Factors Affecting Students' Acceptance of Tablet PCs: A Study in Italian High Schools

To maximize the advantages of the tablet personal computer (TPC) at school, this technology needs to be accepted by students as new tool for learning. With reference to the Technology Acceptance Model and the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology, the aims of this study were (a) to analyze factors influencing high school students' acceptance of TPCs and (b) to detect any difference in this influence considering the frequency of TPC use, students' gender, and school grade. Two hundred and ninety-six students from six high schools in the Milan area participated in the study. Data were collected using an online survey. The results showed that empowerment in learning, perceived usefulness, and support conditions affect learning use, and empowerment in learning and affect influence communicative use of TPCs. The implications of these results are discussed. (Keywords: tablets, acceptance, digital technologies, high school, path analysis)     

The physical profile of adult male basketball players: Differences between competitive levels and playing positions

This study examined the physical differences in adult male basketball players of different competitive level and playing position using a large cohort. In the middle of the regular season, 129 players from four different Divisions completed a Yo-YoIR1 and, after 3-to-8 days, they performed a 6-min continuous running test (Mognoni’s test), a counter-movement jump (CMJ) test and a 5-min High-intensity Intermittent running test (HIT). Magnitude-based inferences revealed that differences in HIT were very likely moderate between Division I and II and likely small between Division II and III. The differences in absolute peak power and force produced during CMJs between Division I and II and between Division II and III were possibly small. Differences in Yo-YoIR1 and Mognoni’s test were very likely-to-almost certain moderate/large between Division III and VI. We observed possibly-to-likely small differences in HIT and Mognoni’s test between guards and forwards and almost certainly moderate differences in absolute peak power and force during CMJs between guards and centres. The ability to sustain high-intensity intermittent efforts (i.e. HIT) and strength/power characteristics can differentiate between competitive level, while strength/power characteristics discriminate guards from forwards/centres. These findings inform practitioners on the development of identification programs and training activities in basketball.     

Setting up a presence on the World Wide Web

There is considerable pressure on most professional and society publishers to create a presence on the World Wide Web, from their members and customers alike. This paper describes the planning that went into the establishment of CAB INTERNATIONAL’S Home Page, focusing on the strategic issues and detailed preparation rather than the physical tasks involved. Although it is technically straightforward to set up a Home Page, many publishers are faced with difficult decisions about how to use the features of the World Wide Web to best advantage and how to develop a real presence in terms of both promotion and publishing activities.     

A confirmatory factor analysis of the hendrick‐hendrick love attitudes scale: We may not yet have an acceptable model

Loving is a fundamental aspect of being human. Freud himself argued that the inability to love leads to illness, and some empirical research appears to support his view. Yet our knowledge of the nature of love remains primitive, because until recently it was not considered scientifically respectable to investigate love phenomena. This study used confirmatory factor analytic methods to test the fit of various models to data provided by 499 subjects on the 1990 version of the Hendrick and Hendrick Love Attitudes Scale. The results suggest that counselors and researchers should not treat the love styles delineated by Lee as discrete or uncorrelated entities. The results also suggest that the traditional model regarding this measure, positing (a) six factors (b) that are uncorrelated, may not provide a very good fit to data from the Love Attitudes Scale.     

Elementary Science Students’ Motivation and Learning Strategy Use: Constructivist Classroom Contextual Factors in a Life Science Laboratory and a Traditional Classroom

The purpose of this study was to describe the influence of constructivist classroom contextual factors in a life science laboratory and a traditional science classroom on elementary students’ motivation and learning strategy use. The Constructivist Teaching Inventory was used to examine classroom contextual factors. The Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire was used to examine student motivation and learning strategies. A Wilcoxon nonparametric test determined that constructivist teaching practices were found to occur more often in the life laboratory than in the regular classroom. Although constructivist teaching practices increased at each observation time in both the regular classroom and in the life laboratory, a Friedman test determined that they were not statistically significant increases. Paired sample t tests determined that student motivation and learning strategies were higher in the life laboratory than in the regular classroom overall as well as at each survey time except for learning strategies at Post 1. A 2 × 4 between 3 within repeated measure ANOVA determined that student MSLQ motivation and learning strategy scores in the regular classroom varied statistically significantly by teacher. Student MSLQ motivation and learning strategy scores in the life laboratory varied statistically significantly by teacher. To triangulate data, individual interviews of students were conducted at the end of the semester and revealed students regard the life laboratory as an asset to their science study; however, students do appreciate and value working in the learning environment that the regular classroom provides.     

Are all citations worth the same? Valuing citations by the value of the citing items

Bibliometricians have long recurred to citation counts to measure the impact of publications on the advancement of science. However, since the earliest days of the field, some scholars have questioned whether all citations should be worth the same, and have gone on to weight them by a variety of factors. However sophisticated the operationalization of the measures, the methodologies used in weighting citations still present limits in their underlying assumptions. This work takes an alternative approach to resolving the underlying problem: the proposal is to value citations by the impact of the citing articles, regardless of the length of their reference list. As well as conceptualizing a new indicator of impact, the work illustrates its application to the 2004–2012 Italian scientific production indexed in the WoS. The proposed impact indicator is highly correlated to the traditional citation count, however the shifts observed between the two measures are frequent and the number of outliers not negligible. Moreover, the new indicator shows greater “sensitivity” when used to identify the highly-cited papers.     

Testing for universality of Mendeley readership distributions

Altmetrics promise useful support for assessing the impact of scientific works, including beyond the scholarly community and with very limited citation windows. Unfortunately, altmetrics scores are currently available only for recent articles and cannot be used as covariates in predicting long term impact of publications. However, the study of their statistical properties is a subject of evident interest to scientometricians. Applying the same approaches used in the literature to assess the universality of citation distributions, the intention here is to test whether the universal distribution also holds for Mendeley readerships. Results of the analysis carried out on a sample of publications randomly extracted from the Web of Science confirm that readerships seem to share similar shapes across fields and can be rescaled to a common and universal form. Such rescaling results as not particularly effective on the right tails. In other regions, rescaling causes a good collapse of field specific distributions, even for very recent publications.     

Doctoral students’ experiences of nondisclosure with their dissertation chair

We examined doctoral students’ experiences of nondisclosure with their dissertation chairs. Using a hermeneutic phenomenology design, we analyzed two individual interviews of 10 doctoral students. We identified the following three themes: (a) the professional dynamics in the relationship, (b) the interpersonal and cultural dynamics in the relationship, and (c) prioritization of completing the dissertation. Implications for doctoral students and dissertation chairs are discussed.     

To Score or Not to Score: Factors Influencing Performance and Feasibility of Automatic Content Scoring of Text Responses

In this article, we systematize the factors influencing performance and feasibility of automatic content scoring methods for short text responses. We argue that performance (i.e., how well an automatic system agrees with human judgments) mainly depends on the linguistic variance seen in the responses and that this variance is indirectly influenced by other factors such as target population or input modality. Extending previous work, we distinguish conceptual, realization, and nonconformity variance, which are differentially impacted by the various factors. While conceptual variance relates to different concepts embedded in the text responses, realization variance refers to their diverse manifestation through natural language. Nonconformity variance is added by aberrant response behavior. Furthermore, besides its performance, the feasibility of using an automatic scoring system depends on external factors, such as ethical or computational constraints, which influence whether a system with a given performance is accepted by stakeholders. Our work provides (i) a framework for assessment practitioners to decide a priori whether automatic content scoring can be successfully applied in a given setup as well as (ii) new empirical findings and the integration of empirical findings from the literature on factors that influence automatic systems' performance.