Reading Progress Monitoring for Secondary‐School Students: Reliability,Validity, and Sensitivity to Growth of Reading‐Aloud and Maze‐Selection Measures

The validity and reliability of curriculum‐based measures in reading as indicators of performance and progress for secondary‐school students were examined. Thirty‐five grade 8 students completed reading aloud and maze‐selection measures weekly for 10 weeks. Criterion measures were the state standards test in reading and the Woodcock–Johnson III Test of Achievement. Different time frames for each measure were compared. Most alternate‐form reliability coefficients were above .80. Criterion‐related validity coefficients ranged from .77 to .89. No differences related to time were found. Only maze selection reflected significant growth, with an average increase of 1.29 correct choices per week. Maze growth was related to the reading performance level and to change on the Woodcock–Johnson III from pre‐ to posttest.     

Erscheinungsbasierte statistische Objekterkennung

Zusammenfassung.   Die automatische Erkennung und Lokalisation von Objekten in digitalen Bildern ist ein wesentlicher Bestandteil vieler praktisch relevanter Anwendungen. In diesem Artikel wird ein erscheinungsbasiertes Verfahren zur Erkennung starrer zwei- oder dreidimensionaler Objekte vorgestellt, dem eine statistische Modellierung zugrundeliegt. Im Gegensatz zu segmentierungsbasierten Verfahren, wie sie vor allem im Bereich der 3D-Objekterkennung eingesetzt werden, erm?glicht der erscheinungsbasierte Ansatz aufgrund der Modellierung der Intensit?tswerte oder davon abgeleiteter lokaler Merkmale eines Bildes die Erkennung komplexer Objekte. Die statistische Formulierung der Problemstellung bildet den mathematischen Kontext zur Bestimmung optimaler L?sungen. Die Form der Modellierung erlaubt neben der Einzelobjekterkennung auch die Berücksichtigung von heterogenem Bildhintergrund und Mehrobjektszenen. Die dazu ben?tigten lokalen Merkmale entstehen durch r?umlich begrenzte Transformationen des Bildes, wie beispielsweise Gabor- oder Wavelet-Transformationen. Die statistische Modellierung beschreibt die Verteilung dieser lokalen Merkmale anhand einer Dichtefunktion, die sich bei der Hintergrund- und Mehrobjektmodellierung als Mischungsverteilung der Einzelobjektverteilungen ergibt. Die Aufgabenstellungen des Erlernens und Erkennens von Objekten sind damit als Parametersch?tzprobleme formal darstellbar. Dabei werden im einen Fall die Modellparameter und im anderen Fall die Lageparameter beziehungsweise die Klassen von Objekten gesch?tzt. Die experimentelle überprüfung des Ansatzes anhand realer Objektaufnahmen durch CCD-Kameras zeigt seine Brauchbarkeit zur Erkennung von 2D- und 3D-Objekten bei homogenem und heterogenem Hintergrund. Eingegangen am 5. April 2000 / Angenommen am 20. Juli 2001     

Archival theory in Italy today

Archival theory in Italy has a long tradition, going back as far as the second half of the nineteenth century, and with roots in the 17th and 18th centuries. Central theme in the theory is themetodo storico, the principle of provenance, for the first time expressed in the late 19th century by Bonaini and Bongi. In the following decades archivists like Casanova and Cencetti were among the leading authors. Elio Lodolini assigned himself the task to synthesize ideas and notions, within a clear distinctions between records (registratura) and archives. One of the overall characteristics of the rich Italian literature is the stressing of the cultural value of archives. I have twice treated before the theme of archival theory in Italy from the fifties up to the nineties. The first time on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of theScuola speciale per Archivisti e Bibliotecari dell'Università degli Studi “La Sapienza” di Roma in 1989, when there was an international round table on archival science in the State Archives of Rome. My essay,Italian archival science today, has been published in the proceedings of the meeting (cfr. Donato Tamblé,L'archivistica in Italia oggi, inStudi sull'archivistica, by Roma: Elio Lodolini, 1992). Some years later, in 1993, I published a book on contemporary Italian archival theory (Donato Tamblé,La teoria archivistica italiana contemporanea (1950–1990). Profilo storico-critico (Roma, 1993) which was the sequel to the volume of Elio Lodolini on Italian archival history — (Lineamenti di storia dell'archivistica italiana (Roma, 1991). The purpose of my book was that of locating and identifying the scientific object of archival science as it developed and was clarified in the thinking and in the lucubration of the contemporary Italian Archivists.     

