The construction of national identity in South Korea and the tradition of masculinity in Korean Abstract Painting

ABSTRACT

Korean Modern Art History began to be produced in the 1970s, when Western Modernist Art History, based on Formalism, was introduced as a matrix to map the ‘evolution’ of 20th century Korean Art. Korean modern art history is based in the same paradigm as the West, beginning with Impressionism and ‘ending’ with Abstract Expressionism. First introduced to the country from the West immediately after the Korean War, Korean Abstract Expressionism is now deemed as South Korea’s ultimate ‘progressive’ and ‘modern’ art form, a ‘Korean’ painting style combining the Western art form with traditional artistic concepts of ‘Scholarly Painting’ (muninhwa). Japanese‐influenced painting styles originating in the colonial period (1910–45) are rejected as ‘non‐authentic.’ The problem is that Scholarly Painting was a gender and class specific art born from the rigid Confucian culture of pre‐modern Korea, and thus its revival as an ‘ultimate modern’ and ‘Korean’ form has the consequence of locating traditionally‐gendered notions of art and artist at the core of the South’s modern art. This essay uses a Semiotic approach to deconstruct this gendered modernist rhetoric by tracing the emergence of the sign ‘Koreaness’ in South Korean modern art, showing how it is defined within Korean Abstract Painting as an ‘ultimate Korean sign’ and how its use of anti‐Japanese rhetoric covers up the traumatic history of the Korean War.     

Infant Temperament: Stability by Age,Gender, Birth Order,Term Status,and Socioeconomic Status

Two complementary studies focused on stability of infant temperament across the 1st year and considered infant age, gender, birth order, term status, and socioeconomic status (SES) as moderators. Study 1 consisted of 73 mothers of firstborn term girls and boys queried at 2, 5, and 13 months of age. Study 2 consisted of 335 mothers of infants of different gender, birth order, term status, and SES queried at 6 and 12 months. Consistent positive and negative affectivity factors emerged at all time points across both studies. Infant temperament proved stable and robust across gender, birth order, term status, and SES. Stability coefficients for temperament factors and scales were medium to large for shorter (< 9 months) interassessment intervals and small to medium for longer (> 10 months) intervals.     

Globalization,Regionalism and Reconciliation in South Korea's Asian Games

The Asian Games have exercised an influence over the Asian region which has been strong enough to change the paradigms of host countries having substantial socio-cultural effects on various elements of relationships such as geopolitical diplomatic relations in the region. South Korea has confidently hosted three Asian Games in the last two decades, the 1986 Seoul, 2002 Busan and 2014 Incheon Games. In this study, an investigation of the socio-cultural impacts of the Asian Games held in South Korea in the last two decades is carried out. The focuses of the study are the aspects of globalization, regionalism and reconciliation featured through the three Games. The outcomes of the study may contribute to the understanding of the role of mega sports events in promoting globalization of society and in intertwining with regional states. The Asian Games, as witnessed, which are held while maintaining the motto of the Olympics within Asia, will not only promote the globalization of host countries and cities in the future, but also it will contribute to improving diplomatic relations with neighbouring countries. These games are also predicted to help relieve political tension in the Asia-Pacific region, including the Korean Peninsula. However, as the effects of hosting mega sports events are largely concentrated on the development of their host countries and cities, these events also have the potential to become the seeds of regional conflicts or disputes by creating further competition or a sense of alarm.     

Estimation fusion of nonlinear cost functions with application to multisensory Kalman filtering

This paper focuses on four fusion algorithms for the estimation of nonlinear cost function (NCF) in a multisensory environment. In multisensory filtering and control problems, NCF represents a nonlinear multivariate functional of state variables, which can indicate useful information of the target systems for automatic control. To estimate the NCF using multisensory information, we propose one centralized and three decentralized estimation fusion algorithms. For multivariate polynomial NCFs, we propose a simple closed-form computation procedure. For general NCFs, the most popular procedure for the evaluation of their estimates is based on the unscented transformation. The effectiveness and estimation accuracy of the proposed fusion algorithms are demonstrated with theoretical and numerical examples.     

