Reverse Image Lookup: Assessing Digital Library Users and Reuses

Reverse image lookup technology was used to assess the users and reuses of images from the Library of Congress' Teaching with Primary Resources digital collection. After selecting 44 images for the study, researchers used Google Reverse Image Lookup to generate a dataset of over 1,400 URLs. Drawing upon a coding rubric designed for a previous study on the ultimate uses of digital library materials, researchers coded the data to identify who uses these images and for what purposes. They found that the most popular type of user was “personal,” which aligns with previous work and indicates that a pattern is emerging between ultimate use and the personal user type. Additionally, the study's results indicate that social media and popular culture research outnumbered any other type of reuse. This article introduces reverse image lookup as a viable and approachable tool for digital library assessment, and discusses its implications for assessment and content selection.     

The prediction of academic achievement by a British study habits inventory

The purpose of this study is to determine if the prediction of college success can be improved with the Student Attitude Inventory (SAI). This inventory was developed in Britain and contains 47 items which attempt to identify students in higher education on the basis of: (1) motivation, (2) study methods, (3) examination technique, and (4) lack of distractions toward academic work. Students in six Kentucky community colleges were asked to express their attitudes toward study habits on the Student Attitude Inventory. There were 996 students in the sample population (413 males and 583 females). A measure of ability (composite American College Test score) and academic performance (cumula grade-point average) were obtained for each student sampled. The Student Attitude Inventory did contribute a statistically significant amount of variance beyond an ability measure for males and females.     

Is life living? Defining death in a technological age

Historically, humanity has assigned death to evil spirits, malevolent gods, and other supernatural agents; but by the eighteenth century, the scientific spirit began to manifest itself through more precise biologic definitions of death. Thanks to modern medical technology, these early scientific views, with their considerable margin for error, gave way in the twentieth century to criteria based on such diverse factors as total lack of response to external stimuli, absence of spontaneous muscular movements, absence of all reflexes, total collapse of the arterial blood pressure, flat electrocardiogram, and flat electroencephalograph tracings. Undoubtedly such difficult matters as organ transplants, wills, homicide, euthanasia, and abortion demand precise definitions of death; but modern medical advances have engendered visions of physical immortality with doctors as the arbiters who often define and determine death. Even so, such one-dimensional, scientific views fail to capture those nebulous social, religious, or spiritual definitions that pervade humanity's definition of death. Humanistic views of death resist the movement of death from the moral realm to a technological order that places people in a system, theory, or chart, where they are thus absolved from fear of freedom. Rather, humanistic definitions demand that humanity step beyond mechanistic definitions of death into a transcendent world of moral choices that guarantee human dignity and worth by ascribing meaning to life and death. These meanings counter the desiccating fear that something like biologic human might, through something called medical technology, defeat something called fate.     

The effect of phonics instruction on the reading comprehension of beginning readers

This study investigated whether two groups of6-year-old beginning readers taught to read by aphonics and by a ``book experience' non-phonicsapproach would differ in reading comprehension as wellas the processes of word recognition. The two groupswere matched for word recognition but despite this, thephonics taught children had higher readingcomprehension. Phonics taught children produced morecontextually appropriate errors, and in both singleword and text reading made more spoken attempts atreading unknown words. The non-phonics taught childrenhad much faster reading reaction times to familiarwords but they scored less in phoneme segmentation andnonword reading tasks. Compared with the nonphonicsgroup, the phonics group spent more time in attemptsat identifying unknown words and this included usingcontextual information, which apparently resulted inmore rehearsal of the meaning of the story text andhence better reading comprehension performance.     

Did the Recession Impact Student Success? Relationships of Finances,Staffing and Institutional Type on Retention

Economic recessions impact higher education institutions in complex ways. Several analyses have examined the influence of the 2007–2009 recession on tuition, enrollments, revenues, and expenditures, but the connection of these resource allocation patterns to a student success outcome—namely, retention—is limited. This study examined relationships among institutional expenditures, tuition, and staffing patterns on first-year retention rates at private and public institutions in 2007, 2009 and 2011: before, during, and after the economic recession. Private and public institutions increased tuition during this time period and increased expenditures. Expenditures most directly educating students (i.e. instruction) and institutional selectivity were positively associated with retention. However, public and private institutions differed in how they allocated their expenditures. That the findings correspond with past research investigating relationships between resource allocation and retention illustrate principles of the resource dependency theory (Pfeffer and Salancik 1978): institutions impacted by external economic changes, adjust revenues, staffing, and expenditures during economic changes.     

“Nice things get said”: corpus evidence and the National Literacy Strategy

The article compares evidence from an electronic corpus of texts written for a child audience with specifications in the National Literacy Strategy. The concepts and terminology associated with corpus linguistics are introduced and explained, and the research study from which the findings derive is summarised. Results of the analysis are presented in sections on word frequencies, contractions, word forms and synonyms. The article concludes with an indication of the implications of the findings for education policy and classroom practice.     

Complex patterns for kindergartners

Knowing what kinds of patterns are easy for children to recognize early in their kindergarten year, and what kinds are difficult, can be a useful guide for patterning instruction. Hence, the ability of children to recognize complex patterns early in their kindergarten year was assessed in two experiments. One experiment showed that the children were significantly less accurate on patterns made of progressively higher numbers or of letters that came progressively later in the alphabet than on patterns made of clock faces that showed increasing amounts of time or were made of rotating objects. There was an interaction between the type of element of which the pattern was composed and the pattern’s orientation. A second experiment showed that symmetric patterns were easier than growing patterns, and there were effects of orientation and the elements of which a pattern was composed, as well as interactions. This research indicates that instruction on clock faces and rotating objects should precede instruction on letters and numbers, and that symmetric patterns can also be easily understood.