Art and Its Publics: Museum Studies at the Millennium: Andrew McClellan,ed.

New Interventions in Art History 2. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. 213 pages. Paperback, $24.95.     

The quick test as a screening device for gifted students

This study investigated the utility of the Quick Test in screening for gifted students; 57 identified gifted students were administered forms of the Ammons Quick Test. This screening instrument was unable to identify 60% of the sample tested as gifted.     

The accountability era in US teacher education: looking back,looking forward

Abstract

In keeping with the theme of the 40th anniversary issue of EJTE, this article looks back and forward at US teacher education accountability. It argues that “holding teacher education accountable” has been the major approach to reforming teacher education in the US for the last two decades, assuming that enhanced teacher education quality depends on vigilant public evaluation and monitoring of outcomes related to teacher education institutions, programs, and teacher candidates. This article looks back at the “era of accountability” by examining five policy, political, and professional developments that contributed to its emergence and strong hold on US teacher education. Looking forward to the future of teacher education accountability in the US, the article argues that we need a new approach – democratic accountability in teacher education – which is based on intelligent professional responsibility for students’ learning including democratic knowledge and skills, strong equity, and genuine collaboration with multiple stakeholders.     

The role of non-formal contexts in teacher education for STEM: the case of horno3 science and technology interactive centre

Abstract

Teacher education can benefit directly from experiences in non-formal settings. This article presents a research study with elementary teachers who were teaching in public schools in the state of Nuevo León, México, and participated in a STEM Continuous Professional Development (CPD) workshop. The workshop provided a platform for teachers to interact with scientists and disseminators of science, allowing the appropriation of scientific knowledge applied to everyday activities and settings. Participants improved the quality of their teaching practices in classrooms and gained a new understanding of STEM subjects, enabling them to promote inspiring learning experiences with their students, where dialogue, experimentation and elucidation became an important part of their lessons. The study was carried out using ethnographic tools for analysing recorded videos, 15 sets of field notes, and 49 questionnaires. The sequential analysis of talk and gestures in their participation in the CPD workshop demonstrated high levels of involvement, creativity, and collaborative solution of STEM problems.     

A telepresence learning environment for opera singing: distance lessons implementations over Internet2

The Opera eLearning project developed a solution for opera singing distance lessons at the graduate level, using high bandwidth to deliver a quality audio and video experience that has been evaluated by singing teachers, chorus and orchestra directors, singers and other professional musicians. Prior to finding a technological model that suits the user's requirements, several experiments have been conducted, testing and prototyping different technologies, until arriving at a telepresence, immersive sound model. This paper summarises the findings of this pilot stage, and its interest includes the management of innovation exercises across a multidisciplinary team, based on usability and a user-centred design. Some of the technology tested includes professional audio and video equipment, software for A/V signal capturing and transmission on uncompressed formats, A/D converters, and other auxiliary devices. The resultant model has later been successfully used in a formal case study, delivering 14 remote masterclasses.     

Using rating matrix compression techniques to speed up collaborative recommendations

Collaborative filtering is a popular recommendation technique. Although researchers have focused on the accuracy of the recommendations, real applications also need efficient algorithms. An index structure can be used to store the rating matrix and compute recommendations very fast. In this paper we study how compression techniques can reduce the size of this index structure and, at the same time, speed up recommendations. We show how coding techniques commonly used in Information Retrieval can be effectively applied to collaborative filtering, reducing the matrix size up to 75 %, and almost doubling the recommendation speed. Additionally, we propose a novel identifier reassignment technique, that achieves high compression rates, reducing by 40 % the size of an already compressed matrix. It is a very simple approach based on assigning the smallest identifiers to the items and users with the highest number of ratings, and it can be efficiently computed using a two pass indexing. The usage of the proposed compression techniques can significantly reduce the storage and time costs of recommender systems, which are two important factors in many real applications.