This paper reports a replication of part of Tavakoli and Foster’s (2008) investigation into the influence of narrative task design on second language (L2) oral performance. The initial study found in part that narratives with both foreground and background information elicited significantly greater syntactic complexity than those with only foreground information. This close replication adds the variable of literacy, conducting the study with adult refugees to New Zealand with low first language (L1) literacy. Participants narrated two of the four cartoon strips in Tavakoli and Foster (2008). In contrast to the initial study, background information in the narrative tasks had no impact on the syntactic complexity, lexical diversity, or fluency of performances. However, given the tendency of participants to omit background events, this outcome is discussed in terms of visual literacy, and aptness to describe rather than connect the cartoon frames. The implications for the use of narrative tasks with such learners are explored.

Northern British Columbia, Canada, is an undersurveyed region for aquatic macroinvertebrates. We surveyed the Stellako River, a culturally and economically important river in the region, for adult caddisflies using Malaise traps, then identified species by using DNA barcoding, which revealed the presence of Protoptila coloma Ross (Trichoptera: Glossosomatidae). This is the first record of this species in Canada; it represents a 680-km northwards expansion of the species’ currently known range.

In March 2024, Daniel Kahneman – the man who did perhaps more than anyone else to shape the field of behavioural public policy – died. He is among a small handful of scholars who have had a huge effect on my own career, and in this essay – the first in a series of essays in a special section of the Journal that honour him – I reflect on how his work inspired much of my own.

The Master of Science in Clinical Research Management program at Rutgers Biomedical Health Sciences underwent significant restructuring aligned with the Clinical and Translational Science Award funding parameters. This evolution necessitated formal evaluation through accreditation by the Commission on Accreditation of Allied Health Education Programs. The years-long accreditation process posed challenges, particularly regarding the collection of course learning outcomes data aligned with accreditation competency standards. The objective of this special communication is to report the rationale behind pursuing accreditation for clinical research degrees, the data collection challenges during the accreditation process, and a potential solution. In order to address existing university metric data gaps, Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap) software was used to develop a data collection tool that streamlined the accreditation process and reduced the administrative burden. REDCap was effective in allowing faculty to self-report 3 years of course outcomes data for accreditation. There was an elevated level of user satisfaction compared to alternative data collection methods. A SWOT analysis identified the strengths and weaknesses of using REDCap, emphasizing strengths in functionality that include customizability, data validation, and compliance with regulatory standards. Overall, the advantages of leveraging REDCap for accreditation data collection, including customization, data security, and user-friendliness outweigh the key disadvantage of REDCap, which is its limited reporting capabilities.

This article analyzes the transformation of an image of ritual violence on the Kenyan coast from the sixteenth century to the present. Drawing on a range of sources, it shows how understandings of “mung'aro” — a ritual of senior male initiation among Mijikenda-speaking peoples — changed as it became an object of inquiry for generations of missionaries, explorers, colonial administrators, local intellectuals, and foreign historians and anthropologists. In the mid-twentieth century, mung'aro became a key feature of Mijikenda traditions of origin in Singwaya, but in such a way that it reversed the direction of a specific form of ritual violence described in nineteenth-century traditions. By focusing on the transposition and recombination of ritual motifs across practical and discursive modalities (namely, ritual and narrative), this article offers a new approach to “the limits of invention” regarding traditions of origin.

Overwhelmingly, philosophers tend to work on the assumption that epistemic justification is a normative status that supervenes on the relation between a cognitive subject, some body of evidence, and a particular proposition (or “hypothesis”). This article will explore some motivations for moving in the direction of a rather different view. On this view, we are invited to think of the relevant epistemic norm(s) as applying more widely to the competent exercise of epistemic agency, where it is understood that cognitive subjects are simultaneously engaged in a number of different epistemic pursuits (distinct “lines of inquiry”), each placing irreconcilable demands on our limited cognitive resources. In effect, adopting this view would require shifting our normative epistemic concern away from the question of how a subject stands with respect to the evidence bearing on the hypothesis at stake in any one line of inquiry, and over onto the question of how well they cope with the inherent risks of epistemic resource management across several lines of inquiry. While this conclusion brings to light important connections between practical and epistemic rationality, it does not collapse the distinction between them. It does, however, constitute a step in the direction of a more systematically developed account of “non-ideal epistemology.”

We propose a qualitative method of assessing a policy mix’s content, which can be utilized alongside currently common quantitative techniques such as counting the number of tools, policies, and levels of government involved. Focussing on whether or not the mix promotes flexibility or standardization and whether it is intended to be maintaining or innovating helps to better map existing policy mixes and inform design decisions than do more contentless quantitative methods. It has implications for theories of policy-making in improving on current depictions of the nature and dynamics of policy mixes, especially with respect to the impact of procedural tools, and also helps underscore the significance of what often appear in quantitative studies to be marginal or incremental shifts in instruments and goals. The utility of the model and its improvement on existing methods are illustrated through examination of two cases of banking regulation and pension policy in Canada.

Humanitarian crises often require urgent medical care to people of concern. Such medical aid includes assessing and treating acute medical needs and ongoing chronic health conditions. Among the people of concern there are children, who are often the most vulnerable population in humanitarian contexts because they often lack the experience, independence, and cognitive and verbal skills to deal with the ordeals they are facing. These limitations might prevent identification and diagnosis of pain. The under-diagnosis and under-treated pain by health care providers might be also due to the perceived urgency of more acute or life-threatening medical needs with limited medical equipment and personnel, lack of awareness, or assessment tools in such contexts. Additionally, due to issues of anonymity and lack of formal guidelines, there is a severe lack of standardized registration of children’s pain conditions in humanitarian crises. Finally, acute pain is also a predictor of post-traumatic stress disorder, a common outcome in such disasters. We call on health care providers to use standardized scales to assess children’s pain intensity, frequency, and duration, and to treat it appropriately. These will not only reduce children’s physical suffering but may also prevent subsequent risk of PTSD.