High school girls are bored, disengaged and stressed in science classes when compared to boys, NIU researchers say.
And teachers might not be doing enough to change the situation.
Jennifer Schmidt and M Cecil Smith, professors in the College of Education’s Department of Leadership, Educational Psychology and Foundations, studied 244 high school students and 13 science teachers during the 2008-09 academic year.
Funded by a three-year, $476,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, the pair expect their research eventually will help high school science teachers design and deliver lesson plans that best engage and electrify girls as well as boys.
So far, NIU researchers have found that classroom discussions are the only activity to score among the top three most engaging for both boys and girls and are perhaps the optimum way to connect with all science students.
Although much work remains – Schmidt, Smith and members of their research team are still “coding” a hundred hours of video shot in the 12 classrooms to dissect “every utterance from the teachers’ mouths” – the early indications confirm that the situation is not a good one for girls.
“We want schools and teachers to be aware,” Schmidt said. “Their students are not having the same experiences.”
Girls enjoy science less. They concentrate less. They doubt their skills. They’re bored. They’re stressed. They’re less intrigued by a challenge.
Ironically, many girls earn good grades in science but still feel less competent than their grades would indicate. Also, both genders report similar levels of hard work, living up to the teacher’s expectations and the value of science to themselves and to their future. Meanwhile, even though more boys than girls told the researchers that science is challenging, boys reported more confidence in their skills and a higher level of concentration in class.
The largest gender difference is in ninth-grade general science classes; the imbalance appears to narrow by the time students reach physics, usually a junior- or senior-level course.
Of great concern to the researchers is their finding that as the challenge of the material rises, girls become less engaged. A similar response is seen concerning the perceived importance of the material. In both cases, boys intensify their engagement.
Girls also respond negatively to “public” activities in science class, such as lab work and giving presentations. They rate lectures and completing work at their seats as the most engaging classroom activities. In contrast, boys eagerly greet opportunities to “show what they know.”
More questions are arising as the researchers break down the data, of course: Are girls lacking the necessary support from teachers, parents and peers? How often are teachers or parents sending messages of competence or helplessness to girls? Are these factors that shut them down?
The teachers equally represented both genders, although none of the physics teachers was a woman and all the biology teachers were women. “Biology is the area of science that women tend to go into,” Schmidt said.
The study population breaks down fairly evenly between white, black and Latino students.
Some of the data removes gender from the reporting but still contains interesting information for teachers and curriculum committees.
For example, students as a whole enjoy lab work the most but consider it the least important activity in class and less educational than lectures or seatwork. Most important to students are tests – the thing they enjoy the least, the thing that causes them the most stress and the thing they perceive as contributing the least to their learning.
Evidence was gathered through electronic signals sent to the participating students, each of whom had a pager that vibrated when the researcher wanted to gauge reactions to the content.
When signaled, the students immediately reported what they were doing and thinking. They also rated their engagement, enjoyment, anxiety and concentration levels on a prescribed scale.
Schmidt and Smith believe teachers can quickly and personally improve their instruction by conducting similar evaluations by simply asking those pointed questions during class.
“Teachers really should strive to understand student perspectives. They should make an effort to get student feedback in the moment as things are happening,” Smith said. “If they assess and understand student voice, they can bring those perspectives.”
Now the research team is watching the raw video footage to determine how much time the teachers spend on classroom management, such as taking attendance or making announcements, and how much time is devoted to lectures, discussions, labs and content that deals with science.
They also are measuring who the teachers are addressing – the whole class, an individual, a group – and the function of each utterance. Does it present content knowledge? Does it elaborate to provide a deeper meaning? Is it an open question to students? Does it foster thinking? Is it simply to move the class along, such as an instruction to open their textbooks to a certain page?
Members of the research team have taken several hours of training to prepare for the coding, partly to ensure each member sees the video in the same way. They are coding in pairs and groups, Schmidt said.
The two lead researchers already have begun to share their preliminary findings with the test site high school and will present seven papers in the coming year at national academic conferences.
Meanwhile, Smith is conducting a side project with a doctoral student to examine literacy practices within the context of science class. What kinds of reading and writing are students doing in science? What technology are they using? How are teachers supporting or undermining students’ literacy practices?
Two doctoral students and one master’s degree candidate also are writing dissertations and theses on the data gathered so far.
Schmidt is optimistic the team members will finish coding their data within the year, but imagines that their analysis of the data will continue for years to come. “This is just the tip of the iceberg,” she said.
Internationally celebrated composer Morten Lauridsen will hold a three-day residency at the NIU School of Music next semester thanks in part to a $1,800 grant from the DeKalb County Community Foundation.
Eric Johnson, the school’s director of choral activities, said Lauridsen’s February visit is a tremendous opportunity for NIU and the greater university community.
His busy agenda includes rehearsals, concerts, convocations, master classes and a lecture and demonstration for up to 700 nearby high school singers.
“It is rare that a composer of such stature comes to campus,” Johnson said. “As musicians, we benefit from understanding how others process, create and describe music. Interacting with a brilliant composer such as Morten Lauridsen would enrich the education of the current School of Music students and provide the faculty with a fascinating point of view.”
A professor of composition at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music for more than 30 years, Lauridsen is the most frequently performed American choral composer. His pieces enjoy hundreds of performances each year in such prestigious venues as Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center and Westminster Abbey.
Lauridsen has sold nearly a million copies of his scores and has received nearly 300 commission requests. His works have been recorded on more than 100 CDs, three of which earned Grammy nominations.
In 2006, he was named an “American Choral Master” by the National Endowment for the Arts. At a White House ceremony in 2007, President Bush bestowed on him the National Medal of Arts “for his composition of radiant choral works combining musical beauty, power and spiritual depth.”