试论“网球肘”的成因、诊断、预防与治疗

“网球肘”是网球运动中常见的一种伤病。通过研究“网球肘”的成因、诊断、预防与治疗，预防伤病的发生。     

L'experience regionale arabe en matiere d'education aux droits de l'homme dans les situations d'apprentissage informel

This article describes an informal approach to human rights education, which is anchored in reality and based on experience gained throughout the Arab region and more particularly within the Arab Institute for Human Rights. It is argued that the approach of the Institute could be adopted on a larger scale by organisations working in this domain, not only in the Arab region but also in other regions of the world. The article emphasises the essential role of governments and the importance of cooperation between the governmental and non-governmental levels in order to implement this type of human rights education in informal learning situations, and thus to disseminate a universal culture of human rights.     

Controlling the field of academic economics in Hungary, 1953–1976

Conclusions On the basis of these findings, I suggest that the structure and organisation of the field of Hungarian economics under state socialism should be described as a case of partitioned bureaucracy.⁹ The compromise between research economists and the political elite in the New Course era between 1953 and 1955¹⁰ survived the post-1956 reaction in so far as political economy, with its predominantly legitimatory and ideological functions, remained partitioned from the other sectors in the field through the remainder of the state-socialist period. This secured considerable protection both for Marxist-Leninist political economy—which faced the destabilising effects of exposure to the findings of serious empirical research—and for the other sectors, which were professionally oriented and earnestly interested in the pursuit of unbiased empirical research, free from stifling agitprop interference. Our data concerning the reputational control of the field reflects only one, although very important, aspect of this partitioning. Another and much plainer aspect is that, from the early 1960s, the Agitation and Propaganda Department of the Central Committee no longer exercised control over the field, except in the political economy sector.The proposition about the mechanism paradigm should not be taken seriously as a statement of a Kuhnian type of intellectual organisation of Hungarian economics, with reform economics at its hard theoretical core. But it should certainly be taken seriously as a reflection of the sociopolitical structure which emerged and developed from the mid-1950s onwards. Neither the politicians nor the economists saw as necessary or even contemplated the integration of Hungarian economic research with Western mainstream economic thought. In exchange for the professional expertise and socio-economic intelligence necessary for the exercise of power, Hungary's state-socialist political class offered their economists relative autonomy and freedom from interference. The price the economists had to pay was partly to refrain from openly and systematically challenging the beliefs perpetuated by the political economy of socialism, and partly to accept in their research the paramountcy of policy orientation. But this burden they assumed willingly since it made them the only group within Hungary's academic intelligentsia—indeed, the only group in Hungarian society outside the political class—with the privilege of being coopted to the institutions with power over some restricted domains of policymaking. After 1989, especially under the conservative Antall government, this proved less than advantageous.¹¹ Although the benevolence of many critics is open to question, it could greatly benefit the field if the economists' expulsion from contemporary politics went hand in hand with provision of the material, intellectual and institutional conditions for a new approach where a fundamentally scientific orientation is paramount.     

Multilingual modeling of cross-lingual spelling variants

Technical term translations are important for cross-lingual information retrieval. In many languages, new technical terms have a common origin rendered with different spelling of the underlying sounds, also known as cross-lingual spelling variants (CLSV). To find the best CLSV in a text database index, we contribute a formulation of the problem in a probabilistic framework, and implement this with an instance of the general edit distance using weighted finite-state transducers. Some training data is required when estimating the costs for the general edit distance. We demonstrate that after some basic training our new multilingual model is robust and requires little or no adaptation for covering additional languages, as the model takes advantage of language independent transliteration patterns. We train the model with medical terms in seven languages and test it with terms from varied domains in six languages. Two test languages are not in the training data. Against a large text database index, we achieve 64–78 % precision at the point of 100% recall. This is a relative improvement of 22% on the simple edit distance.