Displacement and Supplemental Effects of the Mobile Internet on Fixed Internet Use

Mobile devices facilitate the use of mobile services that are similar to services used via fixed Internet connections. The objective of this article is to assess displacement effects between fixed and mobile Internet services, and to research the role of technical capabilities of mobile handsets and demographics as moderators. This study is based on a sample of 628 respondents who have access to fixed and mobile Internet services. The respondents' usage of services was analyzed. An online questionnaire was used to collect data on the use of information, communication, entertainment, and transaction services. Mobile Internet reinforces, rather than replaces, Internet usage. When people possess an iPhone^® or (mobile) laptop, this reinforcement effect is present for entertainment services. With respect to transaction services, the Blackberry^® makes a stronger case. With the exception of gender, demographic characteristics do not have a moderating effect. Women display a stronger reinforcement effect than men in relation to transaction services. To the best of our knowledge, no study to date has investigated the displacement effects of fixed Internet services by the mobile handset. This empirical study contributes to the literature regarding the displacement effects of mobile Internet services.     

Designing distance learning programmes for Limited English Proficient (LEP) students in large urban areas: An application of perceptual mapping and conjoint analysis methods

Providing low cost, high quality educational services to growing numbers of multilingual communities is perhaps one of the greatest challenges facing large urban school districts. In the Los Angeles urban area, adult students who wish to attend English as a Second Language (ESL) classes are presently constrained by the limitations of school resources, public transportation and growing levels of crime and street violence. Urban distance learning programmes may provide the best alternative to meet the educational needs of Limited English Proficient (LEP) adult students because it can service large numbers of students who are separated from their schools by geographical distance, safety, convenience, transportation, etc. Using perceptual mapping and conjoint analysis methodologies, this study analytically identifies and examines the design features or attribute characteristics of an ESL urban distance learning programme for LEP adults. Using focus groups as the basis to identify these attributes, perceptual mapping methods point to a market niche in developing technology‐driven, low‐cost distance learning programmes for these students. A conjoint analysis survey finds that LEP students generally favour distance learning programmes where ‘cost’, ‘effectiveness’ and ‘assessment’ are the primary attribute components.     

Natural-Born Arguers: Teaching How to Make the Best of Our Reasoning Abilities

We summarize the argumentative theory of reasoning, which claims that the main function of reasoning is to argue. In this theory, argumentation is seen as being essentially cooperative (people have to listen to others' arguments and be ready to change their mind) but with an adversarial dimension (their goal as argument producers is to convince). Consistent with this theory, the experimental literature shows that solitary reasoning is biased and lazy, whereas reasoning in group discussion produces good results, provided some conditions are met. We formulate recommendations for improving reasoning performance, mainly, to make people argue more and better by creating felicitous conditions for group discussion. We also make some suggestions for improving solitary reasoning, in particular to maximize students' exposure to arguments challenging their positions. Teaching people about the value of argumentation is likely to improve not only immediate reasoning performance but also long-term solitary reasoning skills.     

Perceptions of quality in staff-student written feedback in higher education: a case study

This paper reports on the results of an embedded, multiple case study that investigated the views of both lecturers and students on written staff-student feedback in three postgraduate programmes at one UK university. The study sought to uncover how ‘quality written feedback’ is perceived in the higher education environment under investigation. It found that tutors and students were broadly aligned in the features that they identified as constituting quality, which could be categorised within three dimensions: the affective or interpersonal, the orientational and the transformational. The findings suggest that feedback needs to incorporate each of these dimensions if it is to be perceived as being of good quality.     

Learned Helplessness and Dyslexia: A Carts and Horses Issue?

A survey into attitudes towards and beliefs about dyslexia among ABE teachers and providers is reported. This research appears to reveal doubt, uncertainty and confusion about dyslexia and considerable misgiving as a consequence. A marked degree of learned helplessness was apparently induced in respondents when faced with a student with a diagnosis of dyslexia. Tuition was greatly simplified and expectations lowered. Attribution theory and learned helplessness are discussed in the context of ABE. It is argued that a diagnosis of dyslexia may be a maladaptive attribution and so inevitably induce learned helplessness. Increased scepticism towards dyslexia in ABE is recommended.     