Lauridsen will begin his visit with a Tuesday, Feb. 16, all-school convocation, an open rehearsal with the NIU Chamber Choir, an open master class and a public and free concert of his works for solo and chamber ensembles featuring NIU faculty and student groups.
The Wednesday, Feb. 17, schedule includes a composer’s forum titled “Lauridsen on Lauridsen;” he will hold one-on-one meetings with student composers Thursday, Feb. 18.
His workshop for high school choirs – the Boutell Memorial Concert Hall can seat around a dozen high school groups, although nearly twice that many conductors already have expressed interest – will include a lecture about his music and performances of his works by the NIU Chamber Choir.
Those two hours are a golden opportunity to recruit excellent musicians and confirm NIU’s reputation as a first-choice institution, Johnson said.
“These students will experience NIU’s facilities, see and hear the performing ensembles and interact with NIU students and faculty,” he said. “The high school directors will become more familiar with NIU’s music program and will potentially endorse NIU as a quality option to future music students. These directors will also discuss this event with colleagues.”
Lauridsen’s visit will close Feb. 18 with an 8 p.m. performance of his “Lux Aeterna” by the NIU Concert Choir and NIU Philharmonic. The composer will deliver a free and public lecture about the concert at 6:30 p.m.
A post-concert reception will drop the curtain on the residency that will educate, enlighten and entertain musicians and music lovers alike.
None of this cultural enrichment would occur without the generosity of the DeKalb County Community Foundation, Johnson said.
“When brainstorming about where to find funding sources, I immediately thought of the DeKalb County Community Foundation. They have funded choral projects in the past, and I know they are strongly committed to the arts and education in our community,” Johnson said.
“In these tight economic times, our budgets have been cut past the bone, and external funding was necessary for this event to take place,” he added. “I am extremely grateful that organizations such as the DCCF exist. Their tireless work to support the community is essential for the wellbeing of us all.”
Other NIU projects receiving DCCF funding this fall:
As funds for literacy education professor Chris Carger’s Project ROAR dwindled over the years, its reach simultaneously shrank until the program ultimately disappeared.
First to go was Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, followed by Aurora’s Archbishop Romero Catholic School; Carger deemed it wiser to spend the program’s limited dollars on DeKalb schools, books and art supplies rather than van rentals, gasoline and tolls.
Finally, despite having served three public and parochial schools in DeKalb, the project “roared” its last at Littlejohn Elementary School in the DeKalb Community Unit School District 428 a couple years ago.
But thanks to a grant from the DeKalb County Community Foundation and other financial support from NIU’s new Center for P-20 Engagement, it will return to Littlejohn’s three first-grade classrooms in the spring semester.
Twenty-five early childhood education or elementary education majors enrolled in LTRE 231, “Techniques of Tutoring,” will serve as tutors.
They will read books aloud to an estimated 75 mainstream and Latino first-graders for whom English is a second language, measure their comprehension and engage them in relevant art projects. Project ROAR, which stands for “Reaching Out through Art and Reading,” began in the NIU School of Art and eventually became funded by the College of Education.
“Project ROAR really benefits the children,” said Carger, who always funded the program through both internal and external grants. “The teachers tell us they don’t have time to do read-alouds, so we prepare and facilitate them.”
Carger, who received a $659 grant from the DCCF, will use the money to purchase new, high-quality children’s books that draw them into the stories as they learn English and widen their vocabulary.
Other NIU projects receiving DCCF funding this fall:
Music professor Rodrigo Villanueva and the NIU Jazz Lab Band are playing for two special audiences tonight.
One will fill the seats in the Boutell Memorial Concert Hall for the free 8 p.m. concert.
The other will sit 2,100 miles west of DeKalb at the 21st annual SuperComputing Conference (SC09) in Portland, Ore., where the NIU School of Music and Information Technology Services will transmit a 30-megabit-per-second stream of uncompressed audio and video through Internet2.
That strength is more than 30 times more powerful than the regular Webcast quality, providing superior audio and video and the shortest possible delay. (Tonight’s concert also is scheduled for normal Webcast.)
“We’re excited to be identified as the institution representing Internet2 at what is the most important gathering of supercomputing expertise in the world. This just reinforces our stature as a leader in the discipline,” said Paul Bauer, director of the NIU School of Music.
“The list of places that have done individual events using Internet2 and video technologies is a lot longer than the list of places that make regular use of the technology. We are clearly emerging as a leader in the United States.”
Recognized globally as the premier international conference on high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis, SC09 will feature the world’s most interesting and innovative scientific and technical applications of high performance computing.
“Internet2 has demonstrated at the SuperComputing Conference for 10 years now,” said Elaine Lauerman, Internet2 program manager for events, “and each year it is a challenge to come up with compelling demonstrations.”
Ann Doyle, manager of arts and humanities initiatives for Internet2, recommended NIU as the perfect source for a persuasive presentation.
“I like to call Ann ‘the arts and humanities evangelist’ for Internet2, and she describes NIU as a place that has gone from zero to 60 in very short order regarding Internet2 technologies,” Bauer said. “I’ve developed a good working relationship with Ann over the last three years through my attendance at arts and humanities Internet2 workshops, and she invited me most recently to present at the Internet2 membership meeting that took place Oct. 6 in San Antonio.”
NIU’s reputation is spurring other universities to contact DeKalb for assistance merging onto the Internet2 highway.
The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s School of Music asked NIU to provide equipment specifications for its grant application to set up Internet2 capabilities. The school’s submission, which identified NIU as an “expert,” earned funding.
