Jeremy Cohen

‘Doing Good’ and Scholarship: A Service-Learning Study

The national interest in formal links between university classroom education and community service raises two important issues for college and university teaching.The first is definitional. What is service learning--learning that combines public service with related academic work--and what distinguishes it from academic internships, semesters abroad, and classroom laboratories?The second issue is pedagogical. Is there reason to believe that the learning aspects of service learning justify the entry of colleges and universities into the public-service sector?An undergraduate mass communication and society lecture course at a residential research university provided the laboratory to experiment with a dozen independent service-learning projects. Although the class was large and included several teaching assistants, the unit of analysis was service project. Each project was viewed as an individual endeavor suitable for a small class with no graduate student assistance.(1) Some service projects involved experiential learning in which students worked directly with off-campus community groups. Nonexperiential service-learning service projects provided the opportunity to aid community groups, but without direct student/community contact.The projects enabled us to reach anecdotal, but systematic conclusions about the pedagogical value of service learning and to document empirically the differences in pedagogical value between service learning with and without an experiential component. We also were able to identify and then bring our observations to several normative issues.Service learningThe growth of service. Interest and participation in community service has become well entrenched on American college campuses over the last decade. More than 305 campuses, for example, belong to Campus Compact, an umbrella organization established in 1985 by a number of college and university presidents to encourage community service among undergraduates.(2) The 1993 Report of the Commission on National and Community Service estimates that 140,000 students at Campus Compact schools participated in service on a weekly basis in 1992.(3) Another 650 colleges and universities participated in the Campus Outreach Opportunity League and 150 schools ROW provide academic credit for service-learning programs offered by the Partnership for Service Learning.(4) And of course, 1993 saw bipartisan support for President Bill Clintons March 1 proposal for a program to offset tuition through public-service participation and for the inauguration of the 1993 Summer of Service.The variety of motivations and rationales for service education are numerous and might even suggest that some see service education as a panacea. The 1980 report of the National Commission on Youth is often cited for its recommendation that community service be used to bridge the gap between youth and adulthood.(5) In a 1985 report for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Frank Newman concluded, If there is a crisis in education in the United States today, it is less that test scores have declined than it is that we have failed to provide the education for citizenship that is still the most important responsibility of the nations schools and colleges.(6) Rutgers political scientist Benjamin Barber has become the leading advocate of teaching citizenship values in a democracy through service education courses.(7)In another Carnegie report, however, Ernest Boyer takes higher education to task for the gap between values in the academy and the needs of the larger world. Service is routinely praised, but accorded little attention, Boyer notes in Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professorate.(8) And although Boyer embraces the values of service education, he does so with the practiced critique of the classroom professor. Colleges and universities have recently rejected service as serious scholarship, partly because its meaning is so vague and often disconnected from serious intellectual work, Boyer warns. …

Third-Person Effects and the Differential Impact in Negative Political Advertising

People often assume that, because of their special knowledge, others will be influenced by mass media messages while they remain relatively untouched. This experiment uses negative political advertisements to find that when subjects saw their own candidates attacked, they reported they were not much influenced, but they said others would be. Conversely, when they saw an attack on a candidate they disliked, they reported themselves to be influenced but were less likely to think others would be. These trends worked more for negative advertising about Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis than those about the Republican winner George Bush.

Altered brain function underlying verbal memory encoding and retrieval in psychotic major depression

Psychotic major depression (PMD) is associated with deficits in verbal memory as well as other cognitive impairments. This study investigated brain function in individuals with PMD during a verbal declarative memory task. Participants included 16 subjects with PMD, 15 subjects with non-psychotic major depression (NPMD) and 16 healthy controls (HC). Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data were acquired while subjects performed verbal memory encoding and retrieval tasks. During the explicit encoding task, subjects semantically categorized words as either man-made or not man-made. For the retrieval task, subjects identified whether words had been presented during the encoding task. Functional MRI data were processed using SPM5 and a group by condition ANOVA. Clusters of activation showing either a significant main effect of group or an interaction of group by condition were further examined using t-tests to identify group differences. During the encoding task, the PMD group showed lower hippocampus, insula, and prefrontal activation compared to HC. During the retrieval task, the PMD group showed lower recognition accuracy and higher prefrontal and parietal cortex activation compared to both HC and NPMD groups. Verbal retrieval deficits in PMD may be associated with deficient hippocampus function during encoding. Increased brain activation during retrieval may reflect an attempt to compensate for encoding deficits.

