Asynchronous online discussion boards are an effective tool for developing and enhancing critical thinking skills and writing in online as well as in-person courses. In this teacherready research review, we examine the literature on the benefits of implementing asynchronous online discussion boards as a way of fostering critical thinking and writing skills in psychology courses. We subsequently discuss some of the challenges associated with online discussion boards and offer solutions to address them. One of the primary challenges is the lack of participation or high-level participation of students. To address this challenge, we outline strategies for communicating the purpose and value of the discussion, setting clear expectations for responses, and designing a structure for the discussion. We also review best practices for designing effective question prompts, innovative approaches to discussion questions, and strategies to engage students in the discussion. Sample question prompts for psychology courses as well as a grading rubric for the discussions are provided. Finally, the role of the instructor in facilitating the discussion and techniques for doing so effectively are discussed.
Through an analysis of the structure of the community mediation movement in the United States and an ethnography of the practices of mediators in local programs, this paper examines how community mediation is made, and how it is ideologically constituted. The ideology of community mediation is produced through an interplay among three ideological projects or visions of community mediation and organizational models, and by the selection and differential use of mediators to handle cases. We argue that ideologies are formed through the mobilization of symbolic resources by groups promoting different projects. Central to the production of mediation ideology is a struggle over the symbolic resources of community justice and consensual justice. Although various groups propose differing conceptions of community justice, they share a similar commitment to consensual justice, and this similarity is produced through reinterpretations of the same symbols. The ambiguities in community mediation are, it appears, being overtaken by consensus on the nature of the mediation process itself.
Thirty fifth-and sixth-grade students were given extensive proactive instruction on the content of a computer-based problem-solving game called Rocky's Boots. Participants were then divided into three treatment groups that received either problem-solving training, problem-solving and self-monitoring training, or no further training. The monitored problem-solving group solved more complex problems than either of the other two groups, and they took less time to solve those complex problems. The specific impact of the monitoring training is discussed as evidence for the importance of strategy monitoring in learning to solve problems. Results are discussed as evidence of the potential of proactive instruction on problem-solving performance. Preparation of this article was supported by a research leave sponsored by the Research Fund of the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences of Tulane University. We wish to thank two anonymous reviewers for invaluable comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript.
A major challenge for scholars seeking new directions in sociolegal research is the persistence of old paradigms and assumptions about law. The challenge for the new is not to be cast as part of the old by efforts that assimilate its methods, goals, and results to earlier approaches. Such efforts, aimed at comparison and clarification, tend to “domesticate” the new, or in Boa Santos's words “doubly institutionalize” a developing project by reading the order of a conventional analysis into the emergent order appearing in the interstices of new scholarly work. In this essay we focus on interpretivism as a developing project in sociolegal research. In particular, we discuss three aspects of interpretive research that are at the center of current debates in sociolegal theory: meaning construction and the dynamics of power, legal ideology, and knowledge as politics. Our discussion focuses on different readings of ideology, on different understandings of power, and on the politics of interpretive research connected with these readings. To illuminate the struggles over these points and at the same time illustrate the process of domestication, we begin with a recent paper by David Trubek and John Esser, “‘Critical Empiricism’ in American Legal Studies.” Their paper lays out a treatment of ideology and politics that provides a basis for our broader discussion of interpretive work in the second half of this essay.
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