Dismantling the Black–White Achievement Gap Paradigm: Why and How We Need to Focus Instead on Systemic Change

More than half a century of educational efforts have focused on eliminating the Black–White achievement gap. Yet, racial disparities persist. In this article, we describe the issues with educational discourse focused on the achievement gap and the ways structural racism drives the educational experiences and outcomes of Black students. We include a discussion of Black children’s developmental competencies and the ways educators may use culturally relevant pedagogy to capitalize upon these competencies and support higher achievement among Black students. We conclude with suggestions for specific actions to foster systemic change for Black students.

‘Attention, attention, exploring minds acknowledge digital structure!’ The shift to digital humanities has happened, so what should information scientists do in response?

This article examines the impact of the digital humanities on information science and information scientists and how information scientists can contribute to digital collaborations in the digital humanities. This article uses three basic concepts—user-researcher, digital information system, and digital research object—as the framework for a description of the digital humanities shift and discusses the consequences of this shift for information science with reference to these concepts. The second part of the article investigates the two pillars of the digital humanities shift, acknowledgement of digital structure and the exploring mind, in more detail. In the case of correspondences, acknowledgement of digital structure involves respecting the ‘thing-like’ properties of letters that cannot be handled (searched, classified, etc.) unless they are translated into digitized metadata; this elevates metadata to genuine digital research objects. These theoretical issues are illustrated by the Prior archive, a collection of digitized letters, manuscript drafts, and other ‘grey’ material bequeathed from the New Zealand logician-philosopher Arthur Norman Prior. The concept of the ‘exploring mind’ is connected to a movement in information science, away from the needful user and information gap paradigm towards more open and exploratory information behaviour in the digital humanities. A concluding literature review examines selected works of information science that deals with non-standard, serendipitous information behaviour and identifies exploratory and serendipitous design features of information systems for the digital humanities. These features are represented in a taxonomy consisting of six design categories.

The Sub-Eddington Boundary for the Quasar Mass–Luminosity Plane: A Theoretical Perspective

By exploring more than sixty thousand quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 5, Steinhardt & Elvis discovered a sub-Eddington boundary and a redshift-dependent drop-off at higher black hole mass, possible clues to the growth history of massive black holes. Our contribution to this special issue of Universe amounts to an application of a model for black hole accretion and jet formation to these observations. For illustrative purposes, we include ~100,000 data points from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7 where the sub-Eddington boundary is also visible and propose a theoretical picture that explains these features. By appealing to thin disk theory and both the lower accretion efficiency and the time evolution of jetted quasars compared to non-jetted quasars in our “gap paradigm”, we explain two features of the sub-Eddington boundary. First, we show that a drop-off on the quasar mass-luminosity plane for larger black hole mass occurs at all redshifts. But the fraction of jetted quasars is directly related to the merger function in this paradigm, which means the jetted quasar fraction drops with decrease in redshift, which allows us to explain a second feature of the sub-Eddington boundary, namely a redshift dependence of the slope of the quasar mass–luminosity boundary at high black hole mass stemming from a change in radiative efficiency with time. We are able to reproduce the mass dependence of, as well as the oscillating behavior in, the slope of the sub-Eddington boundary as a function of time. The basic physical idea involves retrograde accretion occurring only for a subset of the more massive black holes, which implies that most spinning black holes in our model are prograde accretors. In short, this paper amounts to a qualitative overview of how a sub-Eddington boundary naturally emerges in the gap paradigm.

What prevents knowledge inequalities among citizens from increasing? Evidence from direct-democratic campaigns in Switzerland

This article seeks to enrich the normative debate on the advantages and drawbacks of direct democracy through an empirical analysis of individual learning about the contents of ballot propositions during campaigns. Following the knowledge gap paradigm, this article examines the factors that prevent socio-economic- knowledge inequalities among citizens from increasing. I argue that ballot propositions of low complexity exert a moderating influence, since such environments provide citizens with easy learning situations. The empirical analysis, based on panel survey data on three federal level votes that took place in Switzerland from 2006 to 2008, supports the issue complexity hypothesis.

The disengagement of visual attention in the gap paradigm across adolescence

Attentional disengagement is important for successful interaction with our environment. The efficiency of attentional disengagement is commonly assessed using the gap paradigm. There is, however, a sharp contrast between the number of studies applying the gap paradigm to clinical populations and the knowledge about the underlying developmental trajectory of the gap effect. The aim of the present study was, therefore, to investigate attentional disengagement in a group of children aged 9–15. Besides the typically deployed gap and the overlap conditions, we also added a baseline condition in which the fixation point was removed at the moment that the target appeared. This allowed us to reveal the appropriate experimental conditions to unravel possible developmental differences. Correlational analyses showed that the size of the gap effect became smaller with increasing age, but only for the difference between the gap and the overlap conditions. This shows that there is a gradual increase in the capacity to disengage visual attention with increasing age, but that this effect only becomes apparent when the gap and the overlap conditions are compared. The gradual decrease of the gap effect with increasing age provides additional evidence that the attentional system becomes more efficient with increasing age and that this is a gradual process.