Implementing faculty computer literacy programs

A faculty computer literacy grant underwrote distribution and analysis of surveys of faculty computer use and expectations, publication of an extensive newsletter, seminars and workshops, and a computers-on-loan program in which faculty members could take out portable computers like library books. Survey results, successes, and failures are discussed.     

Are We on the Same Page? College Students’ and Faculty’s Perception of Student Plagiarism in Taiwan

The rapid development of the Internet has granted college students easy access to vast amount of online resources, and to some degree has increased the chances of plagiarism problems. A number of studies have suggested that both faculty’s and students’ perceptions toward plagiarism are found to be influential on students’ plagiarizing behaviors, and limited research has been done to explore the perceptional differences between these two roles. This study aims to respond to the growing educational concerns about plagiarism by comparing the perceptions held by faculty and college students. A total of 229 faculty and 634 college students in Taiwan completed the Perceptions of Student Plagiarism Questionnaire designed for the study. The results reveal that faculty held stricter standards than those of students. Results also indicate various causes of plagiarism, such as no interest in the learning subjects, lack of citation knowledge, or lack of research ability. Furthermore, significant disciplinary differences were shown to contribute to students’ plagiarism perception; the results reveal that most students with an Arts or Communication major held a relatively adverse thinking toward plagiarism. Last, this study provides research-based strategies for school and faculty to reduce the likelihood of plagiarism.     

Library Instruction,Intervention and Immersion: A 5-Year Study of Religion and the Arts

A religion faculty member approached the author after he gave a presentation to the faculty at Waldorf College on integrated library instruction. She expressed disappointment at her students’ scholarly performance on a major research paper she assigns every semester. The ensuing discussion resulted in a campus collaboration among the author, the faculty member, the campus writing center, and the academic achievement center. This article reports on the results of a five-year study on intervention and immersion of library instruction for the class Religion and the Arts at a small liberal arts college.     

Make the Context Work for You: Faculty in a Changing Academic Medicine Landscape

Academic medicine’s landscape is dynamically adjusting. The changes are accelerating and these alterations are impacting both the faculty workforce as a whole and individual faculty members. This article reviews workforce and institutional changes within academic medicine and supports the need for faculty members to adapt to this changing landscape. Resources to maintain an understanding of these ongoing changes are reviewed. A faculty life-cycle model is proposed as a context for developing a personal action plan. Career management steps are suggested to facilitate career productivity and satisfaction. Finally, we propose that psychologists, being human behavior experts, are well positioned to contribute within the transformation of academic medicine.     

Business Faculty Perceptions and Actions Regarding Ethics Education

This paper examines faculty perceptions regarding ethical behavior among colleagues and students, and faculty practices with regard to teaching ethics in three institutions over a 4-year period. Faculty reported an uneven pattern of unethical behavior among colleagues over the period. A majority of business courses included ethics, however as both a specific topic on the syllabus and within course discussions. The percentage of courses with ethics discussions increased in 2006, however, the time allocated to these discussions decreased. These results suggest that faculty are approaching ethics instruction less formally, raising concerns over the success of curriculum integration.     

Comparison of Engagement with Ethics Between an Engineering and a Business Program

Increasing university students’ engagement with ethics is becoming a prominent call to action for higher education institutions, particularly professional schools like business and engineering. This paper provides an examination of student attitudes regarding ethics and their perceptions of ethics coverage in the curriculum at one institution. A particular focus is the comparison between results in the business college, which has incorporated ethics in the curriculum and has been involved in ethics education for a longer period, with the engineering college, which is in the nascent stages of developing ethics education in its courses. Results show that student attitudes and perceptions are related to the curriculum. In addition, results indicate that it might be useful for engineering faculty to use business faculty as resources in the development of their ethics curricula.     

Job Evaluation and Gender: The Case of University Faculty

This study examined the effects of students' and professors' sex on student evaluations of professors' teaching effectiveness. Ratings of over four hundred faculty made by over nine thousand students were analyzed. After controlling for a large number of variables, the main results showed that (a) male faculty were given significantly higher evaluations on global teacher effectiveness and academic competence than female faculty; (b) when controlling for extraneous variables, female faculty were not found to be rated as more sensitive to student needs than male faculty; and (c) when making overall, global judgments of faculty performance, students seem to place more weight on academic competence for male faculty than for female faculty.     

The faculty psychology of Thomas Reid

Contradictory versions of Reid's faculty psychology have been presented. A reexamination of Reid's writings suggests that the term, faculty, was used not as a classificatory device but rather to refer to innate, universal, and active mental powers. Being active, the faculties are one of the basic causes of observable psychological phenomena. The relation of the faculties to other mental powers is considered. A new listing and classification of such powers is compared with that presented in 1936 by H. D. Spoerl which has been used as the basis for much of the subsequent analysis of Reid's faculty psychology.     