Eastern Illinois University is currently receiving NIU’s help to “get their video technology equipment working,” Bauer said. “We’ve done some testing, and we’re consulting with them to get them up to speed.”
For its part, NIU has made Webcasts of its concerts the norm rather than the exception. Many are captured with two cameras while four-camera setups are available to provide additional and unique angles for special occasions.
Members of the Jazz Lab Band realize that tonight is one of those occasions, Bauer said.
“They’re very excited about this,” Bauer said, “and very conscious that we’re going to be featured at a most important conference.”
When it comes to innovations in teaching accountancy, the NIU College of Business’ Department of Accountancy cornered the market this year with a trio of professors sweeping the major honors.
Accountancy professors Linda Matuszewski, Rebecca Shortridge and Pam Smith all were honored for the unique approaches they have brought to the classroom. Such a sweep is unprecedented, says Jim Young, chair of NIU Accountancy.
“We are so proud of each of these individuals and the honors they have received,” Young says. “Academics across the country consider these the premier awards for innovation in accountancy education. To be able to claim the winner of any one of these awards would be an accomplishment; to win them all is amazing.”
College of Business Dean Denise Schoenbachler shares Young’s excitement, pointing out that creativity in the classroom has always been a hallmark of a program that long has ranked among the best.
“Innovative teaching is one reason that NIU Accountancy always comes up in any discussion of the top accountancy programs in the country,” Schoenbachler says. “Classes like those developed by Rebecca, Linda and Pam not only keep us on the cutting edge, but also ensure that we graduate students who are ready to tackle the tasks expected of accountants in today’s fast changing business world.”
Linda Matuszewski
The Bea Sanders/AICPA Innovation in Teaching Award
Celebrities from Air Bud to Bono to Lady Gaga have made cameo appearances in Linda Matuszewski’s classes – sort of. Those celebs and many others are at the center of fictitious charity events that her students organize as part of the UCare component of Matuszewski’s class in managerial accounting.
Her undergraduate students must organize the event from start to finish, including a business plan that includes marketing and operations, budgeting, a cost-volume profit analysis and other components. The project culminates with a presentation in front of the class.
“The goal,” says Matuszewski, “is to help students understand the relevance of accounting information in real-world settings and to learn how accounting integrates with other business disciplines like marketing and operations management.”
The project also compels them to evaluate unstructured situations, recognize the importance of documenting the assumptions underlying their accounting estimates and to apply managerial accounting concepts.
UCare was developed by Matuszewski and her collaborator, Fabienne Miller, an assistant professor of accountancy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. It caught the eye of judges at a poster session sponsored by the American Accounting Association, which ultimately led to this award.
The duo will have an opportunity to share their project with other accounting educators at the Conference on Teaching and Learning in Accounting next July in San Francisco. They will attend as guests of the AIPCA.
Rebecca Shortridge, Gaylen and Joanne Larson Professor of Accountancy
The Federation of Schools of Accountancy Innovation in Graduate Education Award
The days when accountancy students could devote themselves solely to poring over columns of numbers have gone the way of the green visor and arm garters, Shortridge says.
To prepare them for a business world that requires a much broader view, she has revamped the capstone class for students seeking master’s degrees in accounting – essentially a requirement for those wishing to pursue a CPA. The course focuses on business valuation and how different facets of business influence that concept.
“It’s easy for accountancy students to get caught up in memorizing rules and learning formulas and to lose sight of the bigger picture. In this class I try to get them to ask skeptical questions about how the markets work, and where accounting fits into the big picture. I prod them to question the assumptions that go into financial reports and challenge them to think critically.”
The approach means less time spent on lectures and more on team activities, guest speakers and case studies to demonstrate how various aspects of business interconnect.
Students occasionally object that the subject matter strays too far into finance or other areas. However, Shortridge says, they often report back after graduation that the perspective gained and methods learned in the class are invaluable at their jobs or in getting them through their CPA exams.
The approach is fairly common in MBA classes, Shortridge says, but she is unaware of any accountancy programs that offer anything comparable at this level.
She has been part of a group working to change that, and will get a chance to share her ideas on the topic at the Conference on Teaching and Learning in Accounting next July in San Francisco, where she also will be a guest of the AIPCA.
Pam Smith, KPMG Endowed Professor of Accountancy
American Accounting Association Innovation in Accounting Education Award
Businesses have been using derivative financial instruments as a way to mitigate risk for as long as anyone can remember, but it’s a topic that many accounting teachers won’t touch with a 10-foot pole.
“It’s a very intimidating topic. It crosses the line into finance, and the accounting is very complex,” acknowledges Pam Smith, who modestly claims that her personal mastery of the subject does not extend far beyond the basics.
However, that last point might be disputed by the thousands of NIU advanced accounting students (and the thousands of professional accountants she presents to each summer) whom she has schooled in the matter over the last decade.
In fact, her reputation is such that attorneys representing Enron officials in one of the great financial scandals of the century recruited her to be an expert witness. They wanted someone who could break dwon the complexities of the Enron transacations so the judge and jury could understand the complex derivatives that were entangled in the case.
That ability to break down such a complex topic is the foundation of Smith’s approach, which she has carefully honed and tweaked over the last decade. The result has become what many consider to be the most comprehensive approach available for teaching the topic – the Innovation in Accounting Education award is recognition of this contribution to accounting education.
Smith has been asked countless times when she is going to write a book of her own on the topic, but she has no interest in doing so. “I don’t believe in having a monopoly on knowledge,” she says. “I make my materials available to any instructor that asks for them.”
Smith received her award at the August meeting of the American Accounting Education Association.
Chris Carger finally has found a happy ending, even if it’s not the one she wanted.
