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For the thirty-third year, the Research and Theory Division of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) is sponsoring the publication of these Proceedings. This is Volume #2 of the 33rd "Annual Proceedings of Selected Papers on the Practice of Educational Communications and Technology." This volume includes papers presented at the national convention of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology held in Anaheim, California. The papers in this volume primarily deal with instruction and training issues. Papers dealing with research and development are contained in the companion volume (Volume #1). (Individual papers contain references, tables, and figures.) [For Volume 1, see ED514646.]

This report summarizes a panel discussion among five college administrators who have initiated or taken part in restructuring efforts in their states: Herman Blake, vice chancellor for undergraduate education at Indiana University-Purdue University; Ronald Carrier, president of James Madison University (Virginia); Gordon Davies, director of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia; Judith Ramaley, president of Portland State University (Oregon); and Charles Reed, chancellor of the State University System in Florida. Following statements by each panel member, their responses to questions from the audience are provided. Topics covered include the following: meaning of "restructuring," the implementation process and its resulting consequences, financial constraints and societal needs and expectations. cultural change, course elimination, implementation of new technologies, school stability, funding needs, the reward structure, transforming the undergraduate student culture from one of credit acquisition to one of learning, resource allocation and curriculum change, accountability and production figures, faculty and administrator roles, and cutting rules and regulations. (CK/DB)

The "International Society for the Social Studies (ISSS) Annual Conference Proceedings" is a peer-reviewed professional publication published once a year following the annual conference. The following papers are included in the 2015 proceedings: (1) Local History and Local Culture at the Core of Elementary Social Studies Curriculum (C. Agcaoili and S. Oshihara); (2) An Analysis of Enrolment in Advanced Placement Classes in Florida from the 2010 to 2011 School Years (B. Bittman); (3) Looking Beyond the Textbook: Multimodal Intertextuality in a Secondary Social Studies Classroom (T. Brown and S. Nance); (4) School/Family Communication and Involvement: A Top Ten List for Elementary School Teachers (S. H. Bowden and C. Corlis); (5) Bi-epistemic Research in a Policy Context: Current Findings and Subsequent Studies (L. Cherubini); (6) Replacing the Birth Language for Internationally Adopted Children: Linguistic and Cognitive Effects (A. P. Davies); (7) Strategies for Managing Culturally Diverse Virtual Teams: Creating a Feeling of Globalness (M. Flammia); (8) Neoliberalism and Privatization of Urban Health Care Facilities in Bangladesh (K. S. Haq); (9) Engaging Students through the Dynamic Learning Approach (M. M. Hussein); (10) Role of Cultural Diplomacy in Strengthening Diplomatic Relations: A Case Study on U.S.-Bangladesh Relations (M. T. Islam and M. N. Nur); (11) Just Eat It: An Examination of the Sociological Factors that Influence the Eating Habits of College Students (A. Minnick); (12) Why We Should be Skeptical of Bandura's Bobo Dolls (A. Pulido); (13) Opportunity Costs of Planning with Mandated Assessments: A Case Study of Fourth Grade Social Studies (R. Reed); (14) RCAIntervention: An Intervention System for Traditional, Blended, and Online Courses (J. Reynolds and C. Cummings); (15) Millennials at the Ballot Box: Where Have All the Young Voters Gone? (M. L. Rogers); (16) Impacts of Socio-Economic Background on Participation in Various Sport Types (H. I. Sengör); (17) Using Film to teach Character Education and Social Justice Education in Social Studies (C. Van Zandt); (18) Creating lessons with the C3 Framework and Digital Literacy (C. Van Zandt and L. Smith); and (19) Examining Students' Patterns Based on Their Historical Knowledge and Ability by Cluster Analysis (D. Yongjun). (Individual papers contain references.) [For the 2014 proceedings, see ED565293.]

