Undergraduate Engineering Students' Understanding of Heat, Temperature, and Radiation

Difficulty understanding heat and temperature concepts has been recognized in engineering education. Confusion has been shown to persist after instruction. The purpose of this study was to determine whether undergraduate engineering students’ knowledge of four heat transfer concept areas significantly changed with instruction and whether this varied by major and GPA. Two hundred twenty-eight undergraduate engineering students from six institutions were assessed prior to and after instruction. Results showed significant improvement in most concept areas but mean scores were below mastery. Previously documented misconceptions persisted after instruction. Significant differences were found by major and GPA. Suggestions for future research provided.

All Alone, Without Money, No Language--Just Yiddish": An Immigrant's Letters from Missouri to Galicia

In June 1891, Shimshon Gerye, a Jewish immigrant from Galicia (a region that now falls across the border of Ukraine and Poland) living in Sedalia, Missouri, received a letter from a cousin back home. The content of the letter was probably rather mundane (a request to send money, inquiries about health), but its timing was somewhat unusual: in the thirty-five years that Shimshon had been living in America, this was apparently the first he had heard from his family in Europe. What survives of the ensuing correspondence, written in Yiddish and spanning a one-year period, provides an interesting view of the situation of the immigrant and the pressures of assimilation, as well as the Yiddish language in America at the end of the nineteenth century.

On the Way to Becoming Global Citizens: Use of ICT by Ukrainian Students

Information is one of the important assets in today's society. Information and communication technologies (ICT) may be particular important for students as one of the tools to become global citizens. The objective of this study was to investigate use of ICT by high school students (n=122) from Ukraine, a developing country. The analysis indicates that majority of students from Ukraine have computer at home and more than half of students have the Internet access at home. In addition, gender differences in the use of computer and the Internet were identified. Educational implications and future directions are discussed.

Student Performance in Traditional vs. Online Format: Evidence from an MBA Level Introductory Economics Class

All previous studies comparing online and face-to-face format for instruction of economics compared courses that were either online or face-to-face format and regressed exam scores on selected student characteristics. This approach is subject to the econometric problems of self-selection omitted unobserved variables. Our study uses two methods to deal with these problems. First we eliminate self-selection bias by using students from a course that uses both instruction formats. Second, we use the exam questions as the unit of observation, and eliminate omitted variable bias by using an indicator variable for each student to capture the effect of differences in unobserved student characteristics on learning outcomes. We report the finding that students had a significantly greater chance of answering a question correctly if it came from a chapter covered online.

Public School Choice and Integration: Evidence from Durham, North Carolina

Using evidence from Durham, North Carolina, we examine the impact of school choice programs on racial and class-based segregation across schools. Theoretical considerations suggest that how choice programs affect segregation will depend not only on the family preferences emphasized in the sociology literature but also on the linkages between student composition, school quality and student achievement emphasized in the economics literature, and on the availability of schools of different types. Reasonable assumptions about how these factors differ for students of different races and socio-economic status suggest that the segregating choices of students from advantaged backgrounds are likely to outweigh any integrating choices by disadvantaged students. The results of our empirical analysis are consistent with these theoretical considerations. Using information on the actual schools students attend and on the schools in their assigned attendance zones, we find that schools in Durham are more segregated by race and class as a result of school choice programs than they would be if all students attended their geographically assigned schools. In addition, we find that the effects of choice on segregation by class are larger than the effects on segregation by race.