In 1996, the professor in NIU’s Department of Literacy Education penned “Of Borders and Dreams,” a narrative account of her heartfelt mission to help a young Mexican-American boy to overcome his learning disabilities and English language learner needs.
Her book ended, unfortunately, with an account of a telephone call Carger received from the boy’s mother. She was seeking advice on how to help her son to quit high school.
“I never planned to write another book, but I started getting calls and e-mails from across the country to find out how Alejandro was,” says Carger, who at first tried to respond personally to each and every inquiry. “Eventually, there was so much interest that I decided I would continue the story.”
That story is “Dreams Deferred: Dropping Out and Struggling Forward,” a close-up and caring look at a high school dropout and his family. The book was released this fall by Information Age Publishing Inc. and is sold at http://infoagepub.com/products/Dreams-Deferred.
“Dreams Deferred” traces the life of Alejandro Juarez – not his real name – from his decision to quit school at the start of his sophomore year through the present. Readers learn of his young fatherhood at age 16, his noble decision to marry the baby’s mother and his subsequent fight for jobs and income to support his new family.
But readers also gain insight into his parents and siblings, Mexican-American culture in general and the valuable knowledge that, while most prisoners are dropouts, not all dropouts come from broken and indifferent families or end up behind bars.
“When you look at studies of dropouts, it’s a long list of deficits, and Alejandro’s family has some of those deficits: low income, low literacy, low English,” Carger says. “But they never look at what was positive about the families. I feel the dropout literature is missing the study of whole family units that do care about their children. Those strengths are completely overlooked.”
Carger’s book, which her publisher has released as a volume in its series “Research for Social Justice: Personal-Passionate-Participatory,” is told from the inside by a researcher with incredible access that evolved into deep friendship.
And, like the earlier book about Alejandro, she presents her research in a narrative form.
“For centuries – for millennia – we have known the power of story. Why not use that power to convey some educational concepts?” she asks. “I’m bilingual. They opened their home to me. I’m like a family member, and I don’t know how I could stay distant and objective. We have a friendship, and I respect them. I learn from them all the time.”
This journey began by accident.
Carger, teaching then at another university near Chicago, wanted to send her education majors to tutor bilingual children in the nearby poor, urban classrooms.
“I couldn’t find anybody to go to this one school, but it was on my way home, so I decided I would do it. I’ve always liked working in the field, and that’s where I met Alejandro Juarez,” she says. “He had so many needs – learning disabilities, English language learner needs – that when the summer came, I felt I just couldn’t stop tutoring him.”
Alejandro’s private school lacked special services for students like him and had connected to a nearby public school district for those resources, but it still wasn’t enough.
Carger began tutoring Alejandro after school as well, and soon brought him to her university for testing. She met his mother and his siblings then, and through her ability to speak fluent Spanish, discovered that his mother realized her son had learning disabilities but didn’t understand what they were.
“So I stayed with him,” says Carger, who obtained other intervention services for the boy and shepherded him and his siblings to educational summer camps where she worked.
“I ended up writing my dissertation on what it was like trying to obtain an education as a Mexican-American in Chicago with a family considered low-income, and I reported it as the story of Alejandro Juarez.”
When she transformed that tale into “Of Borders and Dreams,” it made an impact.
The book became a popular text in multicultural education courses and the source material for dissertations.
Entire classes of education majors from Butler University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln contacted her for more information. Students from across the University of California system and from the University of Arizona wrote and called. Students at National Louis University, where Carger was invited to present her research, even dramatized parts of the book.
“People respond to the narrative research,” Carger says. “People tell me, ‘I better understand the Mexican students in my class now.’ ”
Ironically, the research removed Carger from her comfort zone.
By the time she decided to revisit the life of Alejandro Juarez, his education was a long-ago memory.
“For the first book, I was in his school, going into his classroom, observing, interviewing his teachers. I had never done research that wasn’t school-based, so I decided to look at his community: Pilsen-Little Village,” she says.
“I interviewed a community activist. I interviewed the director of a program for alternative school placement. I interviewed the director of an alternative school. I interviewed a teacher at an alternative school,” she adds. “I found that there is no place that specializes in someone with special learner and English language learner needs. I had one principal tell me, ‘Let me know if you find one. I have kids like Alejandro who come to me every day, and I have to turn them away.’ ”
Some high schools in Chicago suffer a 70 percent dropout rate of Latinos, Carger says, and most of those teens quit at the beginning of their sophomore years as Alejandro did. She also read an eye-opening report from Harvard University that labels high schools like those Alejandro attended as “dropout factories” where graduation is not normal.
But exhausted by her search, and with the realization that Alejandro had become an adult who was ineligible for most alternative school options, she focused then on his work life. For his part, the young husband and father was mostly concerned about earning a paycheck anyway.
Finding jobs proved difficult for him, though, and keeping those jobs was just as tough.
“The economy was already heading south then,” Carger says. “The least-skilled workers would get let go, and that was always Alejandro.”
Carger located a Catholic church that helped Alejandro to write a résumé and placed him in a job, but his constant search for better jobs with better pay led him to quit when his low literacy skills blocked the promotion he wanted.
He settled on a job loading freezer trucks. “It pays more,” Carger says, “because most people don’t want to be inside a freezer all day.”
Fortunately, Alejandro also enjoyed strong support from his family.
Mother and father both are U.S. citizens – their preparations for the test are detailed in a chapter of “Dreams Deferred” titled “My Country Tis of Thee” – and immigrants who have lessons to teach about raising children and being friends.
Alejandro’s parents involved him in construction projects at their home, remodeling their entire basement with his assistance. That work helped to keep him off the violent streets, where he had been approached to traffic drugs and steal cars. In both cases, his father warned Alejandro to say, “No.”
