Word co-occurrences on Webpages as a measure of the relatedness of organizations: A new Webometrics concept

Web hyperlink analysis has been a key topic of Webometric research. However, inlink data collection from commercial search engines has been limited to only one source in recent years, which is not a promising prospect for the future development of the field. We need to tap into other Web data sources and to develop new methods. Toward this end, we propose a new Webometrics concept that is based on words rather than inlinks on Webpages. We propose that word co-occurrences on Webpages can be a measure of the relatedness of organizations. Word co-occurrence data can be collected from both general search engines and blog search engines, which expands data sources greatly. The proposed concept is tested in a group of companies in the LTE and WiMax sectors of the telecommunications industry. Data on the co-occurrences of company names on Webpages were collected from Google and Google Blog. The co-occurrence matrices were analyzed using MDS. The resulting MDS maps were compared with industry reality and with the MDS maps from co-link analysis. Results show that Web co-word analysis could potentially be as useful as Web co-link analysis. Google Blog seems to be a better source than Google for co-word data collection.     

Pre-service educators’ dispositions toward inclusive practices for students with emotional and behavioural difficulties

ABSTRACT

In response to challenging behaviour from students with emotional and behavioural difficulties (EBD), teachers around the world often label students as challenging, defining them by their disability. Negative views of students with EBD are a barrier to their inclusion and a major challenge for policy in the United States and elsewhere associated with access to the education system for students with disabilities. Pre-service teacher education has been highlighted as an optimum time to instil in pre-service educators a more equitable disposition toward behaviour management and inclusive practices. Therefore, the purpose of the current mixed-methods study was to assess whether or not an undergraduate course focused on relationship-based approaches to positive behaviour support could impact pre-service educators’ dispositions toward inclusive classroom practices for students with EBD. Survey results from 41 pre-service educators indicated that participants made significant improvements in their knowledge and understanding of compassionate behaviour management, intentional relationship building, and establishment of a welcoming classroom environment. Analysis of participants’ written responses to open-ended questions revealed several themes regarding changes in dispositions toward students with EBD. Implications for pre-service educator preparation and inclusion of students with EBD are discussed.     

Political Socialization of International Students: Public-Issue Discourse and Discussion on the College Campus

ABSTRACT

This study examined international students’ interests in public issues in the U.S. and motivational factors behind their discourse or avoidance of such issues. In-depth interviews with international students revealed that they discuss certain public issues in the U.S. to gain or exchange information and knowledge, because these issues are relevant to themselves and others, or due to the misconceptions that others have about their country. Moreover, international students tend to avoid certain public issues because of the level of their knowledge and lack of interest in such issues and in order to avoid dissonance caused by the public issues.     

IP Address Data and its Place in the Library Community Today and in the Future

Internet Protocol (IP) technology has played an important role in the management of access to scholarly work within institutions since the advent of electronic publishing in the late 1990s. Despite recent efforts to explore alternative modes of authentication, the ubiquitous use of IP address authentication within the systems of libraries, publishers, and third party vendors around the world suggests it will continue to play a significant role for the foreseeable future. However, recent studies show that a large amount of the IP address data held within publisher systems is incorrect, improperly assigned, or requires clarification. Poor source data carries significant risks—not the least of which translates into unreliable usage reporting for libraries and publishers. The IP Registry is designed to help mitigate these challenges by creating a Registry of cleaned data that libraries and publishers can interact with in a centralized fashion thereby helping to ensure accuracy and reducing the level of resources necessary to manage and communicate changes to existing data. The database of more than 60,000 academic, corporate, and government libraries was created through the amalgamation of raw source data from more than 170 scholarly publishers. In addition to cleaned IP address data, the Registry includes standardized English naming, aliases, local language naming (and characters), hierarchies, and organizational IDs for each record. The importance of accurately understanding current usage and how libraries utilize published content is clear. Regardless of what the future holds, the need for a clean and stable source of IP address data is real for libraries, publishers, and vendors alike.     

Emergence of the Link Between the Approximate Number System and Symbolic Math Ability

Experimentally manipulating Approximate Number System (ANS) precision has been found to influence children’s subsequent symbolic math performance. Here in three experiments (N = 160; 81 girls; 3–5 year old) we replicated this effect and examined its duration and developmental trajectory. We found that modulation of 5-year-olds’ ANS precision continued to affect their symbolic math performance after a 30-min delay. Furthermore, our cross-sectional investigation revealed that children 4.5 years and older experienced a significant transfer effect of ANS manipulation on math performance, whereas younger children showed no such transfer, despite experiencing significant changes in ANS precision. These findings support the existence of a causal link between nonverbal numerical approximation and symbolic math performance that first emerges during the preschool years.     

What are Middle School Students Talking About During Clicker Questions? Characterizing Small-Group Conversations Mediated by Classroom Response Systems

There is a growing interest in using classroom response systems or clickers in science classrooms at both the university and K-12 levels. Typically, when instructors use this technology, students are asked to answer and discuss clicker questions with their peers. The existing literature on using clickers at the K-12 level has largely focused on the efficacy of clicker implementation, with few studies investigating collaboration and discourse among students. To expand on this work, we investigated the question: Does clicker use promote productive peer discussion among middle school science students? Specifically, we collected data from middle school students in a physical science course. Students were asked to answer a clicker question individually, discuss the question with their peers, answer the same question again, and then subsequently answer a new matched-pair question individually. We audio recorded the peer conversations to characterize the nature of the student discourse. To analyze these conversations, we used a grounded analysis approach and drew on literature about collaborative knowledge co-construction. The analysis of the conversations revealed that middle school students talked about science content and collaboratively discussed ideas. Furthermore, the majority of conversations, both ones that positively and negatively impacted student performance, contained evidence of collaborative knowledge co-construction.