High Aspirations: Differences in Employee Satisfaction Between University Faculty and Staff

Employee satisfaction surveys were examined for five universities in the US, UK and Canada, selected because they presented results for faculty and other staff separately. Faculty consistently score more negatively on employee satisfaction across a wide range of areas. The most negative responses are for areas such as personal/worklife balance, work demands/workload, university direction, and whether the employee would choose to work at the same institution again/would recommend it for employment. The results are consistent with previous studies which have shown that education level is negatively associated with job satisfaction. The results suggest that university faculty have high aspirations, since in a number of indicators faculty working conditions appear superior to those of staff (tenure; average income; sabbatical leaves; work control; involvement and consultation in university decision-making), although junior faculty prior to tenure may experience more stress than staff. Employers undertaking employee satisfaction surveys need to take into account systematic differences in aspirations among their employees, when interpreting survey results.     

THE FILE DRAWER EFFECT AND PUBLICATION RATES IN MENSTRUAL CYCLE RESEARCH

The file drawer problem refers to a publication bias for positive results, leading to studies which support the null hypothesis being relegated to the file drawer. The assumption is that researchers are unable to publish studies with nonsignificant findings. A survey of investigators studying the menstrual cycle showed this assumption to be unwarranted. Much of the research did not lend itself to a hypothesis-testing model. A more important contribution to the likelihood of publication was research productivity, and researchers whose first study was published were more likely to have continued their work.     

Faculty Perceptions of Student Self Plagiarism: An Exploratory Multi-university Study

The purpose of this research study was to evaluate faculty perceptions regarding student self-plagiarism or recycling of student papers. Although there is a plethora of information on plagiarism and faculty who self-plagiarize in publications, there is very little research on how faculty members perceive students re-using all or part of a previously completed assignment in a second assignment. With the wide use of plagiarism detection software, this issue becomes even more crucial. A population of 340 faculty members from two private universities at three different sites was surveyed in Fall 2012 semester regarding their perceptions of student self-plagiarism. A total of 89 faculty responded for a return rate of 26.2 %. Overall, institutional policies on self-plagiarism did not exist and faculty did not clearly understand the concept and believed their students did not either. Although faculty agreed students need to be educated on self-plagiarism, faculty assumed students had previously been educated on plagiarism as well as self-plagiarism; only 13 % ensured students understood this concept.     

Verbal learning and visuomotor attention in Alzheimer's disease and geriatric depression

We compared the verbal learning and visuomotor attention of 34 Alzheimer's patients and 18 depressive patients. Verbal learning was assessed using The Hopkins Verbal Learning Test--Revised (HVLT--R); visuomotor attention was assessed using the Trail Making Test (TMT). The Alzheimer's patients had significantly lower scores on immediate and delayed recall of a word list. There was a nonsignificant trend in this group toward a fewer number of true positives and a greater number of false positives. Alzheimer's patients were significantly slower on Trails A, with a nonsignificant trend toward slower performance on Trails B. No difference was observed in accuracy of attentional processing. The results are discussed in terms of other factors, such as stage of cognitive decline, which might have influenced the findings.     

解读不显著结果：基于500个实证研究的量化分析

不显著结果(如, p > 0.05)在心理学研究中十分常见, 且容易被误解为接受零假设的证据, 并可能导致分组匹配研究的错误推断或者忽视被小样本的不显著结果掩盖的真实效应。但国内目前尚无实证研究对不显著结果的普遍性及其解读进行调查。本研究调查500篇中文心理学实证研究, 统计其摘要中出现与不显著结果相关的阴性陈述的频率, 判断并统计基于阴性陈述的推断准确性, 并使用贝叶斯因子对不显著结果中包含t值的研究进行重新评估。结果表明, 36%的摘要提及不显著结果, 共包含236个阴性陈述。其中, 41%的阴性陈述对不显著结果的解读出现偏差(如, 解读为支持了零假设)。对包含t值的研究进行贝叶斯因子分析, 结果显示仅有5.1%的不显著结果可以提供强证据支持零假设(BF₀₁ > 10)。与先前对国际心理学期刊的调查结果相比(32%的摘要包含阴性陈述; 72%的阴性陈述对不显著结果的解读错误), 中文心理学期刊中报告不显著结果的比例更高, 且对不显著结果解读错误的比例更低。但国内研究者仍需进一步加强对不显著结果的认识, 推广适于评估不显著结果的统计方法。     

ORMA: A strategy to reduce Psychology's replication problems

Because of their historical reliance upon null hypothesis statistical tests (NHST), the human sciences have developed a number of potentially problematic research literatures. While aware of the file drawer effect since the 1970s, scientists have been largely unsuccessful at addressing its pernicious effects. Because significant results have a greater likelihood of being published than do nonsignificant effects, many of our research literatures might currently be constructed upon a series of Type I errors and inflated effect sizes. A method (called Original Replication of Meta-Analyses or ORMA) has recently been developed for identifying problematic research literatures and offering a method to address the problems due to publication bias. Philosophers of science have long argued that a chief reason for science's preeminence as a source of knowledge rests in its ability to self-correct. Researchers in the human sciences are now able to empirically test their research literatures to ascertain which are in need of repair. The use of ORMA serves to lessen the problems that led to the recent calls for bans on significant/nonsignificant statistics in human science research. ORMA will also improve psychology's ability to successfully replicate its research findings.