They also taught him about “what a good employee is” – both of his parents work manual labor jobs in factories where they have endured “racism and maltreatment,” Carger says – and have encouraged their son to find outside programs that might help him.
And, despite their own work-related injuries and health problems, they brought food to Carger weekly last summer after she underwent open-heart surgery. Meanwhile, they took care of the lawn for Carger as she recuperated and her husband awaited hip replacement.
Of their other children, all have earned bachelor’s or associate’s degrees. Two are teachers, and one is considering a master’s degree with sights set on a career in law.
“I’ve learned from them what’s important about child-rearing. You don’t have to have a lot of money,” she says. “I’ve also learned what it means to be a good friend. Again, you don’t need money. It’s about time and effort. Alejandro’s mother is one of my closest friends in the world.”
Carger calls their willingness to share “an absolute gift.”
“To stand in another person’s shoes, to get that close – I wrote about very personal things,” she says. “They agonize about why their son dropped out. It’s been a dozen years, and still they question whether they made the right decision.”
The book offers plenty of revelations for teachers and education majors beyond Carger’s primary message about dropouts and their families.
“Hispanic students identify a lot with what happens in the book. I get poignant, poignant e-mails from readers who say, ‘My brother went through the same thing,’ or, ‘I went through the same thing,’ ” she says.
“People who aren’t Latino are just amazed – at what happens in schools, and what children go through in disadvantaged communities and schools.”
Readers will learn that many Spanish-speaking parents are intimidated by parent-teacher conferences, Carger says. In addition to the language barrier, their culture is one that places great emphasis on greetings and friendly conversation at the start of an encounter. Because the tight schedule of parent-teacher conferences prevents that, many Latino parents choose not to attend.
Meanwhile, they value family above all else. Not all trips to Mexico are vacations; some might offer the chance for a long farewell to a dying grandparent.
“For Mexican families, family will always trump school. Sometimes, teachers just don’t think about that,” Carger says. “This will help them realize that diverse families, like all families, can be concerned and caring, although they may express it in different ways.”
And, like Carger, readers will find a happy ending.
“It’s not the happy ending I wanted,” she says. “His sibling provides it. His oldest sister’s wedding was an absolute triumph. She and her fiancée paid for a beautiful wedding. All of the relatives from Mexico came. It was held in the church where they went to school when they were younger. Everything was thought out and perfect. It was a lovely wedding.”
The marriage made the Juarez parents proud, Carger says, who believes it “repaired, in some small way, the damage their family felt over the loss of Alejandro’s education and a church wedding for him.”
“His parents, however, also take pride in the fact that Alejandro stayed out of gangs and away from drugs unlike many of his peers who drop out,” she adds. “They are always able to see the glass half-full. Their indefatigable hope inspires me.”
NIU’s Department of Geography will showcase a wide array of uses for Geographic Information Systems (GIS) – from virtual 3D tours of the university campus to an exploration of Martian valleys – as part of a celebration of Geography Awareness Week (Nov. 15-21).
The demonstrations will be held in open-house format from 6 to 8:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 18, in Room 114 of Davis Hall. Room 114 is the department’s Advanced Geospatial Laboratory, which is focused on GIS development. The free event is open to the public.
NIU’s Geography Department boasts one of the top GIS programs in the region, offering an undergraduate emphasis in GIS and GIS certificate programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
A GIS is a computer-based mapping tool that takes information from a database about a location, such as streets, buildings, water features and terrain, and turns it into visual layers. The ability to see geographic features on a map gives users a better understanding of a particular location, enabling planners, analysts and others to make informed decisions about their communities.
GIS touches every life every day. It is used throughout the world to solve problems related to the environment, health care, land use, business efficiency, education and public safety. The power supply directed to homes function more efficiently because of GIS, as do the patrol cars and fire trucks that keep neighborhoods safe and the delivery trucks on the road.
Geography department demonstrations will allow visitors to:
Several other events are on tap for Geography Awareness Week, including the annual Career Day, which will be held at 1 p.m. Friday, Nov. 20, in Room 121 of Davis Hall.
Career Day is a long-running tradition in the Geography Department that attracts students, alumni and friends. Alumni of geography and meteorology will return to talk about the importance of geographic knowledge in the real world, share information about their work experiences, advise faculty and students on the status of geographic and meteorological careers and recruit students for internships and other career related experiences.
This year, the department celebrates both the commencement of its Ph.D. program in January and the 50th anniversary of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
The National Geographic Society also sponsors activities related to Geography Awareness Week. For games, activities and lessons about mapping, visit www.GeographyAwarenessWeek.org.
For more information regarding the NIU events, contact Phil Young at pyoung@niu.edu or Sarah Blue at sblue@niu.edu.
NIU will host an open house and offer tours of clinics from 2 to 5 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 22, at the Family Health, Wellness and Literacy Center.
The building is the former Monsanto Corporation headquarters, located at 3100 Sycamore Road, and features more than 65,000 square feet of newly remodeled, state-of-the-art clinical space.
The center is home to the College of Health and Human Sciences’ Speech-Language Hearing Clinic, the Physical Therapy Clinic and the Community Cares Clinic and the College of Education’s Literacy Clinic.
The center provides a variety of services in speech, language and hearing, physical therapy, primary care and literacy and serves as a clinical teaching site for a wide range of academic programs. Students receive hands-on experience working with clients and patients of all ages and backgrounds, under the supervision of experienced faculty and clinic professionals.
The open house is an excellent opportunity to learn more about the services offered by each of the respective clinics, as well as to meet the faculty and staff. Parking is free for the event, with light refreshments being served.
For more information, call (815) 753-1891.