Academic advising plays an important role in students' decision-making in higher education. Data-driven methods provide useful recommendations to students to help them with degree completion. Several course recommendation models have been proposed in the literature to recommend courses for the next semester. One aspect of the data that has yet to be explored is the suitability of the recommended courses taken together in a semester. Students may face more difficulty coping with the workload of courses if there is no relationship among courses taken within a semester. To address this problem, we propose to employ session-based approaches to recommend a set of courses for the next semester. In particular, we test two session-based recommendation models, CourseBEACON and CourseDREAM. Our experimental evaluation shows that session-based methods outperform existing popularity-based, sequential, and non-sequential recommendation approaches. Accurate course recommendation can lead to better student advising, which, in turn, can lead to better student performance, lower dropout rates, and better overall student experience and satisfaction. [For the complete proceedings, see ED630829.]

Clustering of educational data allows similar students to be grouped, in either crisp or fuzzy sets, based on their similarities. Standard approaches are well suited to identifying common student behaviors; however, by design, they put much less emphasis on less common behaviors or outliers. The approach presented in this paper employs fuzzing clustering in the identification of these outlier behaviors. The algorithm is an iterative one, where clustering is applied, outliers identified, the data restricted to the outliers, and the process repeated. This approach produces a clustering that is crisp between each iteration and fuzzy within. It arose as a consequence of trying to cluster student progress trajectories in an adaptive learning platform. Included are results from applying the repeated fuzzy clustering algorithm to data from multiple courses and semesters at the University of Central Florida, (N=5,044). [For the full proceedings, see ED599096.]

Simplified categorizations have often led to college students being labeled as full-time or part-time students. However, at many universities student enrollment patterns can be much more complicated, as it is not uncommon for students to alternate between full-time and part-time enrollment each semester based on finances, scheduling, or family needs. While prior research has established that full-time students maintain better outcomes than their part-time counterparts, little study has examined the impact of mixed enrollment patterns on academic outcomes. In this paper, we apply a Hidden Markov Model to identify students' enrollment strategies according to three different categories: part-time, full-time, and mixed enrollment. According to the enrollment classification we investigate and compare the academic performance outcomes of each group. Analysis of data collected from the University of Central Florida from 2008 to 2017 indicates that mixed enrollment students are closer in performance to full-time students, than part-time students. More importantly, during their part-time semesters, mixed-enrollment students significantly outperform part-time students. Such a finding suggests that increased engagement through the occasional full-time enrollment leads to better overall outcomes. [For the full proceedings, see ED599096.]

This paper will discuss some assignments using freeware/shareware instructors can find on the Web to use to provide students with hands-on experience in this arena. Also, the college, Palm Beach State College, via a grant with the U.S. Department of Labor, has recently purchased a unique cyber security device that simulates cyber security attacks upon servers/hosts/devices. Information on this is also discussed and included herein. [For the full proceedings, see ED571252.]

This paper is part of a larger study that focuses on how today's community college students are paying for their education. Analysis of the data collected for this study shows that students who cohabit display distinctly different characteristics than single, divorced and married students. These include such things as being more likely to have no immediate family with a college degree, and being more likely to work more than 20 hours per week while studying than other unmarried students. This paper brings the particular difficulties with funding and academics faced by cohabiting students at a large urban community college in the south into sharper focus by contrasting their situations with married, divorced, and single students. (Contains 4 tables)

The amount of information contained in any educational data set is fundamentally constrained by the instructional conditions under which the data are collected. In this study, we show that by redesigning the structure of traditional online courses, we can improve the ability of educational data mining to provide useful information for instructors. This new design, referred to as Online Learning Modules, blends frequent learning assessment as seen in intelligent tutoring systems into the structure of conventional online courses, allowing learning behavior data and learning outcome data to be collected from the same learning module. By applying relatively straightforward clustering analysis to data collected from a sequence of four modules, we are able to gain insight on whether students are spending enough time studying and on the effectiveness of the instructional materials, two questions most instructors ask each day. [For the full proceedings, see ED593090.]

