Journal Entry, July 2020: Affirmation, Inclusion, Equity and Everyone

When we reflect on 2020, especially in the United States, the divides in society amplified by the pandemic and laid bare for all to see following the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota in May, 2020 will most likely be the top of mind. We could all see this nation’s history and current complicity for racism, both the systematic and systemic. The moment was not unfamiliar, but markedly different. Initially, we wrote this piece in the summer of 2020, in response to our professional organization’s delay and hesitancy to affirm Black lives, Black students, Black engineers and Black faculty. Many of us were crying out. Allies with commitment to action showed up for and with us -- no questions asked, to ensure that what we felt was at least heard. In nearly a year since our original effort to write this piece together, some things have changed for the better. We saw our professional organization affirm Black lives. We saw some of our colleagues take action, change course and use their influence to make the community better. Some learned, listened and tried to do something new. Others, either remained silent, hopefully in contemplation, but some with a silence that convinces us that they are simply not on the same side. We composed the below entries in the summer of 2020, amid national turbulence and internal reflection. Below we provide four personal stories and some specific calls to action situated in the summer of 2020, but these remain our aspirations and hopes for the field of engineering education.

Three essays on labor economics

This dissertation addresses labor market issues. The first two chapters deal with employment issues during the great recession using nationally representative data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation. The first chapter looks at the added worker effect in the great recession, the wife's labor market response to a husband loss of job. The second chapter investigates the impact of a wife's labor market participation on family poverty. The third chapter examines employment opportunities in the economics discipline using journal publication records from IDEAS/RePEc. It looks at the effect of new journal entry on the distribution of publicati

Spring 1942

This chapter highlights the journal entry of Rachela Auerbach on May 22, 1942 about a rumor that 'something' would be happening as the entire Jewish police force was placed on high alert. It discusses the information about the mass murder of the Jewish population in the eastern parts of occupied Poland that began to reach the ghetto through refugees and letters. It mentions that the underground Jewish press had alarmed its readers with news about the massacre of Vilnius Jews in Ponary. The chapter details how the German administration introduced additional forceful measures aimed at the separation of a ghetto from the rest of Warsaw, and Jews who were residing illegally on the Aryan side were more aggressively hunted down. It recounts the beginning of German surveillance of the attitude of the Jewish population and search of possible resistance leaders.

Reporting and Disclosure of Investments in Sustainable Development

This paper builds upon prior research regarding the quest for a sustainable measuring method. Here, we present a method to integrate sustainability and financial accounting at the level of transaction recording and introduce the concept of environmental debit and credit entry. This concept is illustrated through investment reporting. Identification of the research gap is based on the review of the initial population of 141 research papers and is supported with the European legal framework analysis. Logistic regression on the 500 largest European-based companies justifies the environmental footprint inclusion into the integrated journal entry. This study provides robust data concerning the limitations of the current financial reporting system. Our findings support the conclusion that the currently applied hybrid sustainable disclosure with synthetic ratios, indicators and unstructured narratives failed to provide a comprehensive and auditable picture of a company’s environmental.

Feedback in Reflective Journals Fosters Reflection Skills of Student Teachers

The main goal of this study was to test whether feedback from a lecturer and tutor on an initial reflective journal entry fosters reflection quality in a subsequent journal entry and reflection skills in student teachers. To address these questions, we, a team of educators and psychologists, conducted a field experiment during the practical semester. Student teachers ( N = 54; 40 female) wrote two reflective journals about their own classroom teachings on an online-platform and were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: (a) reflective journaling with feedback (experimental condition, n = 27) or (b) reflective journaling without feedback (control condition, n = 27). Feedback in reflective journaling fostered reflection quality in the subsequent journal entry and conceptual knowledge about reflection. These findings indicate that feedback in reflective journal-keeping exerts a powerful influence in fostering reflection in student teachers during their practical semester.

Preparing for Audit Data Analytics with the AICPA General Ledger Audit Data Standards

It is challenging for auditors to effectively and efficiently use data analytics in audit procedures and general ledger testing when the data acquired from clients is often incomplete and not in a usable format. Considerable time must be spent cleansing, transforming, standardizing, and validating the data prior to analyzing it. This problem motivated the AICPA task force to develop a set of Audit Data Standards for streamlining the exchange of data. This paper describes an extensive exercise where students: 1) develop a Microsoft Access database that complies with the Audit Data Standards (ADS) for general ledger data; 2) cleanse and transform non-standardized client data for import into an ADS-compliant database; and 3) write queries for general ledger testing and journal entry testing. The exercise strengthens students’ database and query-writing skills while introducing the ADS in the context of realistic tasks to support a financial statement audit.