Norman A. Stahl, professor and chair of NIU’s Department of Literacy Education, was awarded the A. B. Herr Award for significant and continuous scholarship and contributions to the field of literacy research and pedagogy.
Stahl received the award Nov. 7 at the recent conference of the Association of Literacy Educators and Researchers, held in Charlotte, N.C.
“It is an honor to be recognized by the Association of Literacy Educators and Researchers in that it has been the organization on the forefront of promoting programs and policy for training literacy professionals across the past 50 years,” Stahl said. “This award is particularly gratifying as involvement by NIU faculty in the ALER (formerly the College Reading Association) has been one important reason why the Department of Literacy Education is known across the nation as a premier leader in the field of literacy scholarship and pedagogy.”
A nationally recognized authority on postsecondary academic literacy research and instruction, Stahl came to NIU in 1986.
Stahl is the past president of the National Reading Conference and has served as president of the College Reading Association (ALER) and chair of the board of directors of the American Reading Forum as well. He is a fellow of the Council of Learning Assistance and Developmental Education Associations.
He has given more than 200 presentations and workshops for professional organizations, postsecondary institutions and school systems nationally and internationally. He has more than 100 publications (articles, chapters and books) focusing primarily on postsecondary reading and the history of reading instruction, including “Teaching Developmental Reading” and the forthcoming “Teaching Study Strategies in Developmental Education.”
Stahl also has been the recipient of:
NIU students, faculty, staff and local residents can renew driver’s licenses and state IDs, purchase their annual vehicle license plate stickers, register to be organ and tissue donors or conduct other transactions at a mobile office coming to campus.
The mobile office will visit campus from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday, Oct. 19, in the lower level of the Holmes Student Center.
Acceptable forms of payment include personal checks, cash, MasterCard, American Express and Discover credit and debit cards. Other services available include vehicle title registration and parking placards for persons with disabilities.
A complete list of acceptable forms of identification is online at www.CyberDriveIllinois.com.
NIU’s Office of Assessment Services has posted the winter issue of “Toolkit,” its quarterly “nuts and bolts” e-newsletter. Toolkit is specifically designed to assist the NIU community with practical assessment issues in a user friendly format.
This issue announces NIU’s participation in the Voluntary System of Accountability (VSA), an accountability initiative by public, four-year universities designed to supply basic, comparable information about the undergraduate experience. The Tool of the Month features the special October workshop with Catherine Wehlburg on Faculty Learning Groups. Also included is a call for participation in the University Writing Project, along with a summary of results from past years.
Back issues are posted on the Assessment Services Web site. Contributions to the newsletter are welcome at any time.
NIU’s Muslim Student Association will present a speech and question-and-answer session titled “Quran: Book of Guidance” at 7 p.m. today in the Clara Sperling Sky Room of the Holmes Student Center.
Internationally known Islamic speaker and scholar Shaykh Yaser Birjas will speak and take all questions from the audience. All are welcome. Refreshments will be served.
For more information, visit www.niumsa.org.
Roof repairs to the Holmes Student Center, scheduled to begin as early as Tuesday, Nov. 17, will disrupt traffic in the bus turnaround area on the west side of the building for up to three weeks.
During the construction, NIU Public Safety will control vehicle access to that area from 8 a.m. until 4 p.m. weekdays. The only vehicles allowed will be Huskie buses, delivery trucks, service vehicles, construction vehicles, emergency vehicles and cars allowed to park in the areas dedicated for individuals with handicaps.
Doors on the west side of the building will remain open to pedestrian traffic throughout the construction, and temporary covered walkways will be created to protect pedestrians from any falling debris.
Much of the sidewalk on the west side of the building will be closed for use by the contractors as a staging/work area. Buses will queue in different areas of the turnaround to accommodate cranes and other equipment.
On the menu at Ellington’s this week: Calavance Restaurant is scheduled for Tuesday. Caribbean Cove takes over Wednesday. Wasabi Bistro concludes the week Thursday.
Continuing this semester is the option to enjoy wine with your meal. One red and one white wine choice will be available with meal service. Wine will be selected for the menu based on wine-and-food pairings made by the students. Wine selections will range from $4.50 to $6.50 per glass.
Calavance Restaurant features sundried tomato triangles or tabbouleh salad for starters, Mediterranean chicken kabobs or eggplant matzo lasagna for entrees and Turkish pudding or almond lemon torte for dessert. Each table will be served zatter sticks with garlic yogurt dip.
Caribbean Cove features jerk-spiced shrimp with fruit salsa or avocado salad for starters, calypso chicken or spicy Caribbean stew with pumpkin for entrees and chocolate coconut rum cake or mango-lime ice for dessert. Each table will be served plantain chips with warm cilantro dipping sauce.
Wasabi Bistro features sushi or miso soup for starters, udon noodles with beef or hoisen-drenched tofu and stir-fried vegetables for entrees and green tea cheesecake with raspberries or vanilla ice cream with oranges and sake cream for dessert. Each table will be served freshly steamed edamame.
Seating is from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. with service until 1 p.m. The cost is $9 per person. Ellington’s is located on the main floor of the Holmes Student Center. Call (815) 753-1763 or visit www.ellingtons.niu.edu to make reservations.
NIU’s Honors Program will host a screening of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 17, inside DeKalb’s historic Egyptian Theatre, 135 North Second St.
“O Brother, Where Art Thou?” is a 2000 film directed by Joel and Ethan Coen and starring George Clooney, John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson. Set in Mississippi during the Great Depression, the film’s story is loosely based on Homer’s “Odyssey.”
NIU Department of English professors Dee Anna Phares and Timothy Ryan will lead a question-and-answer session after the movie.
