Evaluated a newly developed peer assessment method for evaluating group work with 261 students at an Australian university. Found generally high levels of student satisfaction with group work and with the assessment method, but significant differences between students who either had or had not had prior work experience, and between Australian and…

Assessed junior high school teachers' work satisfaction and perceptions of teaching difficulties before and after participation in a faculty inservice instructional change project. Pre- and post-inservice surveys indicated that satisfaction remained stable, whereas dissatisfaction declined over time. Students were the main source of difficulty.…

Annual Alberta surveys of parents, high school students, and the public are part of accountability processes and provide public consultation on policy issues and reform efforts. Selected results of the 1995 and 1996 surveys are presented, related to provincial educational objectives, and compared to similar U.S. and Ontario surveys and established…

Discusses aspects of the Family Narrative Consortium's multisite, multidisciplinary collaboration to study the effect of social context on family narratives. Considers the value of the study for developing a coding system for narratives that yields comparable results across research sites. Examines the measures, epistemological issues,…

Reports on a study of the information sources used in environmental scanning by chief executives of the Canadian telecommunications industry that investigated the relationship between perceived source quality and source use and the chief executives' perception and use of the company library and electronic information sources. (Contains 23…

Describes an empirical study that investigated how well people in the information science field perform as judges of document relevance, topicality, and utility for information needs that they did not originate. Results are compared to the actual users' judgments, and the effects of experience and gender are explored. (Contains 17 references.)…

Provides a critical perspective on service learning, and raises issues about focusing on the growth of students, which often ignores the service recipients and fails to ask how service is affecting the communities in which it is being performed. A new service-learning paradigm is offered to overcome some perceived inconsistencies in the existing…

Presents results of empirical research examining job satisfaction among proprietary school teachers in the new Laender in Germany. Identifies three main areas of concern; academic freedom, professional satisfaction, and job-related stress. Suggests significant differences between these findings and those of earlier studies. (MJP)

A study investigated the effects of major social, economic, and political disruption on the perceptions of 232 Cape Breton (Nova Scotia) teachers concerning their professional lives and identities. Teachers believed they were transmitters of information and values, but felt that those outside the school did not understand the stresses and nuances…

Presents results from a study of English teachers in Israel that examined levels of satisfaction with online courses and factors that influenced them. Highlights include connections between confidence levels and satisfaction levels; prior professional experience; delivery modes; communication with instructors and peers; course prerequisites; and…

Views of 110 English school nursery nurses were studied to discover how the caregivers assess the nature and demands of their jobs. Findings confirm a need to eliminate nursery nurses' role-confusion, and to halt present trends toward de-professionalization through a public valuing and clarification of the nature of the nursery nurses' role in…

Discusses the problems of access to information in a machine-sensible environment, and the potential of modern library techniques to help in solving them. Explains how authors and publishers can make information more accessible by providing indexing information that uses controlled vocabulary, terms from a thesaurus, or other linguistic assistance…

This study compared dual-degree master of social work/master of public health (MSW/MPH) and MSW-only graduates with 3 or more years of postgraduate experience. Thirty graduates from an MSW/MPH program were matched with 30 MSW-only graduates. All subjects were randomly selected from the alumni directory and interviewed via telephone. Results showed…

Background: Recent theories of stress and coping in parents of children with intellectual disabilities (ID) emphasize the importance of cognitive appraisals in influencing parents' levels of stress and their adaptations to difficulties presented by the children. This study investigated the relationships between parental cognitions, child…

Some children with autism and learning disabilities also have aberrant behaviours that are difficult to regulate and stressful for both the child and family members. This case study concerns experiences of 10 parents from five families before and 2 years after entrusting their 10- to 11-year-old child with autism to a group home. Hermeneutic…