The potential of Supplemental Instruction in engineering education – helping new students to adjust to and succeed in University studies

Supplemental Instruction (SI) is a programme that is attached to difficult courses with the objective of increasing student performance and retention. However, an SI programme also has the potential to increase overall student performance and retention during the first critical year if applied to introductory courses. In this study the latter objective is investigated in an engineering educational environment. The study shows that an SI programme attached to difficult first semester courses for new engineering students has substantial positive effects on both first-year student performance and retention. Both male and female students appear to benefit from attending SI to the same extent. Some potential reasons for these improved first-year student performances are that attendance at SI sessions appears to lead to improved self-confidence, a broader network of study partners, improved study strategies and problem-solving skills and an increased ability to critically review material and work with others.     

Post-traumatic stress disorders in women who experienced childhood incest

Symptoms exhibited in a clinical population of 17 women who had experienced childhood or adolescent incest appear to fit the features of a chronic and/or delayed post-traumatic stress disorder. These women, entering individual therapy an average of 17 years after the abuse had ended, ranged in age from 24 to 44. All regarded their incest experience as the most damaging event of their lives, and had manifested, in adulthood, such symptoms as intrusive imagery of the incest, feelings of detachment or constricted affect, sleep disturbance, guilt, and intensification of symptoms when exposed to events resembling the incest trauma. Treatment included establishment of trust, expression of feelings, guilt reduction through an understanding of family dynamics and acquisition of new, adaptive behaviors.     

The potential of supplemental instruction in engineering education: creating additional peer-guided learning opportunities in difficult compulsory courses for first-year students

Supplemental Instruction (SI) can be an efficient way of improving student success in difficult courses. Here, a study is made on SI attached to difficult first-year engineering courses. The results show that both the percentage of students passing a difficult first-year engineering course, and scores on the course exams are considerably higher for students attending SI, compared to students not attending. The study also shows that a higher percentage of female students attend SI, compared to male students. However, both genders seem to benefit to the same degree as a result of attending SI meetings. Also all students, independent of prior academic ability, benefit from attending SI. A qualitative study suggests that SI meetings provide elements important for understanding course material, which are missing from other scheduled learning opportunities in the courses.     

“Whatever Happened to the Social Dimension?” Aspects of Learning in a Distance-based Teacher Training Programme

In this article we discuss distance-based teacher trainees' understandings of learning and education in a computerised learning environment. Educational research today often stresses the importance of a social dimension in learning and education and computerised learning environments are said to create and fulfil the social dimension in on-campus education as well as in distance education. This social dimension of learning and education is investigated, in a Swedish distance-based teacher training programme supported by ICT, through semi-structured interviews with 19 teacher trainees. The study shows that there is a complex relationship between the use of the computerised learning environment and the physical meetings in the programme. One conclusion is that, even though theories emphasise the social dimension of learning through participation, teacher trainees view participation with others as important primarily in relation to social aspects of well-being and not in relation to learning. The use of ICT for creating a community of learners through participation seems to individualise the students' learning rather than bringing them together in their learning.     

Extending the language modeling framework for sentence retrieval to include local context

Employing effective methods of sentence retrieval is essential for many tasks in Information Retrieval, such as summarization, novelty detection and question answering. The best performing sentence retrieval techniques attempt to perform matching directly between the sentences and the query. However, in this paper, we posit that the local context of a sentence can provide crucial additional evidence to further improve sentence retrieval. Using a Language Modeling Framework, we propose a novel reformulation of the sentence retrieval problem that extends previous approaches so that the local context is seamlessly incorporated within the retrieval models. In a series of comprehensive experiments, we show that localized smoothing and the prior importance of a sentence can improve retrieval effectiveness. The proposed models significantly and substantially outperform the state of the art and other competitive sentence retrieval baselines on recall-oriented measures, while remaining competitive on precision-oriented measures. This research demonstrates that local context plays an important role in estimating the relevance of a sentence, and that existing sentence retrieval language models can be extended to utilize this evidence effectively.     

Future programs at the National Library of Medicine

The future of the National Library of Medicine will be shaped by a number of scientific, technical, and social influences. Among these are the continuing rapid development of computer technology and storage systems. Artificial intelligence techniques, factual databases, the emergence of medical informatics as a formal discipline, and the development of Integrated Academic Information Management Systems (IAIMS) are also important influences on the direction of the library. Public policy issues will influence the future of NLM--among them, sharing of scientific information between nations and the role of federal agencies in dissemination of information domestically. The formal, long-range plan now being prepared for the library by panels of expert advisers will be a guide for future programs and goals.     

Validating simulated interaction for retrieval evaluation

A searcher’s interaction with a retrieval system consists of actions such as query formulation, search result list interaction and document interaction. The simulation of searcher interaction has recently gained momentum in the analysis and evaluation of interactive information retrieval (IIR). However, a key issue that has not yet been adequately addressed is the validity of such IIR simulations and whether they reliably predict the performance obtained by a searcher across the session. The aim of this paper is to determine the validity of the common interaction model (CIM) typically used for simulating multi-query sessions. We focus on search result interactions, i.e., inspecting snippets, examining documents and deciding when to stop examining the results of a single query, or when to stop the whole session. To this end, we run a series of simulations grounded by real world behavioral data to show how accurate and responsive the model is to various experimental conditions under which the data were produced. We then validate on a second real world data set derived under similar experimental conditions. We seek to predict cumulated gain across the session. We find that the interaction model with a query-level stopping strategy based on consecutive non-relevant snippets leads to the highest prediction accuracy, and lowest deviation from ground truth, around 9 to 15% depending on the experimental conditions. To our knowledge, the present study is the first validation effort of the CIM that shows that the model’s acceptance and use is justified within IIR evaluations. We also identify and discuss ways to further improve the CIM and its behavioral parameters for more accurate simulations.     

A more equitable account of the note-taking functions in learning from lecture and from text

Previous research investigating the encoding, encoding-plus-storage, and extermal-storage functions of note taking has failed to equate processing opportunities among the groups. The present studies did so by having the encoding group take notes on two occasions without review, the encoding-plus-storage group take notes one time and review notes the next, and the external-storage group twice review a set of borrowed notes. Three forms of note taking were used: conventional, and note taking on skeletal and matrix frameworks. In both Experiment 1, involving lecture learning, and Experiment 2, involving text learning, an advantage was found for the encoding-plus-storage function on tests involving factual-recall and recognition performance but not on tests measuring higher-order performance. With respect to note-taking forms, no advantage existed for any form when information was acquired from lecture. When text material was used there was some advantage for conventional notes and a clear advantage for not taking notes at all, but instead twice reading the material. These findings were explained relative to observed note-taking behaviors, the opportunity for review, and the processing demands proposed by the combination of reading and note taking, particularly when notes must be classified into an existing framework.