Testing a model of teaching for anxiety and success for English language teaching

Much research has shown that there is a negative relationship between high levels of anxiety and success for English language teaching. This paper aimed to test a model of teaching for anxiety and success in English language teaching to affect anxiety and success levels at the same time in a control-experiment group with pre- and post-test study design. Anxiety levels were measured by anxiety questionnaires and electroencephalograph recordings of brain waves and success was measured by grammar tests prepared by the researcher. Results of Mann–Whitney U Test, Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test and ANOVA pointed to a statistically significant difference in anxiety and success levels between the experiment and control group. Discussion of the results as well as implications for future research is presented.     

Evaluation of retrieval effectiveness with incomplete relevance data: Theoretical and experimental comparison of three measures

This paper investigates two relatively new measures of retrieval effectiveness in relation to the problem of incomplete relevance data. The measures, Bpref and RankEff, which do not take into account documents that have not been relevance judged, are compared theoretically and experimentally. The experimental comparisons involve a third measure, the well-known mean uninterpolated average precision. The results indicate that RankEff is the most stable of the three measures when the amount of relevance data is reduced, with respect to system ranking and absolute values. In addition, RankEff has the lowest error-rate.     

Evaluating epistemic uncertainty under incomplete assessments

The thesis of this study is to propose an extended methodology for laboratory based Information Retrieval evaluation under incomplete relevance assessments. This new methodology aims to identify potential uncertainty during system comparison that may result from incompleteness. The adoption of this methodology is advantageous, because the detection of epistemic uncertainty – the amount of knowledge (or ignorance) we have about the estimate of a system’s performance – during the evaluation process can guide and direct researchers when evaluating new systems over existing and future test collections. Across a series of experiments we demonstrate how this methodology can lead towards a finer grained analysis of systems. In particular, we show through experimentation how the current practice in Information Retrieval evaluation of using a measurement depth larger than the pooling depth increases uncertainty during system comparison.     

Mobile and Information Literacy Perceptions and Skills of Library and Information Sciences and Humanities Students From Bulgaria and Turkey

Welcome to the Global Postcards column! We are so excited to bring you news and projects from around the world. In this column, our contributors from Bulgaria and Turkey bring us a comparative study of mobile and information literacy among students at two universities in those countries. In addition to presenting perceptions of students around these literacy concepts, their research project also highlights growing trends in the use of distance education and web-based study materials. Thanks to the contributors for this issue, and please keep the submissions coming!

If you would like to send a submission, please contact either of the column's co-editors: Jacqueline Solis, jsolis@email.unc.edu, and Robin Kear, rlk25@pitt.edu.     

Linked Data Annotation Without the Pointy Brackets: Introducing Recogito 2

Recogito 2 is an open source annotation tool currently under development by Pelagios, an international initiative aimed at facilitating better linkages between online resources documenting the past. With Recogito 2, we aim to provide an environment for efficient semantic annotation—i.e., the task of enriching content with references to controlled vocabularies—in order to facilitate links between online data. At the same time, we address a perceived gap in the performance of existing tools, by emphasizing the development of mechanisms for manual intervention and editorial control that support the curation of quality data. While Recogito 2 provides an online workspace for general-purpose document annotation, it is particularly well-suited for geo-annotation, in other words annotating documents with references to gazetteers, and supports the annotation of both texts and images (i.e., digitized maps). Already available for testing at http://recogito.pelagios.org, its formal release to the public occurred in December 2016.     

Powerful Actor and Hesitant Institutionalization: The State in the History of Turkish Football

We examine the validity of the assumptions of the new institutional theory about the state over the history of national football league as an institutional field in Turkey. The state is not out of the field, on the contrary, at the centre of the field, and is not an ordinary actor but the most important one although the intensity of the state’s impact changes from time to time. Sometimes, the state founds the football clubs and administrates them directly, decides who will be the champion; and sometimes, authorizes the regulative agency and gives autonomy. However, despite the state’s coercive power on the ground, the Turkish football field is still far from being fully institutionalized with its fluctuating structure.     

Effectiveness of Conceptual Change Text-oriented Instruction on Students’ Understanding of Energy in Chemical Reactions

The aim of this study is to compare the effectiveness of conceptual change text instruction (CCT) in the context of energy in chemical reactions. The subjects of the study were 60, 10th grade students at a high school, who were in two different classes and taught by the same teacher. One of the classes was randomly selected as the experimental group in which CCT instruction was applied, and the other as the control group in which traditional teaching method was used. The data were obtained through the use of Energy Concept Test (ECT), the Attitude Scale towards Chemistry (ASC) and Science Process Skill Test (SPST). In order to find out the effect of the conceptual change text on students’ learning of energy concept, independent sample t-tests, ANCOVA (analysis of covariance) and ANOVA (analysis of variance) were used. Results revealed that there was a statistically significant mean difference between the experimental and control group in terms of students’ ECT total mean scores; however, there was no statistically significant difference between the experimental and control group in terms of students’ attitude towards chemistry. These findings suggest that conceptual change text instruction enhances the understanding and achievement.     

A Study on the Effect of Aesthetic Education on the Development of Aesthetic Judgment of Six-year-old Children

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of aesthetic education on the development of aesthetic judgment of 6 year-old children. The sample of the study comprised 77 children selected randomly from state run primary schools from various socioeconomic levels in Ankara. The experiment group consisted of 22 children, the placebo group of 23 children and the control group of 32 children. The experiment group received an aesthetic education program, the placebo group was offered a placebo education and the control group did not take any education. The Taylor–Helmstadter Pair Comparison Scale of Aesthetic Judgment was used to measure the aesthetic judgments of children. The findings of the study show that there is a significant difference in the aesthetic judgments of male children in the experiment group who received aesthetic education (p < .05). Moreover, it found that the educational and socioeconomic levels of parents did not have any effects on the aesthetic judgments of children (p > .05).     

Institute notes

International Review of Education -