Mathematics achievement in high- and low-achieving secondary schools

This paper identifies the amount of variance in mathematics achievement in high- and low-achieving schools that can be explained by school-level factors, while controlling for student-level factors. The data were obtained from 2679 Iranian eighth graders who participated in the 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. Of the total sample, 1422 and 1257 students were from high- and low-achieving schools, respectively. Two-level hierarchical linear modelling was applied. The results indicated that of the total variance in mathematics achievement, 27.95 and 6.70% were due to between-school differences in the high- and low-achieving schools, respectively. Controlling for the school-level factors, the better-performing students were those with a higher level of confidence in learning mathematics in both samples. After controlling for the student-level factors, inadequacies in school resources and school type yielded the strongest link to achievement in the high- and low-achieving schools, respectively.     

The effects of cold application and modified PNF stretching techniques on hip joint flexibility in college males.

The purpose of the study was to determine the effects of modified Proprioceptive Neuromuscular Facilitation (PNF) flexibility techniques on hip flexion in college males and to determine if local cold application enhances the effectiveness of these techniques. Male subjects (N = 120), with an average age of 21.5 +/- 2.7 years, were randomly assigned to one of four different kinds of stretching treatments with cold or no cold application (15 per group). Range of motion (ROM) in degrees was determined following four stretching techniques: three modified PNF (PCP, 3-PIECP, 3-PIFCP) and a passive stretch (P). Data were analyzed using a 2 (conditions) x 4 (treatments) ANOVA. There were no significant differences in ROM between cold and no cold conditions. Significant differences existed among ROM techniques (p less than .05). Post hoc analyses revealed that the three modified PNF techniques resulted in greater ROM than the passive stretch technique. However, we conclude that cold application does not influence the effectiveness of selected stretching techniques.     

THE EFFECT OF COOPERATIVE LEARNING STRATEGIES ON ELEMENTARY STUDENTS’ SCIENCE ACHIEVEMENT AND SOCIAL SKILLS IN KUWAIT

This study compares the effects of two methods of teaching—teacher-centered and cooperative learning—on students’ science achievement and use of social skills. The sample consists of 163 female elementary science students in 8 intact grade 5 classes who were assigned to 2 instructional methods and were taught an identical science unit by 4 classroom teachers. The students’ science achievement was measured by a researcher-designed achievement test given to students as a pretest and a posttest. Students’ social skills were determined by a researcher-designed survey administered as a pretest and posttest. Analysis of the achievement test scores and the social skills survey responses revealed that cooperative learning strategies have significantly (p > 0.05) more positive effects on both students’ achievement and social skills than teacher-centered strategies. These results provide an evidential base to inform policy decisions and encourage and persuade teachers to implement cooperative learning methods in Kuwaiti classrooms.     

Maternal Socialization and Kindergarten Children’s Behaviors from Jordanian Mothers’ and Teachers’ Perspectives

This study investigated whether Jordanian mothers’ self-reported parenting practices were associated with their kindergarten children’s prosocial or anti-social behavior based on three parental patterns: nurturance, respect, and power assertion. The participants were 95 mothers with children in the kindergarten level in Jordan. Additionally, 13 teachers of these 95 kindergarten children were also participants. This Parenting Styles Inventory Scale, and the Prosocial and Anti-Social Behavior Rating Scale, developed by Lin (Influences of parenting and teaching styles on young children’s prosocial and anti-social development in Taiwan. Unpublished dissertation, Arizona State University, USA, 1995), were used as instruments. Results indicated that nurturance was the most frequent and preferred parenting pattern of participants. Mothers who are warm and nurturing were more strongly associated with prosocial behavior in their children. An unexpected finding was that mothers with more children were more assertive and strict towards them.     

Neural word and entity embeddings for ad hoc retrieval

Learning low dimensional dense representations of the vocabularies of a corpus, known as neural embeddings, has gained much attention in the information retrieval community. While there have been several successful attempts at integrating embeddings within the ad hoc document retrieval task, yet, no systematic study has been reported that explores the various aspects of neural embeddings and how they impact retrieval performance. In this paper, we perform a methodical study on how neural embeddings influence the ad hoc document retrieval task. More specifically, we systematically explore the following research questions: (i) do methods solely based on neural embeddings perform competitively with state of the art retrieval methods with and without interpolation? (ii) are there any statistically significant difference between the performance of retrieval models when based on word embeddings compared to when knowledge graph entity embeddings are used? and (iii) is there significant difference between using locally trained neural embeddings compared to when globally trained neural embeddings are used? We examine these three research questions across both hard and all queries. Our study finds that word embeddings do not show competitive performance to any of the baselines. In contrast, entity embeddings show competitive performance to the baselines and when interpolated, outperform the best baselines for both hard and soft queries.     

Mining user interests over active topics on social networks

Inferring users’ interests from their activities on social networks has been an emerging research topic in the recent years. Most existing approaches heavily rely on the explicit contributions (posts) of a user and overlook users’ implicit interests, i.e., those potential user interests that the user did not explicitly mention but might have interest in. Given a set of active topics present in a social network in a specified time interval, our goal is to build an interest profile for a user over these topics by considering both explicit and implicit interests of the user. The reason for this is that the interests of free-riders and cold start users who constitute a large majority of social network users, cannot be directly identified from their explicit contributions to the social network. Specifically, to infer users’ implicit interests, we propose a graph-based link prediction schema that operates over a representation model consisting of three types of information: user explicit contributions to topics, relationships between users, and the relatedness between topics. Through extensive experiments on different variants of our representation model and considering both homogeneous and heterogeneous link prediction, we investigate how topic relatedness and users’ homophily relation impact the quality of inferring users’ implicit interests. Comparison with state-of-the-art baselines on a real-world Twitter dataset demonstrates the effectiveness of our model in inferring users’ interests in terms of perplexity and in the context of retweet prediction application. Moreover, we further show that the impact of our work is especially meaningful when considered in case of free-riders and cold start users.     

Study of Toxicity Effect of Pegylated Nanoliposomal Artemisinin on Breast Cancer Cell Line

Nano carriers have greatly revolutionized the treatment of most diseases recently. One of these nano carriers, liposomes, has got particular significance. On the other hand, Artemisinin which is used as an effective anticancer drug has some side effects. To reduce such side effects, liposomes can be employed. In order to prepare pegylated nanoliposomal artemisinin, particular proportions of phosphatidylcholine, polyethylene glycol 2000 and artemisinin were combined. As a result, the mean diameter of nano liposomes is 455 nm. Besides, the encapsulation efficiency and the drug release from pegylated nanoliposomes for pegylated nanoliposomal artemisinin are respectively 91.62 ± 3.5 and 5.17 %. The results also show that IC50 of the produced formulation is less than that of the standard drug. This study reveals that the amount of artemisinin cytotoxicity compared to standard drug is increased by pegylated nanoliposomal formulation.     

Mathematics Achievement as a Function of Within- and Between-School Differences

Achievement in mathematics of eighth-grade students is modeled as a function of within-school, between-school and cross-country differences. The data were obtained from 217,728 students, within 7,216 secondary schools, in 48 countries, who participated in the 2007 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. Multilevel analysis showed that out of the total variance in mathematics achievement, 40.39%, 20.61%, and 38.99% were accounted for within-school, between-school-within-country, and cross-country differences, respectively. Mathematics self-concept followed by socioeconomic status was the strongest predictor of achievement at the student level. At the school level, school location yielded the strongest link to achievement, while at the country level socioeconomic status was the main predictor of national mathematics average.