Subjective evaluations of intelligence and academic self-concept predict academic achievement: Evidence from a selective student population

The study examined the relationship between implicit theories, goal orientations, subjective and test estimates of intelligence, academic self-concept, and achievement in a selective student population (N = 300). There was no direct impact of implicit theories of intelligence and goal orientations on achievement. However, subjective evaluations of intelligence and academic self-concept had incremental predictive value over conventional intelligence when predicting achievement accounting for more than 50% of its variance. The obtained pattern of results is presented via structural equation models and interpreted within a dynamic regulative systems framework suggesting the importance of further studying complex sets of achievement predictors that include ability, personality and mediating constructs.     

Role of Discrepant Questioning Leading to Model Element Modification

Discrepant questioning is a teaching technique that can help students “unlearn” misconceptions and process science ideas for deep understanding. Discrepant questioning is a technique in which teachers question students in a way that requires them to examine their ideas or models, without giving information prematurely to the student or passing judgment on the student’s model. This strategy prompts students to see the contradictions in their own model. This study focused on the analysis of small group tutoring sessions on human respiration. Individual and small group construction of mental models was analyzed after instructed with a standardized teaching sequence based on model construction and criticism theory (Rea-Ramirez in Model of conceptual understanding in human respiration and strategies for instruction, Dissertation Abstracts International, 59 (10), 5196B, 1998). Analysis provided deeper understanding of the role discrepant questioning played in this construction of understanding and suggested new models of learning.     

Interaction Between Research and Education: Can industry cooperation improve the link?

This study attempts to provide a new perspective on current shifts in knowledge production through analysing the relationship between research and education. The study, based on interviews and questionnaires, focuses on the interaction within applied research centres with a close industry cooperation. The results suggest that the interaction between research and education benefits from a collaborative environment, since researchers hold positive attitudes towards integrating research, education and collaboration, and students are given the opportunity to work within applied research projects. The findings are discussed in terms of researchers’ ability to handle their scholarly tasks of research, teaching, and collaboration, and the importance for acknowledging research collaborations from both research and teaching perspectives.

     

Alterations in neuromuscular activation patterns associated with walking in short-leg walking boots

BackgroundShort-leg walking boots are a common intervention for acute and chronic lower extremity injury. Few studies have examined the neuromuscular adaptations associated with short-leg walking boots and no previous study has investigated timing characteristics of muscle activation during gait. The purpose of the current study was to examine the timing and amplitudes of muscle activation of the extrinsic ankle musculature during walking in two types of short-leg walking boots.MethodsEleven healthy young adults performed five level walking trials at a self-selected pace in each of three conditions: normal walking, Gait Walker and Equalizer short-leg walking boots. Ground reaction forces were collected from a force platform while surface electromyography (EMG) was collected from the tibialis anterior, peroneus longus and medial gastrocnemius. EMG signals were rectified and smoothed using the root mean squared with a 20-ms smoothing window and were normalized to the largest mean of the normal walking trials. A repeated measures analysis of variance was used to assess the effect of short-leg walking boots on the onset, duration and amplitude of muscle activation.ResultsShort-leg walking boots were generally associated with earlier onsets of muscle activation and longer durations of muscle activation. However, there was no reduction in EMG amplitude.ConclusionThe findings of this study show that the induced alterations in muscle activation patterns may limit the short-leg walking boots.     

Estimating Business and Management journal quality from the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise in the UK

The 2008 Research Assessment Exercise in the UK involved the peer review of over 12,500 research outputs in Business and Management, of which 92% were journal articles. Each output was graded on a 4-point scale from “world leading” to “national” with a fifth point being unclassified. These grades were accumulated for each department to provide an overall quality profile in terms of the proportions of its outputs in each category. The assessments of individual papers were not made public but the papers submitted by each department were. This data provides a major opportunity for addressing issues of concern about the evaluation of research and the effects of journal rankings, as well as the possibility of reconstructing the judgements made by the Panel about journal quality. Given the submission details and the resulting grade profile for each department, we have used linear programming to produce the best estimate of the grades awarded to papers from each journal that had more than three entries. This provides both a grade profile for each journal and a single quality estimate. The results are shown to have good validity in comparison with other journal rankings. Apart from providing a ranking of 700 journals based on the RAE results, the paper is also able to shed light on issues such as the accuracy and coverage of the ABS ranking; the degree of selectivity of submissions; the dispersion of grades for a journal; and differences between different subject areas.     