Science education: a (pending) chapter in the curriculum transformation in Argentina

The article documents the complex process of changing Argentina’s science curriculum and implementing those changes over the last 15 years. It recounts how reformers tackled the challenges of balancing national (federal) unity in education with local (provincial) autonomy from the political, social and pedagogical points of view. It also analyzes various attempts to improve science education in Argentina from the viewpoint of their relevance to current developments in various areas of scientific knowledge and human action. In Argentina the effort to ensure equal opportunities for learners at the federal level led to a strong emphasis on developing Common Basic Contents (CBC) for both primary and secondary education. These contents were seen as fundamental components of the competencies that students need in a world increasingly driven by science and technology. Meanwhile, however, Argentina lacked adequate and sustainable policies and strategies for teacher education and training, which led to an unexpected complication: while the curriculum development process led to diverse and sometimes quite sophisticated curriculum documents, the actual quality of science teaching in the classroom did not improve significantly, and teachers still felt the need for more support before they could effectively implement the new science curriculum. The article ends by suggesting ways in which various stakeholders can work together intensively to improve science education in Argentina, in a new process that will respond to the current situation.

Issues and agency: postgraduate student and tutor experiences with written feedback

This paper examines the issues which postgraduate students and tutors experienced as they engaged in receiving, providing and requesting feedback, as well as the strategies which they adopted as they sought resolution of these issues. The study employed a case study approach, using data obtained from semi-structured and stimulated recall interviews with students and staff from three discipline areas at one university in the UK. The findings reinforce the conclusions that have been drawn in a number of previous studies in terms of the sources of dissatisfaction emerging from individual interactions and institutional practices. Additionally, however, the results expand on our current understanding of feedback and agency in higher education by illustrating how participants sought out imaginative solutions to the challenges they experienced, in order to enhance the effectiveness of the feedback process. The diversity of the strategies used provides evidence of student and tutor agency, and has implications for current feedback practices and future research in this area.     

Inequality of educational opportunity: the relationship between access,affordability, and quality of private schools in Lagos,Nigeria

Using data from a census of private schools in one of Lagos, Nigeria’s administrative jurisdictions, this paper explores the linkages between a heterogeneous sector of private schools and issues of school access, affordability, quality, and ultimately social mobility for households at the bottom of the income distribution. Although a large private education market has buoyed Lagos’s growth towards near-universal primary enrolment, this heterogeneous school sector appears to be providing socially stratifying paths towards educational attainment. We apply Lucas’s theory of effectively maintained inequality to assess the extent to which access to higher quality education services within the private sector is determined by cost. We find that higher-cost private schools provide students with greater opportunities to study in institutions with higher quality inputs and increased potential for progression within the educational system. As such, it is highly likely that these schools are primarily accessible to students at the upper ends of the income distribution.     

Using matrix norms to estimate the direction of arrival of planar waves on an ULA

SEAD method estimates the direction-of-arrival angles on an uniform linear array based on the difference between the two largest singular values, what is called differential spectrum. Although it presented an outstanding performance, the ability to indicate the source positions was not elucidated yet. Inspired by the differential spectrum formulation we derived a total differential spectrum and found out that the matrix norm induced by the vector 2-norm of a modified spatial covariance matrix can be used to estimate the direction-of-arrival of multiple plane waves. Indeed we show that matrix norms are estimators and we propose their use instead of the singular value decomposition in SEAD-based methods. We present a general mathematical expression in order to explicit the operating principles of the proposed methods. Consequently, we were able to explain how the relation between the arriving and the search angles produces the larger peaks on the differential spectrum. To evaluate the important role played by matrix norms, a thousand experiments were carried out. They showed that the proposed approach proved to be as accurate as the previous SEAD-based methods, while providing a significant reduction on runtime. It also outperformed well-established methods like MODEX regarding the estimation error.