and the skills and qualities of expert teachers for students with severe disabilities are not well understood. A lack of understanding about the unique roles and expertise of teachers of students with severe disabilities can influence the quality of education students with severe…