Morphometry of human insular cortex and insular volume reduction in Williams syndrome.

Functional imaging in humans and anatomical data in monkeys have implicated the insula as a multimodal sensory integrative brain region. The topography of insular connections is organized by its cytoarchitectonic regions. Previous attempts to measure the insula have utilized either indirect or automated methods. This study was designed to develop a reliable method for obtaining volumetric magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) measurements of the human insular cortex, and to validate that method by examining the anatomy of insular cortex in adults with Williams syndrome (WS) and healthy age-matched controls. Statistical reliability was obtained among three raters for this method, supporting its reproducibility not only across raters, but within different software packages. The procedure described here utilizes native-space morphometry as well as a method for dividing the insula into connectivity-based sub-regions estimated from cytoarchitectonics. Reliability was calculated in both ANALYZE (N=3) and BrainImageJava (N=10) where brain scans were measured once in each hemisphere by each rater. This highly reliable method revealed total, anterior, and posterior insular volume reduction bilaterally (all ps<.002) in WS, after accounting for reduced total brain volumes in these participants. Although speculative, the reduced insular volumes in WS may represent a neural risk for the development of hyperaffiliative social behavior with increased specific phobias, and implicate the insula as a critical limbic integrative region. Native-space quantification of the insula may be valuable in the study of neurodevelopmental or neuropsychiatric disorders related to anxiety and social behavior.

Insular volume reduction in fragile X syndrome.

Fragile X syndrome (FraX) is the most common form of inherited mental deficit and is caused by mutations of the Fragile X Mental Retardation 1 (FMR1) gene on the X chromosome. While males and females with the full FMR1 mutation are affected differently because the disorder is X‐linked, both suffer from varying degrees of cognitive impairment, attention deficits and social anxiety. The insula is a sensory integrative region that has been increasingly suggested as a critical area involved in anxiety manifestation.

Insular Cortex Abnormalities in Psychotic Major Depression: Relationship to Gender and Psychotic Symptoms

Recent data suggests that psychotic major depression (PMD) may be a discrete disorder distinguishable from nonpsychotic major depression (NPMD), and that patients with PMD may be more similar to individuals with schizophrenia than individuals with NPMD. The insula is a brain region in which morphometric changes have been associated with psychotic symptom severity in schizophrenia and affective psychosis. It was hypothesized that insular volumes would be reduced in PMD compared to NPMD and controls, and insular volumes would correlate with psychosis but not depression severity. Insular gray matter volumes were measured in PMD and NPMD patients and matched healthy controls using magnetic resonance images and manual morphometry. Clinical measures of illness severity were obtained to determine their relationship with insular volume. Posterior insular volumes were significantly reduced in PMD compared to HC. There were also significant group-by-gender interactions for total, anterior and posterior insular volumes. Using Pearson product-moment correlations, anterior insular volumes did not correlate with depression severity. Left anterior insular volume was significantly correlated with total and positive symptom psychosis severity in the PMD group. Atypical insular morphometry may be related to the inability to distinguish between internally and externally generated sensory inputs characteristic of psychosis.

Newtonian Communication: Shaking the Libel Tree for Empirical Damages.

This case study of a 1987 libel suit brought by entertainer Wayne Newton against NBC for that networks broadcasts about Newtons purchase of a Las Vegas hotel resulted in a jury award of

PERCEIVED IMPACT OF DEFAMATION AN EXPERIMENT ON THIRD-PERSON EFFECTS

19 million reduced to about

Developing a Multicultural Mass Communication Course.

5 million by the judge. Newton introduced public opinion survey evidence to prove damage to his reputation and the jury apparently was influenced by it, but not the judge. The authors argue that legal proof currently is less rigorous than is proof demanded by sound social science. Newtons lawyers argue that a post trial survey showed the

Experimental Test of Some Notions of the Fact/Opinion Distinction in Libel.

5 million award helped restore Newtons reputation — a trend that could be dangerous, the authors argue, if lawyers in the future say only a big award can restore a reputation.