The unprecedented increase in the foreign-born population in the United States since the 1970s, low post secondary graduation rates, combined with the requirement of a higher education degree in the U.S. labor market precipitated this study. Since foreign-born students are an integral part of the U.S. population, understanding the challenges faced by foreign-born students in higher educational institutions will create an avenue for recommending solutions to many of these challenges, thereby increasing their educational attainment and economic productivity and ultimately preparing more Americans for the competitive 21st century global market. This study investigates the challenges faced by foreign-born students in a state college and solicited suggestions for improvement in foreign-born student achievement. [For the complete proceedings, see ED590245.]

Fruitfully grappling with the complexity of contemporary issues of social justice in education requires intimate knowledge of their historical roots. This historical case study, anchored by the oral histories of queer activists, is designed to reveal the complex inner-workings of a queer rights movement amongst faculty, staff, and students in an a large public institution of higher education during a critical juncture in queer acceptance on campus, offering insight into how queer people and allies maneuvered within largely homophobic higher education institutions to incrementally change both minds and laws. This paper is of both historical and modern significance as queer people continue to struggle to claim and maintain their civil rights and human dignities both on and off college campuses.

We present an analysis of log data from a semester's use of the OpenDSA eTextbook system with the goal of determining the most difficult course topics in a data structures course. While experienced instructors can identify which topics students most struggle with, this often comes only after much time and effort, and does not provide real-time analysis that might benefit an intelligent tutoring system. Our factors included the fraction of wrong answers given by student, results from Item Response Theory, and the rate of model answer and hint use by students. We grouped exercises by topic covered to yield a list of topics associated with the harder exercises. We found that a majority of these exercises were related to algorithm analysis topics. We compared our results to responses given by a sample of experienced instructors, and found that the automated results match the expert opinions reasonably well. We investigated reasons that might explain the over-representation of algorithm analysis among the difficult topics, and hypothesize that visualizations might help to better present this material. [For the full proceedings, see ED592609.]

The IADIS CELDA 2012 Conference intention was to address the main issues concerned with evolving learning processes and supporting pedagogies and applications in the digital age. There had been advances in both cognitive psychology and computing that have affected the educational arena. The convergence of these two disciplines is increasing at a fast pace and affecting academia and professional practice in many ways. Paradigms such as just-in-time learning, constructivism, student-centered learning and collaborative approaches have emerged and are being supported by technological advancements such as simulations, virtual reality and multi-agents systems. These developments have created both opportunities and areas of serious concerns. This conference aimed to cover both technological as well as pedagogical issues related to these developments. The IADIS CELDA 2012 Conference received 98 submissions from more than 24 countries. Out of the papers submitted, 29 were accepted as full papers. In addition to the presentation of full papers, short papers and reflection papers, the conference also includes a keynote presentation from internationally distinguished researchers. Individual papers contain figures, tables, and references.

Excessive college course withdrawals are costly to the student and the institution in terms of time to degree completion, available classroom space, and other resources. Although generally well quantified, detailed analysis of the reasons given by students for course withdrawal is less common. To address this, a text mining analysis was performed on open-ended, verbatim, student comments in which students explained their reason(s) for course withdrawal. The text for all comments was extracted from the course withdrawals database of Florida State College at Jacksonville, a large, diverse, multi-campus institution located in northeast Florida. An initial set of 616 comments from the fall 2010 term was used to develop a preliminary text mining model which categorized 96.1% of all records. The model was retained and further tested using a second set of 679 comments from the spring 2011 term and found to categorize 98.7% of the term records. Combined data from both terms (n = 1,295) was used to produce a final text mining model containing eleven node categories. Model node categories were labeled referencing a framework of prior empirical work in the area of student course withdrawal. Leading academic rationales include course characteristics (especially those involving student preparedness, satisfaction, and delivery mode), faculty satisfaction, and schedule adjustments. Leading non-academic rationales include personal issues especially involving job/work, family, financial, and health. Record classification data from the model were also exported and explored to further group and summarize results. Principal Components Analysis of all data from both terms revealed four components which accounted for 45% of the total variance with the first two components involving instructional delivery and student personal issues accounting for 24% of the variance. Hierarchical Cluster Analysis and Multiple Correspondence Analysis were also used to confirm results suggesting major academic withdrawal reasons to include negative course perceptions and to a lesser degree negative faculty perceptions. Non-academic rationales were found to center on job-work, personal, and time-schedule issues. Limitations and implications for institutional research and practice are presented and discussed. Additional Model Diagrams by Primary Node Category (fall 2010) are appended. (Contains 12 tables and 9 figures.)

