Study time and test performance as a function of test expectations

Study time and test performance change as a function of subjects expecting either open questions or a multiple-choice test on the contents of a history text. After studying a first history text, the subjects immediately received a test consisting of either open questions or multiple-choice items. They were led to expect the same type of test on a second text. Study time on Text 2 was self-paced, and the type of test was either the expected or unexpected one (either open questions or a multiple-choice test). The main hypothesis was confirmed that subjects consider open questions a more demanding test than a multiple-choice test. Accordingly, subjects expecting open questions on Text 2 used more study time and performed better on both types of test than did subjects expecting a multiple-choice test. Internal analyses revealed that the differences on study time and test achievement between the two expectation conditions occurred only when the subjects were thoroughly acquainted with the processing requirements of the learning material and its expected test.     

Talking back to big bird: Preschool users and a simple speech recognition system

The present study examined the effectiveness of one configuration of automatic speech recognition (ASR) software and hardware with a child sample of 36 three-year-olds and a comparison sample of 20 adults. Subjects used a speaker-dependent, template-based system to play a simple Sesame Street naming game. Results indicated that while the system performed well with adults, it was much less effective with children. An analysis of the children's performances indicates that children's speech is more variable, in both volume and content, than that of adults. The ASR system responded ineffectively to this variability, resulting in inferior performance. Specific behaviors and their effects on the ASR system are identified, and possible system modifications that address these behaviors are noted.     

Unraveling the culture of the mathematics classroom: A video-based study in sixth grade

Changing perspectives on mathematics teaching and learning resulted in a new generation of mathematics textbooks, stressing among others the importance of mathematical reasoning and problem-solving skills and their application to real-life situations. The article reports a study that investigates to what extent the reform-based ideas underlying these mathematical textbooks impact the current teaching of mathematics. Two problem-solving lessons were videotaped in 10 sixth-grade classrooms and a coding scheme was developed to analyze these lessons with regard to three aspects of the classroom culture that are assumed to enhance students’ mathematical beliefs and problem-solving competencies: (1) the classroom norms that are established, (2) the instructional techniques and classroom organization forms, and (3) the set of tasks students are confronted with. Two instruments were administered to measure students’ beliefs about learning mathematical word problem solving, and to assess their problem-solving processes and skills. The results indicate that some reform-based aspects seemed to be easier to implement (e.g., a strong focus on heuristic skills, embedding tasks in a realistic context) than others (e.g., the use of group work, an explicit negotiation of appropriate social norms).     

Associations of Early Developmental Milestones With Adult Intelligence

The study investigated whether age at attainment of 20 developmental milestones within the areas of language, walking, eating, dressing, social interaction, and toilet training was associated with adult intelligence. Mothers of 821 children of the Copenhagen Perinatal Cohort recorded 20 developmental milestones at a 3‐year examination, and all children were administered the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale when they were 20–34 years old. Later attainment of a number of milestones was associated with lower adult IQ with the strongest associations found for those related to language and social interaction. The adjusted full‐scale IQ means were 107.0, 101.8, and 100.6 for being able to form a sentence at less than 24 months, at 24 months, and later than 24 months.     

A tale of two epidemics: Contextual Word2Vec for classifying twitter streams during outbreaks

Unstructured tweet feeds are becoming the source of real-time information for various events. However, extracting actionable information in real-time from this unstructured text data is a challenging task. Hence, researchers are employing word embedding approach to classify unstructured text data. We set our study in the contexts of the 2014 Ebola and 2016 Zika outbreaks and probed the accuracy of domain-specific word vectors for identifying crisis-related actionable tweets. Our findings suggest that relatively smaller domain-specific input corpora from the Twitter corpus are better in extracting meaningful semantic relationship than generic pre-trained Word2Vec (contrived from Google News) or GloVe (of Stanford NLP group). However, domain-specific quality tweet corpora during the early stages of outbreaks are normally scant, and identifying actionable tweets during early stages is crucial to stemming the proliferation of an outbreak. To overcome this challenge, we consider scholarly abstracts, related to Ebola and Zika virus, from PubMed and probe the efficiency of cross-domain resource utilization for word vector generation. Our findings demonstrate that the relevance of PubMed abstracts for the training purpose when Twitter data (as input corpus) would be scant during the early stages of the outbreak. Thus, this approach can be implemented to handle future outbreaks in real time. We also explore the accuracy of our word vectors for various model architectures and hyper-parameter settings. We observe that Skip-gram accuracies are better than CBOW, and higher dimensions yield better accuracy.     

Strategies for internationalisation at technical universities in the Nordic countries

This article investigates strategies for internationalisation at technical universities in the Nordic countries. The study explores the institutional rationales for internationalisation, the stories told in the strategy documents, the importance of leaders, faculty, administration and students for implementation of the strategy, and barriers and key components of successful internationalisation. We studied the strategic work with internationalisation across 27 technical universities in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. This work reflects both global trends of competition and the traditional Nordic model of cooperation. Overall, the universities incorporated internationalisation in their strategies in order to increase quality in research and education, and to establish strategic partnerships and networks. There is a shift in rationales from a more traditional approach of internationalisation to a new integrated form.