NIU Listening Exam: Assessing College Level Listening Skills

The NIU (Northern Illinois University) Listening Exam is a 45-item videotaped exam that assesses eight college level listening skills. This essay describes the criteria that the exam was designed to meet, the procedures used for designing and developing the exam, and the results of its pilot use.     

Stories and the Rhetoric of Contrariety: Subtexts of Organizing (Change)

Stories are an important part of organizational life that scholars have studied from many different perspectives. In this paper, we contribute a new way of exploring the meaning of stories. We use a concept from classical rhetoric, the enthymeme, to help reveal the particular underlying "logic" contained in the story form, and we show that the construction of this logic accounts, in part, for the engaging nature of the stories. We show that storytellers use enthymemes in the construction of their stories and also that scholars can use enthymemes to analyze stories. Understanding the enthymeme and its use in the story form enables interpreters to disentangle the argument often embedded in a story and to surface meanings that are implicit and powerful. In this paper, we focus attention on and examine such implicit meanings in four organizational stories of change in two city administrations, in order to illustrate the role of enthymeme in organizational rhetoric.     

Relational,Indirect, Adaptive,or Just Mean: Recent Studies on Aggression in Adolescent Girls—Part II

Recent research on gender differences in aggressive behaviors is reviewed in this second of a two-part article on the aggression of girls. The objective here is to use findings from studies done by social scientists to confirm and extend vivid reports in recent popular texts (Hadley, 2003). Findings are first summarized and then detailed with methodological issues and some theoretical implications discussed by way of conclusion. This recent research supports observations of differences in the aggression of boys and of girls. It points to the need for further research and discussion on the topic of gender and aggression.     

FROM FOSTER CARE TO FOSTERING CARE: The Need for Community

Using an interpretive ethnographic framework, we investigate how being in a caring community benefits foster children and their families during a time of crisis. Through (re)telling the stories of the untimely death of Carl Connor, a parent of four foster children, we examine the community of Hope Meadows as the site where the activities of caring occurred. Care as a set of relational and moral practices is presented, and we describe how care is facilitated by the purpose as well as the physical and social dimensions of Hope Meadows. The stories of Carl Connor's death provide a foundation for a gendered theory of moral community.     

Rurality,Institutional Disadvantage,and Achievement/Attainment*

Abstract Students living in rural areas of the United States exhibit lower levels of educational achievement and a higher likelihood of dropping out of high school than do their nonrural counterparts. In this paper we extend the literature by offering a framework in which resources influencing achievement/attainment are viewed as embedded in, and varying across, rural and nonrural places because of differences in structures of local opportunity. We draw from the National Educational Longitudinal Survey and the Common Core of Data, and employ hierarchical linear and hierarchical logistic modeling techniques to test our ideas. Rural adolescents are disadvantaged in regard to those family and school resources which are conducive to educational success. These resources translate into important educational investments at both family and school levels, and explain rural deficits in both attainment and standardized achievement. We discuss the implications of our findings for analyses of rural deprivation and inequality specifically, and for educational processes and the spatial patterning of stratification in general.     

心平气和面对面

对于粗鲁行为,没人愿意对他们破口大骂。但暗地里怒火中烧也不是办法我们得承认,人们有时很讨厌。比如有开会时窃窃私语的同事,成天打私人电话的同事,协作项目中总是不能按时交活,大部分时候不遵照议定程序的同事。可事实上,我们中大多数人从不直言相告。为什么?因为我们缺乏勇气,我们想讨好别人．我们不敢惹事。或者是,我们曾经试着开口．却把事情弄糟．非常之糟。“决定打破现状,便伴随着某种责任。如果对方反应不适当,他们便可能会疏远你——可能是永久的疏远。”马萨诸塞大学医学院的精神病学助理教授查尔斯·哈马说。     

Ballot Design and Unrecorded Votes on Paper-Based Ballots

The 2000 presidential election focused attention on the problemof unrecorded votes, in which a person casts a ballot but failsto record a valid vote for a particular contest. Although muchrecent research has evaluated voting technologies and theireffects on unrecorded votes, there has been little researchon the effects of ballot design. We argue that the same theoriesused to design and evaluate self-administered surveys can beused to analyze ballot features. We collect and code paper-basedballots used in the 2002 general election from 250 countiesin 5 states. We code the ballots in terms of several graphicdesign elements, including the content and location of ballotinstructions and the layout of candidate names and office titles.Our analysis suggests that several ballot features are associatedwith unrecorded votes (both overvotes and undervotes) in thegubernatorial contests. We also find that ballot design featuresexacerbate the racial disparity in unrecorded votes. Ballotdesign can be an important factor in determining whether votersare able to cast a ballot accurately, which can influence thelegitimacy of elections.