The Effect of the Most-Attractive-Distractor Location on Multiple-Choice Item Difficulty

Abstract

The arrangement of response options in multiple-choice (MC) items, especially the location of the most attractive distractor, is considered critical in constructing high-quality MC items. In the current study, a sample of 496 undergraduate students taking an educational assessment course was given three test forms consisting of the same items but the positions of the most attractive distractor varied across the forms. Using a multiple-indicators–multiple-causes (MIMIC) approach, the effects of the most attractive distractor's positions on item difficulty were investigated. The results indicated that the relative placement of the most attractive distractor and the distance between the most attractive distractor and the keyed option affected students’ response behaviors. Moreover, low-achieving students were more susceptible to response-position changes than high-achieving students.     

Use of hierarchical linear modeling and curriculum-based measurement for assessing academic growth and instructional factors for students with learning difficulties

The main purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how to apply the Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) technique to multi-wave Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM) measures in modeling academic growth and assessing its relations to student- and instruction-related variables. HLM has advantages over other statistical methods (e.g., repeated measures ANOVA, Structural Equation Modeling) in modeling academic growth. The advantages include allowing more flexible research designs in collecting multiple data points and estimating growth rates and their relations to correlates in more reliable, accurate ways. CBM, as a multi-wave progressmonitoring system, also has distinctive psychometric features that facilitate longitudinal research on academic skill development. These features include provision of multiple data points within short time periods, good validity and reliability, and sensitivity for detecting small degrees of change. Finally, research questions related to assessing the academic growth of students with learning difficulties and using assessment results to improve educational practices for them are discussed     

Incremental Beliefs,STEM Efficacy and STEM Interest Among First-Year Undergraduate Students

Journal of Science Education and Technology - Low retention rates of undergraduate students in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields are a persistent problem in the USA....     

Student response to tuition increase by academic majors: empirical grounds for a cost-related tuition policy

This study explored the responses of students in different academic majors to tuition increase, with a particular focus on the relationship between tuition increase, and future earnings and college expenditures. We analyzed effects of tuition increase on enrollment in six academic majors—Engineering, Physics, Biology, Mathematics, Business, and Education—where disciplinary enrollment data were available. The main findings are that students are elastic to tuition level in Physics, Biology, and Business, but not in Engineering, where the rate of return is the highest among the six majors and the college expenditure are the highest. The findings suggest that student enrollment in various academic majors is affected differentially by tuition. Further, the findings support a cost-related tuition policy, one designed to charge students higher tuition for higher-cost majors and lower tuition for lower-cost majors.

Orthographic consistency and individual learner differences in second language literacy acquisition

This study investigated whether orthographic consistency and individual learner differences including working memory (WM), first language (L1) background, and second language (L2) proficiency affect Chinese L2 learners’ literacy acquisition. Seventy American college students in beginning or intermediate Chinese classes participated in a character learning-and-reading experiment, and completed WM tasks and an L2 proficiency test. In the learning phase of the experiment, participants were asked to master 18 unfamiliar Chinese characters of three levels of consistency—consistent, semi-consistent, and inconsistent. Then in the transfer test of the experiment, participants read 60 novel, artificial characters analogous to the learned characters. Significant consistency effects for learning and reading new characters were found, with no effects of WM and L1. In particular, an interaction effect between consistency and L2 proficiency found in the learning phase indicated that participants with higher L2 proficiency learned the fully consistent characters better and faster than those with lower proficiency. These results suggest that L2 proficiency facilitates awareness of consistency, enabling learners to learn novel characters faster and more accurately. The findings of this study are compared with the character acquisition of beginning L1 Chinese readers and with L2 learners’ acquisition of other types of characters.