No abstract

The Web-based tutorial is an attractive mode of delivery for information literacy instruction, but do we know that it is effective? A pre-and posttest study compared student learning from use of an online tutorial with learning from a traditional lecture/demonstration for basic information literacy instruction in freshman English composition classes. Measures of both student learning and student satisfaction were comparable for online tutorial and in-class instruction. The authors have implemented the tutorial for these classes and continue to improve it based on student and faculty feedback.here is a long tradition of library instruction at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Oswego, and the instructional program is well developed. The library has concentrated its efforts on offering course-related instruction, with particular emphasis on freshmen students taking English 102: Composition II. During English 102 sessions, students are taught basic library research and information literacy skills. The authors focused on these classes for the purposes of this project.

Most theories addressing the topic have proposed that threat and fear underlie right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), and many empirical findings have been consistent with this proposition. Important questions, however, remain unanswered, such as whether RWA is associated with fear and threat in general or only specific kinds of fear and threat. Theories of RWA generate markedly different predictions on this issue, particularly with respect to social or personal fears, and whether the association would also hold for the closely related construct of social dominance orientation (SDO). We investigated the issue by asking 463 undergraduate students to rate their feelings of fear, concern, and anxiety to a comprehensive 93-item list of potential fears and threats, which were formulated as either personal or social. Exploratory factors analysis identified five distinct fear-threat factors: harm to self, child, or country; personal and relationship failures; environmental and economic fears; political and personal uncertainties; and threats to ingroup. All the fear-threat factors were correlated with RWA, with the strongest correlations being for threats to ingroup, and with stronger effects for social than for personal fears. None of the fear factors correlated with SDO. These relationships were not affected by controlling for social desirability or emotional stability (EMS). When the intercorrelations between fear factors and EMS were controlled using ridge regression, only threats to ingroup predicted RWA. Structural equation modeling indicated good fit for a model in which low levels of EMS had a significant path to threats to ingroup, which in turn had a significant path to RWA, and EMS having a significant though weak indirect (fully mediated) inverse effect on RWA. Implications of these findings for theories of authoritarianism and future research are discussed.

The possibility of a passive construction existing in ASL has been alluded to from time to time in the literature on ASL grammar, but discussion is infrequent, and the usual conclusion is that a passive does not, in fact, exist. We contend, however, that a particular configuration of ASL grammatical features surrounding an otherwise transitive verb qualifies as a fully passive construction, and that these passives are more frequent in ASL discourse than may have been realized. This discussion continues and expands upon an earlier proposal in which we identify grammatical and functional characteristics of passive constructions in ASL discourse (Janzen, O'Dea, and Shaffer 2000).

Graduate students are a significant segment in online instruction programs, yet little is known about how well they learn the necessary library research skills in this increasingly popular mode of distance learning. This pre-and posttest study and citation analysis examined learning and confidence among students in graduate education programs, comparing students studying online tutorials, delivered via a course management system, with students receiving hands-on classroom instruction. Results support online information literacy instruction as equivalent in terms of learning. Student feedback, however, showed a statistically significant difference between groups in student satisfaction, with the face-to-face group being more satisfied.