The purpose of this study was to analyze participants' levels of hemoglobin as they performed arithmetic mental calculations using Optical Topography (OT, helmet type brain-scanning system, also known as Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy or fNIRS). A central issue in cognitive neuroscience involves the study of how the human brain encodes and manipulates information, including mental calculation. Recently, functional neuro-imaging studies have begun to clarify how the human brain performs mental calculations. fNIRS is an imaging technique capable of measuring changes in the relative concentration of hemoglobin the in the cerebral cortex of the brain (Hoshi & Tamura, 1993; Villringer et al., 1993; Koizumi et al., 2003). It is well known that near-infrared light of a wavelength between 650 nm and 950 nm can penetrate living tissue where it is specifically absorbed by hemoglobin (Strangman et al., 2002). By illumination the surface of the brain with near-infrared light of two specific wavelengths (695 nm for deoxy- and 830 nm for the oxygen-carrying oxyhemoglobin) changes in the concentrations of oxy- and deoxyhemoglobin can be monitored and allow conclusions about the energy consumption, or activation of the brain region during the performance of cognitive tasks. Twelve undergraduate and graduate college-level students participated in scanning session. Differences in brain activity were found based on mental calculation strategies. There were there different levels of oxy-hemoglobin: low, moderate, and high. The levels of activity were related to participants' mental strategies as they solve the exercises. Students who used more rote memorization tended to show moderate to low hemoglobin oxygenation. These results may have implications for how important rote memorization of arithmetic facts might be. Other results and possible implications are discussed in this article. (Contains 6 tables and 22 figures.)

This study serves as the preliminary analyses of a pilot study of community college students who persisted through their remedial classes and their programs of study and had attained the associate degree at a multicultural community college. This study is informed by Tinto's academic integration model, Astin's social involvement model and Freire's critical theory with attention to the ways that race, class, gender, the economy, education, religion, and sexual orientation interact to construct a social system. The researcher's goal was to identify how learning community experiences, notably the mentoring and networking opportunities, might have influenced experiences of the underprepared student. Individual Interview Protocol for Pilot Study is appended. (Contains 2 tables and 3 figures.)

This study examines the association between three outcomes of the freshman and sophomore years (retention, academic achievement and student rating of instruction) and the amount of exposure to three types of instructors (regular full-time faculty, adjunct faculty and graduate teaching assistants). The growing reliance in higher education on instructors who are not part of the permanent, full-time workforce that has traditionally constituted the professoriate is well documented. Since 1981, the number of part-time faculty employed by colleges and universities has grown by 79 percent, while the share of faculty hired on the traditional tenure track has grown at a much lower rate (Anderson, 2002). According to a report by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce (as cited in Cox, 2000) non-tenure track faculty make up almost half of the teaching staff in many humanities & social science disciplines. Generally, studies have focused on the direct relationships between exposure to adjunct faculty and student outcomes, without taking into effect the background characteristics and other enrollment experiences that may affect these outcomes. The present study attempts to remedy that knowledge gap by modeling student outcomes as a function of exposure to different instructor types while controlling first for variables known to be associated with these outcomes. In this study, part-time faculty will be referred to as "adjuncts." Adjuncts' employment may be long or short-term, but is paid on a part-time contract outside of the regular faculty pay plan. Full-time instructors and lecturers on multi-year contracts but not on tenure-earning lines are included here with the regular, full-time "faculty members."

