This essay describes how the use of a concept inventory has enhanced professional development and curriculum reform efforts of a faculty teaching community. The Host Pathogen Interactions (HPI) teaching team is composed of research and teaching faculty with expertise in HPI who share the goal of improving the learning experience of students in nine linked undergraduate microbiology courses. To support evidence-based curriculum reform, we administered our HPI Concept Inventory as a pre- and postsurvey to approximately 400 students each year since 2006. The resulting data include student scores as well as their open-ended explanations for distractor choices. The data have enabled us to address curriculum reform goals of 1) reconciling student learning with our expectations, 2) correlating student learning with background variables, 3) understanding student learning across institutions, 4) measuring the effect of teaching techniques on student learning, and 5) demonstrating how our courses collectively form a learning progression. The analysis of the concept inventory data has anchored and deepened the team's discussions of student learning. Reading and discussing students' responses revealed the gap between our understanding and the students' understanding. We provide evidence to support the concept inventory as a tool for assessing student understanding of HPI concepts and faculty development.
Eighty percent of the respondents, women journalists in Washington, report sexual harassment is a problem for women journalists in general, and 60 percent say it has been problem for them personally.
This study compared news coverage of Presidents Carter and Reagan at times of crisis. Using content analysis to examine stories sampled from the New York Times and Washington Post, this study found news stories became more wordy in crisis times. For Carter this was when Iran captured hostages in November 1979, and for Reagan it was the revelation of arms sales to Iran in November 1986. The study found news stories were not especially readable before or after crises, but these stories did tend to use action verbs. The study found that in crisis the president tends more often to disappear while spokesmen, such as press secretaries, speak for him.
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