Phares is a visiting assistant professor in who regularly teaches Homer in classics and humanities classes and who also teaches film courses and has taught this film several times. Ryan is a professor who has served as a lecturer in writing and humanities and has taught literature and film courses in the American Studies program at King’s College in London.
“O Brother, Where Art Thou?” will show at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 17, with doors opening at 6:30 p.m. Admission is free to NIU students with a valid NIU One Card; tickets are $5 for adults and $4 for senior citizens.
Faculty and students from NIU’s College of Law will provide an insider’s view to law school during a question-and-answer session from 5 to 7 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 18. The session will be held in Room 186 of Swen Parson Hall.
Topics will include:
Pizza and soft drinks will be provided. RSVP by Tuesday, Nov. 17, to Barbara Manning at (815) 753-9488 or via e-mail at bmanning@niu.edu.
Nehring Gallery announces a historical exhibition celebrating the 80th anniversary of the Egyptian Theatre.
The exhibition will run through Thursday, Dec. 10, and features photographs of the interior and exterior of the theater through the years, as well as newspaper articles highlighting the opening, possible closing, saving and restoration of the building; movie and event posters; and a rarely seen collection of signed photographs of vaudeville performers.
The exhibition also features contemporary photographs used to create a special 2010 Egyptian Theatre commemorative calendar. Calendars are available for sale through the Egyptian Theatre, and a drawing for a calendar will be held.
A series of free Wednesday noon gallery talks are scheduled, and attendees are invited to bring a brown bag lunch.
A closing reception will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 10, on the actual anniversary of the Egyptian Theatre’s opening, in the Nehring Gallery. The gallery also will be open for the scheduled Wednesday noon gallery talks, and from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturdays through Dec. 5, and by appointment. Contact Anna Marie Coveny, gallery director, at (815) 758-6363 or director@nehringgallery.org.
The Nehring Gallery is located at 111 South Second St. in the Nehring Center for Culture and Tourism. The gallery is free and open to the public. Group tours are especially welcome. The accessible entrance is located under the Nehring Gallery awning.
Nehring Gallery is operated cooperatively by the DeKalb Park District, the NIU College of Visual and Performing Arts and the NIU Division of University Outreach. For further information, visit http://www.nehringgallery.org/.
S.I. Salamensky, assistant professor of performance studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, will present “There’s No Place Like Home: Lost & Found in a Global Age” at 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 19, in Reavis 211.
The speech is free and open to the public.
“Home” is a powerful symbolic notion across cultures and eras: a metaphoric site of origin, birth, growth, refuge and reintegration as well as one of death and closure. The temporal and spatial disorientations of today’s increasingly fast-paced, unsettled, virtualized, global lifestyle can leave even the more fortunate feeling “homeless,” if only conceptually.
In this lively presentation, Salamensky will explore a wide variety of fascinating contemporary literary, performance, film and art works. She also will examine bizarre social phenomena, drawn from Jewish, East Asian, Southeast Asian, American and other cultures that, she argues, can help people to re-imagine home, exile, longing, belonging, time and place for the future.
Thursday’s event is sponsored by the Department of English, the Department of History, the Center for Research on Festive Culture and Liberal Arts and Sciences External Programming.
The NIU Steel Band, the Steelpan Studio and All-University Steel Band will present their 2009 fall concert at 3 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 22, under the direction of Cliff Alexis and Liam Teague.
The concert will take place in the Boutell Memorial Concert Hall and showcase a wide variety of musical styles, including classical, jazz, calypso and mazooka.
The event also will feature gifted steelpan player and composer Gary Gibson. The Seattle-based musician has released four recordings which have drawn the praise of steelpan aficionados as well as the jazz community for his unique approach of applying sophisticated jazz harmony and inflection to the infectious traditional forms and rhythms of the Caribbean.
The concert is free and open to the public, and the auditorium is accessible to all. For more information, contact Lynn Slater at (815) 753-1546 or lsater@niu.edu.
The last remaining data files and jobs will be removed from the mainframe Monday, Nov. 30. Any accounts still active will be disabled.
The permanent shutdown of all mainframe services – CICS, TSO, Wylbur – will take place at the end of the semester. This is the culmination of planning that began more than a year ago, and could not have been done without the work of many all across campus.
While NIU has migrated to new software, it is acknowledged that the legacy system provided the university with many years of reliable service.
For more information, e-mail helpdesk@niu.edu or call (815) 753-8100.
The Office of the Vice Provost is seeking proposals from NIU faculty to create themed learning communities for fall 2010.
In these communities, faculty will offer incoming freshmen a unique opportunity to engage deeply with the course theme, connect learning across the linked course(s) in collaborative and active ways, develop relationships with peers and faculty and ease the transition to college.
The goal is to create between seven and 10 themed learning communities for fall 2010. The full
Request for Proposals and proposal form are online at http://www.niu.edu/provost/tlc/.
All proposals are due by Friday, Dec. 11.
At the request and under the guidance of NIU faculty, ITS has been working throughout the summer and fall to develop a building block for Blackboard that will allow NIU faculty to send course grades from the Blackboard Grade Center directly to course grade rosters in MyNIU.
The grade submission tool was designed and pilot-tested successfully with the help of faculty focus groups and the tool will be available for use in December 2009.
Faculty who use the Blackboard Grade Center to calculate final grades soon will be able to choose to export final grades from Blackboard instead of manually entering grades in MyNIU, saving time and the reducing the opportunity for data entry errors. This tool will especially be helpful to faculty who teach classes with large enrollments.
After submitting grades from Blackboard using this new tool, faculty will have to log in to MyNIU to view the final grades and post them officially.
