Primary school teachers as a tool of secularisation of society in communist Czechoslovakia

This study focuses on the secularisation of society in communist Czechoslovakia (1948–1989) as a process in which primary school teachers played an important role. It aims to describe and explain typical everyday situations in which teachers were forced to fulfil tasks in connection with the Communist Party’s politics of secularisation. The text is based on witness memories obtained through oral history interviews, and on examination of historical archival sources and legislation. The study shows that the situations in which teachers found themselves in connection with performing these tasks were often not easy to face. This was, on the one hand, due to the expectations of the political establishment that teachers would obey their instructions meticulously and without reservations. The teachers, on the other hand, strove to interfere in negative ways with the lives of their students (and their families) as little as possible.     

Integrating inquiry science and language development for English language learners

The traditional approach to the education of language minority students separates English language development from content instruction because it is assumed that English language proficiency is a prerequisite for subject matter learning. The authors of this article take the alternate view that the integration of inquiry science and language acquisition enhances learning in both domains. The report describes a conceptual framework for science–language integration and the development of a five‐level rubric to assess teachers' understanding of curricular integration. The science–language integration rubric describes the growth of teacher expertise as a continuum from a view of science and language as discreet unrelated domains to the recognition of the superordinate processes that create a synergistic relationship between inquiry science and language development. Examples from teacher interviews are used to illustrate teacher thinking at each level. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 39: 664–687, 2002     

Rethinking Assessment Design: Evidence-Informed Strategies to Boost Educational Impact in the Anatomical Sciences

University assessment is in the midst of transformation. Assessments are no longer designed solely to determine that students can remember and regurgitate lecture content, nor in order to rank students to aid with some future selection process. Instead, assessments are expected to drive, support, and enhance learning and to contribute to student self-assessment and development of skills and attributes for a lifetime of learning. While traditional purposes of certifying achievement and determining readiness to progress remain important, these new expectations for assessment can create tensions in assessment design, selection, and deployment. With the recognition of these tensions, three contemporary approaches to assessment in medical education are described. These approaches include careful consideration of the educational impact of assessment—before, during (test or recall enhanced learning) and after assessments; development of student (and staff) assessment literacy; and planning of cohesive systems of assessment (with a range of assessment tools) designed to assess the various competencies demanded of future graduates. These approaches purposefully straddle the cross purposes of assessment in modern health professions education. The implications of these models are explored within the context of medical education and then linked with contemporary work in the anatomical sciences in order to highlight current synergies and potential future innovations when using evidence-informed strategies to boost the educational impact of assessments.     

Perceptual Differences in Approaches to Censorship: Information Intermediaries and the Implementation of Law

Censorship exists wherever there is preselection of information made available to a particular group of potential users-that is, wherever there is an information intermediary between the information source and the user. Therefore, one cannot ask whether or not there should be censorship. Nor is it realistic to declare that freedom of expression should override censorship. A more useful approach is to ask what checks and balances should be in place to ensure freedom of expression and other basic information rights in the face of the necessity and reality of the information selection process. Two forms of legal intervention have been used to create our current regime. This article first examines delegation of the censoring/selecting power to particular intermediaries in the information cycle. Historically, power to select appropriate information for dissemination was delegated to the 'censors,' and examples of this approach continue in our law in such areas as access and copyright legislation and in unlegislated areas of the law such as confidential information. Second, the paper examines situations where the law regulates the censoring activity itself. In situations such as libel and obscenity, for example, our law preempts the intermediary by dictating the decision itself. The law, however, does not necessarily mirror actual decisions being made by information intermediaries. Empirical evidence suggests that selection/censorship decisions, which the current law might have been expected to affect, may be being made by other intermediaries and on other criteria than theoretical examination of the law would lead one to expect. These 'extralegal' forms of censorship can be very effective, but are we content to leave those decisions without legal control? The article concludes that more strategic empirical analysis of our current legal attempts to create effective checks and balances on the censoring decisions made by intermediaries will assist us in further law reform attempts.     

Adapting the Knuth–Morris–Pratt algorithm for pattern matching in Huffman encoded texts

In the present work we perform compressed pattern matching in binary Huffman encoded texts [Huffman, D. (1952). A method for the construction of minimum redundancy codes, Proc. of the IRE, 40, 1098–1101]. A modified Knuth–Morris–Pratt algorithm is used in order to overcome the problem of false matches, i.e., an occurrence of the encoded pattern in the encoded text that does not correspond to an occurrence of the pattern itself in the original text. We propose a bitwise KMP algorithm that can move one extra bit in the case of a mismatch since the alphabet is binary. To avoid processing any bit of the encoded text more than once, a preprocessed table is used to determine how far to back up when a mismatch is detected, and is defined so that we are always able to align the start of the encoded pattern with the start of a codeword in the encoded text. We combine our KMP algorithm with two practical Huffman decoding schemes which handle more than a single bit per machine operation; skeleton trees defined by Klein [Klein, S. T. (2000). Skeleton trees for efficient decoding of huffman encoded texts. Information Retrieval, 3, 7–23], and numerical comparisons between special canonical values and portions of a sliding window presented in Moffat and Turpin [Moffat, A., & Turpin, A. (1997). On the implementation of minimum redundancy prefix codes. IEEE Transactions on Communications, 45, 1200–1207]. Experiments show rapid search times of our algorithms compared to the “decompress then search” method, therefore, files can be kept in their compressed form, saving memory space. When compression gain is important, these algorithms are better than cgrep [Ferragina, P., Tommasi, A., & Manzini, G. (2004). C Library to search over compressed texts, http://roquefort.di.unipi.it/~ferrax/CompressedSearch], which is only slightly faster than ours.     

Effects of conceptual systems and instructional methods on general chemistry laboratory achievement

Conceptual systems theory predicts four system orientations. System 1 individuals are highly concrete in their reasoning ability and beliefs. System 2 individuals are strongly negative toward authority and institutions and tend to be autonomous and rebellious. System 3 individuals are more abstract than System 1 or System 2 individuals and have strong need to maintain secure relationships. System 4 individuals have the most abstract, flexible, and open-minded orientation and have an analytical approach to problem solving. Conceptual systems orientations of subjects taking a general chemistry laboratory were determined using the “This I Believe” test. Subjects were classified into Systems 1, 2, 3, 4, or admixtures. Laboratory sections were assigned randomly to three instructional methods (traditional approach, learning cycle, computer simulation) for teaching a three-hour laboratory covering spectrophotometry principles. Factorial analysis of covariance indicated no significant conceptual system by instructional method interaction. The main effect for conceptual system was significant, and pairwise comparisons of adjusted mean posttest scores indicated that System 4 subjects as well as System 3 subjects scored significantly higher than System 1 subjects. There was no significant difference in scores between System 4 and System 3 individuals. Conceptual systems orientation is an attribute variable that may influence chemistry learning.     

A comparative study of students' and their teacher's perceptions of laboratory work in secondary schools

This article reports on a study of student and teacher perceptions of the purpose and effectiveness of laboratory work in science at the Year 10 level of secondary school. The main focus of the study was a comparison between the perceptions of one class of students and their teacher at each of six different schools with regard to the aims, regularity, conduct and assessment of laboratory work. The study identified a number of areas of mismatch between students and their teachers. The findings of the study will be of use to teachers in developing and improving their science curriculum, particularly with regard to laboratory work.