Students’ perspective on the first programming language: C-like or Pascal-like languages?

The choice of the first programming language (FPL) has been a controversial issue for several decades. Nearly everyone agrees that the FPL is important and affects students’ subsequent education on programming. The study presented in this article investigates the suitability of various C-like and Pascal-like programming languages as a FPL. Students from three Universities express their perceptions on the FPL through a specially designed questionnaire. The students had been introduced to programming using different FPLs and having experience on more than one language and formulated two distinct groups: a group introduced to programming with a C-like and another with a Pascal-like language. The statistical analysis of the data collected showed that the choice of the FPL does not have a deep impact on difficulties that novices may experience when learning the basics of programming. However, this result was recorded in the context of three distinct programming courses that were positively evaluated by students in relation to their content, organization and quality. Consequently, this study indicates that the overall quality of the course and the instructors have a great impact on a smooth introduction to programming no matter what the FPL is.     

Using a situation awareness approach to determine decision-making behaviour in squash

Situation awareness (SA) refers to the awareness of all relevant sources of information, an ability to synthesise this information using domain knowledge gained from past experiences and the ability to physically respond to a situation. Expert-novice differences have been widely reported in decision-making in complex situations although determining the small differences in expert behaviour are more elusive. This study considered how expert squash players use SA to decide on what shot to play. Matches at the 2010 (n = 14) and 2011 (n = 27) Rowe British Grand Prix were recorded and processed using Tracker software. Shot type, ball location, players’ positions on court and movement parameters between the time an opponent played a shot prior to the player’s shot to the time of the opponent’s following shot were captured 25 times per second. Six SA clusters were named to relate to the outcome of a shot ranging from a defensive shot played under pressure to create time to an attempted winner played under no pressure with the opponent out of position. This new methodology found fine-grained SA differences in expert behaviour, even for the same shot type played from the same court area, beyond the usual expert-novice differences.     

Automatic acquisition of inflectional lexica for morphological normalisation

Due to natural language morphology, words can take on various morphological forms. Morphological normalisation – often used in information retrieval and text mining systems – conflates morphological variants of a word to a single representative form. In this paper, we describe an approach to lexicon-based inflectional normalisation. This approach is in between stemming and lemmatisation, and is suitable for morphological normalisation of inflectionally complex languages. To eliminate the immense effort required to compile the lexicon by hand, we focus on the problem of acquiring automatically an inflectional morphological lexicon from raw corpora. We propose a convenient and highly expressive morphology representation formalism on which the acquisition procedure is based. Our approach is applied to the morphologically complex Croatian language, but it should be equally applicable to other languages of similar morphological complexity. Experimental results show that our approach can be used to acquire a lexicon whose linguistic quality allows for rather good normalisation performance.     

Is too much help an obstacle? Effects of interactivity and cognitive style on learning with dynamic versus non-dynamic visualizations with narrative explanations

Educational technology research and development - The aim of this study was to investigate the role of visual/verbal cognitive style and interactivity level in dynamic and non-dynamic multimedia...     

Market orientation in managing relationships with multiple constituencies of Croatian higher education

In this paper, market orientation in Croatian higher education (HE) is discussed within the context of stakeholder-oriented management. Drawing on existing studies, the ‘classical’ empirical model, describing the market orientation of generic nonprofit organisations, has been adapted to the contingencies of the Croatian HE sector. Empirical testing of the model, based on primary data drawn from the majority of public institutions of higher learning in the country, reveals inadequate market orientation toward the relevant stakeholders. Although social market orientation currently does not exist in Croatian HE institutions, the empirical results confirm that it might be possible to initiate a ‘virtuous circle’, in which relevant market orientation and stakeholder management practices, directed toward one or other of the stakeholders, simultaneously enhance orientation toward the other stakeholders. Unfortunately, the current situation in HE is not satisfactory, which could hinder the implementation of development of knowledge society in Croatia.

Mobilising funds of identity in and out of school

Learning happens through participation in formal community events and informal community activities. However, learning activities that take place in and out of school are often not mutually recognised. Funds of knowledge projects foster new ways of exchanging learning experiences in and out of school. Funds of identity can be uncovered by teachers through the collection of artefacts, interests and practices that are valuable to children. Specifically, videos, photographs, self-portraits, bilingual texts, diaries or ‘shoeboxes of significant items’ are some of the resources that can be used to make a learner’s funds of identity more visible and tangible in the classroom. The main aim of this paper is to illustrate a number of resources and strategies that help to identify and mobilise funds of identity. These funds of identity are integral for educators in order to develop meaningful and contextualised lessons.     

Science, the public, and social elites: how the general public, scientists, top politicians and managers perceive science

This paper finds that the Croatian public's and the social elites' perceptions of science are a mixture of scientific and technological optimism, of the tendency to absolve science of social responsibility, of skepticism about the social effects of science, and of cognitive optimism and skepticism. However, perceptions differ significantly according to the different social roles and the wider value system of the observed groups. The survey data show some key similarities, as well as certain specificities in the configuration of the types of views of the four groups--the public, scientists, politicians and managers. The results suggest that the well-known typology of the four cultures reveals some of the ideologies of the key actors of scientific and technological policy. The greatest social, primarily educational and socio-spatial, differentiation of the perceptions of science was found in the general public.