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.     

Computer training and general education

Is it possible to integrate ideals of general and liberal education into computer‐training programmes? To answer this question an analysis was made of computer training programmes for adults in Denmark. The results showed that the participants expressed a positive attitude towards computers and towards learning computer technology but they only expressed few and general expectations of the courses. This is problematic according to ideals of general education and of self‐directed learning. The organizers wanted to produce courses with general and enlightening contents but the form and contents of the actual courses only to a moderate degree realized the organizers’ intentions. The participants obtained a broad learning outcome. However, they only to a very moderate degree used this outcome at work or in relation to further education. The conclusion was that it is possible to integrate ideals of general and liberal education if computer training helps the participants to develop more precise intentions, if the teaching methods are modernized, and if the contents of the courses correspond better with the possibilities in the workplace.     

Gait Characteristics Over the Course of a Race in Recreational Marathon Competitors

We analyzed gait and function of the supporting limb in participants of a marathon race at three stages: prerace, midrace (18 km), and near the end of the race (36 km). We confirmed that the most successful runners were able to maintain running speed for the duration of the race with little change in speed or gait. Speed slowed progressively during the race for those with slower race times, but stride frequency–stride length relationships remained normal for the speed they ran. These findings differ from most lab-based studies of fatigue, in which runners are forced to match a constant preset treadmill speed. Small changes in maximum ground force were seen in both slow- and fast-running participants as race end approached.     

Swedish Gymnastics for Export: A Study of the Professional Careers and Lives of Swedish Female Gymnastic Directors, 1893–1933

The aim of the study is to analyze the careers of women gymnastics directors about the turn of the century in 1900. This is done by means of a collective biographical study of the women’s course at the Royal Central Institute of Gymnastics in Stockholm from 1891 to 1893. The study is based above all on unique correspondence between the members of the course, namely a correspondence book circulated among them between 1893 and 1943. This book contained a total of almost 500 letters comprising thousands of handwritten pages with detailed accounts of their professional career and family, as well as life’s positive and negative sides. The study shows that their opportunities of making a career – in Sweden and abroad – in the occupation they had received training in were good. There are several reasons for this success. Swedish gymnastics’ treatment methods were the height of fashion round about the turn of the century in 1900 and there was great demand for their services. They remained faithful to their choice of occupation, even if their career took a back seat for half of them when they married: family life and a professional career could not be combined for them.     

Re-visiting Paul Wasserman’s The New Librarianship: A Challenge for Change

The article offers a retrospective reading of profiled American library educator Paul Wasserman’s seminal work The New Librarianship: A Challenge for Change (1972). The idea was to reevaluate the book’s major message about the urgency of transforming librarianship – the discipline, the profession and the institutional forms – into a field that is “proactive”, client-centered, innovation-conscious, aggressive and well aware of societal needs. Today, a similar change and innovation agenda recurs in R. David Lankes’ redefinition of the role and mission of libraries and librarians in The New Librarianship: A Field Guide (2016). Another contemporary parallel is John Palfrey’s discussion of re-conceptualizing libraries as networked platforms pursued in Bibliotech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google (2015). The paper concludes with a brief comparison of how the three authors frame the issue of change in libraries and librarianship with a focus on basic stylistic and communicative features.     

European Survey of Master's and Doctoral Dissertions in Science Education

Editorial comment and summaries

English

Drs Kjöllerström and Lybeck present here a brief report of their European survey of master's and doctoral dissertations in science education, undertaken subsequently to a workshop on Research in Science Education in Europe held at Malente, FR Germany in 1976. The full report of their survey has recently been published by the Institute for Science Education (IPN), Kiel, FR Germany.

The article published here reports on the distribution, size and organization of science education research groups, their areas of research interest and higher degree programmes. It also surveys the main areas of science education research at master's and doctoral level undertaken during the period 1971‐1976, and the employment taken up by master's and doctoral students upon completion of their studies.     

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.     

The impact of reading material’s lexical accessibility on text fading effects in children’s reading performance

The acceleration phenomenon (AP) is defined by improvements in reading speed and reading comprehension, induced by an artificial text fading procedure corresponding to the previously determined fastest individual reading rate. Recent results, however, indicated that fading that is slower than the self-paced reading rate can produce comparable reading enhancements. As reading performance can be strongly influenced by the reading material, this study aimed at investigating to which extent reading enhancements induced by text fading depend on the reading material’s characteristics. We confronted 39 German third graders with a previously utilized text fading procedure, which was slower than their self-paced reading rate. Included text varied regarding to the lexical accessibility (LA), representing how well information can be accessed from the mental lexicon. Children’s reading rates increased statistically significant due to text fading for all LA levels. However, reading comprehension was sensitive to the text material’s characteristics: Reading comprehension enhancements were observable for easily accessible reading material, but not for material with intermediate or difficult levels of LA. Material that was difficult to retrieve from the mental lexicon even resulted in reduced reading comprehension in the fading condition. Possible influences on immediate lexical access, the impact of working memory capacity and implications for future AP research are discussed.     

Gender differences in both tails of the distribution of numerical competencies in preschool children

Gender differences in mathematical achievement have been examined in a wide range of age groups but only a few studies addressed this issue in preschool children. We compared preschool girls (n?=?570) and boys (n?=?524) from Germany with regard to numerical competencies. Differences in overall group means and the frequency of representation at low, middle, or high levels of performance were explored for girls and boys. Analysis of overall group means revealed that boys showed a better performance than girls (d?=?.32). The analysis of frequencies showed differences in both tails but not in the middle of the distribution of numerical competencies. While boys were more often found at higher levels of performance, girls were found to be overrepresented in the low-ability end of the distribution. These findings demonstrate that gender differences in mathematical achievement can emerge before school entry and stress the importance of further research looking for gender divides in mathematical achievement in preschool children from different countries as well as possible underlying factors.