A7.4: Reflection on Discussion of 10/1/07

Ashley Pence

October 6, 2007

Last Monday I got to experience attending an online classroom.  I didn’t necessarily attend, rather I logged on to our classroom through the Tapped-In site.  This was a great experience for me as a first time user of an online classroom.  The atmosphere was laid back and fun!  I have never had so much fun in class and still be doing work at the same time.  Our guest speaker, Katie who is an SLP, was a wonderful help to myself and i’m sure to others as well.  The experiences she told us about were exciting and thought provoking at the same time as well as providing pertinent information.

The content of our discussion focused on the questions we had to write previously pertaining to adults, literacy, aphasia and TBI.  Once the online classroom got going we all found out eachother’s areas of interests pertaining to our field as SLP’s.  This was interesting to see the mass amount of choices that we as future SLP’s have.  The process of this online class was to ask Katie (guest speaker) one of our questions one by one.  This did not happen.  We were so interested in what Katie had to say about each question we only got half way through the people in our class.  I loved this about the class because it shows that we have such an interest in our future work that we don’t care if “our question” gets answered.  Katie was very well versed on the information she gave us about the questions we had asked her.  She could answer the question very effieciently and then talk about her experiences based on what was included in that question.  Once everyone had commented on that one person’s question we moved on to do the same procedure with the next person’s question.

My favorite part of the online class was what Katie said about Amanda W’s question.  Her question wondered if she personally thought that literacy and intelligence are positively correlated.  Katie’s response talked about her experience with rehab patient’s which consist mostly of older patient’s who may not have even graduated grade school let alone high school.  Katie mentioned that these people may not have been able to read or write previous to their stroke or TBI, but they can be very intelligent in other things such as mechanical work, farming or working in a coal mine.  Based on that outlook literacy and intelligence do not correlate, but a psychologist who measures intelligence with numbers may see it differently.

The remainder of the questions asked dealt a lot with regaining literacy and whether it is easier for someone with aphasia or TBI and if it is hard to work with someone who was more literate before than it is to work with someone who was less literate before their stroke or TBI.  Based on Katie’s responses I concluded that it depends when dealing with who it is easier for to regain literacy skills.  Katie also mentioned that working with someone who was very literate before their stroke or TBI can be hard at times.  Obviously we are trying to get the patient back within normal limits, but based on their previous skills each patient could be different to do this for.  Someone’s normal limits could have been a professor of math or a professor of English.  If you are their therapist you want to help them regain what they love to do and if it’s math and you are bad at it, then that could make their therapy harder.

Overall, this experience was very thought evoking.  I learned that the field of Speech Language Pathology is a broad and exciting one and working with patients can be full of ups and downs, but we have to keep in mind it’s all worth it no matter how hard. 

A7.3: Library Searching II

Ashley Pence

October 6, 2007

1.  Database: ERIC

Keywords: illiteracy

Bibliographic information:

Commons, M. L., Galaz-Fontes, J. F., & Morse, S. J. (2006). Leadership, cross-cultural contact, socio-economic status and formal operational reasoning about moral dilemmas among Mexican non-literate adults and high school students. Journal of Moral Education, 35(2), 247-267. Retrieved October 6, 2007, from the ERIC database.

2.  Database:  ERIC

Keywords:  gerontology and illiteracy

Bibliographic information: 

Roman, S. P. (2004). Illiteracy and older adults: Individual and societal implications. Educational Gerontology, 79-93. Retrieved October 6, 2007, from the ERIC database.

3.  Database:  Academic Search Premier

Keywords:  literacy, education

Bibliographic information:

Literacy classes improve depression through self-efficacy. (2007). Nursing Standard, 21(28), 17. Retrieved October 6, 2007, from the Academic Search Premier database.

4.  Database:  Academic Search Premier

Keywords:  literacy, education, adult

Bibliographic information:

Sticht, T. G. (2006). Can massive injections of adult literacy education imporve children’s reading skills? Reading Today, 23(4), 18. Retrieved October 6, 2007, from the Academic Search Premier database.

5.  Database:  Academic Search Premier

Keywords:  literacy, education, adults

Bibliographic information:

Kazemek, F. E. (2004). Living a literate life. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 47(6), 448-452. Retrieved October 6, 2007, from the Academic Search Premier database.

A7.2: Web Evaluation II

Ashley Pence

October 4, 2007

Poor beyond words: Literacy and poverty in North American Social Policy; http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/CASAE/cnf2003/2003_papers/ralfstclairCAS03.pdf

     When selecting this website to evaluate I was looking for information that discussed the correlation between poverty and literacy.  I came across this article written by Ralf St. Clair who appears to be affiliated with Texas A&M University.  This article also evidence’s its affiliation with the Canadian Association for the study of Adult Education.  A quick search on Google also gives a full background of his work and teaching courses on adult education.  He is a senior lecturer in adult education, the department of Adult and Continuing Education researcher, and a member of the British Educational Research Association.  The page that I googled to find this information also lists articles that he has written previously and the one I chose was included.

The publishing body of this article is not available to link to from this page.  However, the article’s site does appear to be affiliated with either Texas A&M University or the Canadian Association for the Study of Adult Education.  The sites affiliation is unclear.

The article appears to have bias’ toward the positive outcome of adult literacy education and those who appose it.  This article is basically discussing literacy and poverty and how North America’s social policy deals with it.