Generating suggestions for queries in the long tail with an inverted index

This paper proposes an efficient and effective solution to the problem of choosing the queries to suggest to web search engine users in order to help them in rapidly satisfying their information needs. By exploiting a weak function for assessing the similarity between the current query and the knowledge base built from historical users’ sessions, we re-conduct the suggestion generation phase to the processing of a full-text query over an inverted index. The resulting query recommendation technique is very efficient and scalable, and is less affected by the data-sparsity problem than most state-of-the-art proposals. Thus, it is particularly effective in generating suggestions for rare queries occurring in the long tail of the query popularity distribution. The quality of suggestions generated is assessed by evaluating the effectiveness in forecasting the users’ behavior recorded in historical query logs, and on the basis of the results of a reproducible user study conducted on publicly-available, human-assessed data. The experimental evaluation conducted shows that our proposal remarkably outperforms two other state-of-the-art solutions, and that it can generate useful suggestions even for rare and never seen queries.     

Working with artefacts: gestures, drawings and speech in the construction of the mathematical meaning of the visual pyramid

This paper reports a part of a study on the construction of mathematical meanings in terms of development of semiotic systems (gestures, speech in oral and written form, drawings) in a Vygotskian framework, where artefacts are used as tools of semiotic mediation. It describes a teaching experiment on perspective drawing at primary school (fourth to fifth grade classes), starting from a concrete experience with a Dürer’s glass to the interpretation of a new artefact. We analyse the long term process of appropriation of the mathematical model of perspective drawing (visual pyramid) through the development of gestures, speech and drawings under the teacher’s guidance.

Variables contributing to academic success in an intermediate statistics course: the importance of learned resourcefulness

We examined the variables contributing to statistical anxiety, statistical resourcefulness and grades in an intermediate statistics course. Questionnaires assessing the aforementioned variables, as well as general resourcefulness, statistical self‐efficacy and attitudes, and grade goals were completed by 168 students in September and in January. Our findings revealed that students possessing a larger repertoire of general resourcefulness skills and higher statistical self‐efficacy were more likely to rely on statistical self‐control strategies, and, as a result, attain higher grades. Students having higher statistical test anxiety were not only less generally and statistically resourceful, but they were also more likely to be aiming for lower grades and attributing past performance disappointments to lack of ability and task difficulty.     

在线学习环境中课程完成原因探析(英文)

很多提供在线课程的教育机构所面临的一大挑战就是开发能够提高学生动机的教学策略,从而提高课程和项目的完成率.本研究利用Eastmond(1994)开发的"基于计算机会议的成人远程学习框架"(Adult Distance Study through Computer Conferencing,简称ADSCC),探讨了学习者的准备情况、在线特征、与计算机媒介传播(Computer Mediated Communication,tuj tq CMC)相关的学习方法等因素是否会影响虚拟学习环境中学生自备课程完成情况.研究结果表明,以上因素与课程完成情况有着显著的正相关.同时研究还发现,自我动机、对技术的信任,以及技术的易用等是在线学习环境中课程完成的主要原因.     

The effect of the personalization principle on multimedia learning: the role of student individual interests as a predictor

By focusing on the personalization principle, the present study investigates whether two different language presentation formats of a multimedia presentation influence students’ learning outcome and how individual interest towards the learning material moderates this impact. German students (N?=?104) were randomly assigned to either a conversational or a formal language format of the multimedia presentation that taught Gestalt Laws. The results of this study showed that there were more positive effects on the learning performance in the conversational presentation format than the formal language format. This was, therefore, an indication of the effects of personalization. Furthermore, individual interest is a significant predictor for learning in this study. By testing different percentiles of individual interest, the findings showed that students with intermediate interest were affected by the format of language style. In contrast, learning results of students with the very lowest and very highest individual interest were not affected by different language styles. These results underline the necessity to take into account individual motivational prerequisites when designing multimedia learning environments.