Features of the new Blackboard Grade Submission Tool include:
The Faculty Development and Instructional Design Center, in conjunction with ITS, will offer several workshops in December to demonstrate the new Blackboard Grade Submission Tool and will provide faculty with step-by-step instructions on submitting their final grades from Blackboard to MyNIU.
For more details or to register, visit http://www.niu.edu/blackboard/workshops.
NIU strives to be an institution where students are actively involved in the learning process: Engaged learning occurs both inside and outside of the classroom and often results in greater educational benefits for students.
Based on recommendations from the Strategic Planning Task Force on Curricular Innovation, a sample of NIU students participated during spring 2009 in the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) to examine the undergraduate experience at NIU.
The NSSE provides data from students on five benchmarks of student engagement: Level of Academic Challenge, Active and Collaborative Learning, Student-Faculty Interaction, Enriching Educational Experiences, and Supportive Campus Environment.
NIU’s results of the NSSE benchmarks are now available at http://www.niu.edu/nsse.
NIU’s Community School of the Arts will offer a pair of one-day classes Saturday. Both are held in the Visual Arts Building, and all are ideal for parents and/or grandparents to enjoy with children.
From 1 to 5 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 21, students learn how to rewire consumer electronics into new noise machines and music makers in Circuit Bending 101. Students ages 15 and older rewire battery-operated electronic toys to find the weird noises lurking inside. The class also examines other applications for electronic music making. Children ages 9 to 14 are welcome with an adult. The class is taught by Austin Cliffe. The class fee includes the cost of materials.
From 1 to 5 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 21, students learn the art of egg design in Decorating Pysanky Eggs. Using two different styles of Pysanky – the Polish drop/pull folk style and the Ukrainian method – students work with hot wax application and color dye baths. The class is for ages 13 through adult. There is a discount when two people register together. Instructor Billie Giese is an associate professor of drawing in the NIU School of the Art. The class fee includes the cost of materials.
To learn more about these classes and other activities offered by the NIU Community School of the Arts, call (815) 753-1450 or visit www.niu.edu/extprograms.
NIU’s Committee for the Improvement of Undergraduate Education is administering four different types of grants to support research in and projects for the improvement of instruction in undergraduate courses.
Copies of the grant forms and guidelines are attached or can be accessed through the Provost’s Office Web site. It is mandatory to use the current forms and not previous forms.
All proposals must be submitted to jganshir@niu.edu by Wednesday, Jan. 20. Projects must be accompanied by approval from the department chair and college dean as outlined in the proposal form.
All expenditures apart from salary must be made by June 1, 2010. Normally salary associated with projects will be paid May 16, 2010, through June 15, 2010, regardless of when the work is actually completed.
Nominees are sought for the awards for excellence in undergraduate teaching and instruction.
The Committee for the Improvement of Undergraduate Education recommends that special attention be paid to the suggested timetable: Suggested deadlines begin Tuesday, Dec. 1, the recommended date for submission of nominations to the departmental chair of student adviser committee.
Student advisory committees are encouraged to make an early start in the selection process to make the best possible presentations for their candidate.
Electronic nomination forms, complete with examples, are available. Nominations must be made using these forms.
As always, significant student participation at all levels of the process is expected, and deans and department chairs are urged to do everything possible to ensure that this occurs.
It is very appropriate for faculty to provide assistance to students with preparing the career profile, eligibility for nomination and nomination procedures. Supporting information must clearly have been prepared by students.
Please note the strict interpretation of the maximum word count listed for the various boxes on the nomination form and the limited number of required letters of recommendation.
For more information, call (815) 753-0494.
NIU’s Art Museum has scheduled a lecture series in conjunction with the School of Art Faculty Exhibition, which opened last week and runs through Saturday, Dec. 5. All are held in Altgeld 315 unless otherwise noted.
The exhibitions and programs of the NIU Art Museum are sponsored in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency with additional support from the Friends of the NIU Art Museum and the Arts Fund 21.
For up-to-date information, and additions to the calendar, visit www.niu.edu/artmuseum.
NIU’s Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language & Literacy will host a November seminar series on Response to Intervention (RtI). These informative and engaging talks will begin at either 4 or 4:30 p.m.
For more information, call (815) 753-5793.
NIU students are invited to participate in a juried art competition with a $1,000 prize for the first place piece, $500 for second place and $250 for third.
The competition is sponsored by NIU’s Center for Governmental Studies (CGS) in preparation of its 40th anniversary celebration. CGS is a public service, applied research and public policy development center with clients throughout the region and beyond.
CGS is hosting a conference of regional leaders Dec. 10 and Dec. 11 focused on how the region can adjust to the new economic realities of the 21st century and how area residents can prosper within these realities.
The art competition reflects the focus of this event and should interpret its theme of “Returning Prosperity to America’s Heartland: Building a Shared Vision for our Region’s Future.”
Art work must be submitted by Tuesday, Dec. 8. Submitted work will be displayed during the conference. The jury panel will include faculty members of NIU’s School of Art and a CGS representative.
Winning pieces will be incorporated into the conference proceedings and provide an important and unique visual component to the event. The winning artists will be invited to a gala dinner and celebration scheduled for Friday, March 5, 2010.
Details on the art competition, including rules, regulations and registration forms, are online.
The Division of International Programs will host its Fall 2009 Brown Bag Series from noon to 1 p.m. Thursdays in Faraday West, Room 300.
Attendees are invited to bring lunch and listen to speakers covering a variety of topics such as international perspectives, cultural diversity and study abroad experiences.
Upcoming lunches:
For other details, contact Heesun Majcher, director of the International Student and Faculty Office, at (815) 753-8275 or hmajcher@niu.edu.