This site includes many sources that are cited correctly in the bibliography and within the paper.  The author does not skip out on giving credit to those who help support his article.  This shows validity of the article because as we can see from the multiple sources, he really did his research. 

The currency of this article contains no date in the actual body of the site.  However the date, 2003 is included in the web address.  The majority of the authors sources date in the 2000’s and 1990’s however the oldest one dates back to 1959.  The older information could make this articles credibility questionable based on how much of his information was obtained from that particlular source.

A7.1: Web Evaluation I

Ashley Pence

October 4, 2007

Better Dog Food @  http://www.betterdogfood.com/

Accuracy:

1.  Upon carefully searching the Better Dog Food site, there was no evidence that the author cited any sources used to develop this website.

2.  It is not possible to verify the legitimacy of these sources since there were none cited.

3.  There were two people mentioned as a management team for the Better Dog Food website.  Rebecca Hargrave was mentioned as the President and the chief creative officer of the site.  She had experiences listed only as an animal lover and in her past life she designed and digitized a dog breeder magazine.  The other person included on the team was Carl Malamud, a former telephone company employee, a speaker in foreign countries such as Kazakhstan, and he has a dog named Bob.  Based on this information their backgrounds do not seem pertinent to selling dog food on a website.

4.  The site is not research-based according to my opinion.  This opinion is supported by the fact that there are no citings of other sources used to create this site, therefore nothing to prove its legitimacy.

Authority

1.  I do not recognize the author’s name simply because there is not one.  It is only stated as the company name which I also have never heard of.

2.  The only information that is given about anyone affiliated with this site/company are the creator and president of it.  An email address is given for Rebecca Hargrave who is the president of the company.

3.  This site was not referenced in a document that I would trust.  When searched on Google it appeared, but Google is not necessarily the most trustworthy source based on the fact that anything can be searched there, true or false.

Objectivity

1.  The aim of this organization’s website is not exactly clear to me.  A statement that appears on the first page is “we give you the dog, then sell you the dog food.”  Throughout the site it references to selling dog food, and in one place “creating” your dog but I did not see anywhere that it mentioned if the dog was real or not and why someone would want to do this.

2.  The purpose of this site is to advertise a product, dog food.

3.  I do not trust the author or the organization of this site simply because there is not information cited to back up what they are selling.  It is also very confusing at times as to what they are selling and giving away.

Currency

1.  A date, 2000, is at the bottom of the page.

2.  The date on the bottom of the page indicates the date that it was copyrighted.

3.  Some of the resources used by the author/company are current, however some pages once clicked show that they are expired.

4.  It is unclear if the page demands routine or continual updating or revision since there is no date of the most recent revision.

5.  The links on the page point to the correct Internet site addresses that pertain to dog food.

Coverage

1.  The topics on the page provide a short summary and when clicked on contain more information about that topic.

2.  The links on the website are comprehensive.

3.  The links of the site are relevant and appropriate to the site since they deal with dog food and other dog novelties.

4.  The information provided from this site is not valuable.  It does not contain information that leads me to be interested in whatever they are selling simply because I do not understand much of what the site is talking about.

A7.6: Response to McInnis

Ashley Pence

McInnis, R. G. (1994). The three “R”s of inquiry: teaching literacy in academic cultures. Council of Chairs Newsletter.

TAP:  The topic of this article is that as “poor” researchers like myself, I have a basic misconception on inquiring about a research question.  This article is focused on teaching teachers how to appropriately teach students the fundamentals of researching.  (I know a lot of teaching)

Claim:  McInnis claims that “students look for and expect to find the answer to the question instead of the evidence to be examined”.  This is basically what happens due to the lack of education we as students have had on how to research properly.  McInnis further explains the appropriate ways in which to teach students how to research.

Evidence:  Over the years of researching for multiple classes I have found one thing to be true.  That is, I get lots of information, but I have no clue what to do with it.  I can’t sort it out and make sense of it and this is exactly what McInnis says in his article.  His thought is that if we can achieve the three “R”s, reading, writing and researching, efficiently, then we are on our way to a better outcome.  When students aren’t aware of how to do these three things we become insecure and have difficulty with all aspects of work.

McInnis also emphasized on “knowing how” and “knowing that”.  Several examples were given to illustrate this concept.  One example for knowing that is, we all know that America fought in the Civil War.  However practicing inquiry requires an different kind of know and that is knowing how.  We must know how to formulate a researh topic, that answers a research question, to form the right instruments, that helps us choose good evidence in order to interpret results.  Of course this all applies to CD 315’s class work, but it can apply to all inquiring students as well.

As we all know reading is a huge part of performing research.  There are times when I become frustrated with this part of the research because I feel like all the information I read is over my head and is something that i’ll never understand.  Therefore, what’s the point in reading it?  McInnin expresses the same thing and states that “less proficient” students who need vocabulary, struggle to comprehend “word-by-word”.  When the reader is forced to struggle to make sense of words at the time of reading, the limits of short term memory are quickly reached, with the process necessarily painfully restarted over and over again.  (1994) Vocabulary is a key component to research.

Connections:  In my prior experiences with research I have found myself “piling up information”.  I am aware that something needs to change this habit of not knowing what to do with it.  I feel that with more education on synthesizing my findings, I will become a more proficient researcher.  To relate to texts that examined the same topic, I can’t seem to think of any that were quite like it.  In relation to my clinical experience I am aware that many research papers are to come.  In order to be proficient with my research skills I need to focus on learning appropriate ways in which to find evidence and realize that there is not just one answer to every question.