Prompted by two recent studies (Knight, 2001; Trower & Chalt, 2002), this inquiry sought to determine whether the unhurried national diversity trends have been as sluggish at the University of South Florida (USF), in Tampa, Florida. To provide a broader perspective, this study extends to faculty, staff and students, and considers both local and national demographic and local economic data. This post hoc analysis involved a population that included several hundreds of thousands of students, faculty and staff between 1983 and 2001 at USF. Sex and Racial/Ethnic groups were compared on representation and salaries over time for trends and across disciplines/salary levels for differences. Because populations rather than samples were used, no tests of significance were used. The results show that being female or a non-Asian resident minority tends to reduce one's chances of being either in a high salaried job at USF, or job training environment as a student. Basically the same phenomenon occurs among students, faculty, and staff. Nationally, a rather strong relationship occurs both among students and staff in that more highly paid positions and disciplines tend to have greater percentages of whites, non-residents, Asians and males, whereas less highly paid positions and disciplines tend to have greater percentages of underrepresented minorities and particularly females. Diversity trends in higher education have most closely paralleled local and national population trends in disciplines where pay for faculty and program graduates is comparatively low. These analyses make it clear that USF reflects higher education in the United States quite well with regards to consistent underrepresentation for non-Asian minorities and for females, and particularly so in the more highly paid disciplines. (Contains 9 figures and 3 footnotes.)

The study behaviors of Spanish-speaking students at a large two-year public college in the United States were studied using the Inventario de Comportamiento de Estudio (ECI) (L. Bliss, D. Vinay, and F. Koenigner), the Spanish version of the Learning and Study Strategies Inventory (C. Weinstein, 1987). Behaviors of these students were compared with those of students at both a large public university in Mexico and a small private elite Mexican university. The ECI was administered to a sample of 322 Spanish-speaking students at Miami-Dade Community College, Florida. Factor analysis was used to determine the factor structure of the responses on the ICE. This factor structure was compared with those obtained from the private and public Mexican universities in previous studies by L. Bliss and others, and L. Villa (1998) respectively. The factor structure of ICE responses from the Florida sample resembles the structure obtained from the Mexican public university and is consistent with the factor structure found at the Mexican private university. It appears that students at the Mexican public university and the U.S. community college are more concerned about long-term study behaviors and the need to manage time over the long run, while U.S. college students in general and those at the Mexican private college view time management as more of a day-to-day phenomenon. Across all the institutions, however, the factor structure appears to be consistent, with one factor dealing with academic self-efficacy being, in all samples, the factor that accounts for the most variance. An appendix presents the ECI. (Contains 22 references.) (SLD)

In the fall of 1990, the community of Gainesville, Florida, needed information concerning the brutal murders of five local college students. These serial slayings disrupted numerous "scripts" of life in the typical college town and produced a blanket of uncertainty, fear, and hysteria which enveloped Gainesville. College towns are normally viewed as places unlike any others. Seemingly populated predominantly by students, college towns are considered safe havens where parents can send their children with little worry other than that produced by the empty-nest syndrome. The happenings in Gainesville negated the beliefs that a locked door was an option or that all people were potential friends with a lot in common. Some students went so far as to withdraw from school. Instead of offering the information the community desperately requested (and which was not accessible), "The Gainesville Sun" elected to offer the community pseudo-knowledge in the form of scripts which allowed the return of homeostasis. An analysis of excerpts from the newspaper's articles and opinion pages shows how, in essence, through a series of metaphors such as the Ted Bundy metaphor, the father metaphor (which involved the paternal football coach), the seasons metaphor, and the drama metaphor, the newspaper created a new reality which served as the basis for new life scripts. These new scripts served to reduce uncertainly and cognitive dissonance and facilitated the coping process needed in the crisis situation. (Contains 18 references.) (RS)