Marshalltown Community College

Review of: Forty Years of Growth and Achievement: A History of Iowa's Community Colleges, by Jeremy Varner, edited by Janice Nahra Friedel.

The present study was partial replication of a study done five years earlier which examined interdisciplinary teaming in middle schools and the resulting impact of interdisciplinary teaming on student self-concepts. The degree of interdisciplinary teaming was measured using the stages-of-concern instrument that is a component of the Concerns Based Adoption Model (CBAM). Student self-concept was measured by the Piers-Harris Children's Self-Concept Scale. Results showed that the majority of teachers in Iowa schools are at the early stages of usage of interdisciplinary team teaching and usage over time does not lead to higher levels of implementation of the concept. In contrast to the 1987 study, which found students who attended middle schools with interdisciplinary teaming had higher self-concepts than middle schools in which teaming had not been implemented, this study did not find a significant difference between students in user and nonuser schools.

The intelligibility of a 16-item consonant set was assessed for 10 patients who use the Symbion four-channel cochlear implant. The patients were selected on the basis of "good" speech recognition scores. For each patient, consonant intelligibility was assessed when his/her processor was configured to pass from one to four channels of information. The results suggest, most generally, that two channels, one low frequency and one high frequency, provide most of the information about consonant identity.

The fiscal year of the Marshalltown, Iowa, Water Department ends March 3 1 . Last April after the yearly financial report was completed the figures revealed that the income for the year was $20,000 less than the year previous. Furthermore, the figures indicated that the possibility of the income increasing during the next several months to come was rather slim. A comparison of the figures on this report with the figures on similar reports of past years showed that the decrease of $20,000 in income represented the amount spent yearly as capital improvements. I doubt if the financial status of many other water works was little better off if the truth were admitted. Probaby almost every water superintendent and manager asked themselves the same question I did. Certainly the prospects of constructive improvements was about as dark as during the darkest ages.