Measuring Search Engine Quality

The effectiveness of twenty public search engines is evaluated using TREC-inspired methods and a set of 54 queries taken from real Web search logs. The World Wide Web is taken as the test collection and a combination of crawler and text retrieval system is evaluated. The engines are compared on a range of measures derivable from binary relevance judgments of the first seven live results returned. Statistical testing reveals a significant difference between engines and high intercorrelations between measures. Surprisingly, given the dynamic nature of the Web and the time elapsed, there is also a high correlation between results of this study and a previous study by Gordon and Pathak. For nearly all engines, there is a gradual decline in precision at increasing cutoff after some initial fluctuation. Performance of the engines as a group is found to be inferior to the group of participants in the TREC-8 Large Web task, although the best engines approach the median of those systems. Shortcomings of current Web search evaluation methodology are identified and recommendations are made for future improvements. In particular, the present study and its predecessors deal with queries which are assumed to derive from a need to find a selection of documents relevant to a topic. By contrast, real Web search reflects a range of other information need types which require different judging and different measures.     

The Provision for Personal, Social, Health Education (PSHE) and Citizenship in School-based Elements of Primary Initial Teacher Education

This small-scale research study looks at the PSHE/Citizenship framework and the opportunities for student teachers to understand and experience within school the relationship between values, personal and social development and learning. A questionnaire was given to two sets of student teachers on their final school-based placements. The research suggests that there needs to be greater recognition of the centrality of multi-cultural awareness and understanding within the political literacy section of the PSHE/Citizenship framework. This is the counterpart to a previous study of the opportunities for values education within the university-based elements of Primary Initial Teacher Education ( Mead, 2003 ).     

Times, Measures and the Man: the Future of British Higher Education Treated Historically and Comparatively

This article is a tribute to the life work of Maurice Kogan. Very little of higher education's landscape in the United Kingdom has remained unchanged over the past four decades and this article sets out to analyze the way the perception of the role of universities in society has changed in the intervening period. This it does through three perspectives: continuity and change, continuity in change and continuity in the midst of change. Each yields very different visions of the university. Against this ‘inside’ view, the second part of the article examines current British higher education policy from an ‘outsider’ standpoint and very particularly the current strategies towards the European Higher Education and Research Areas. It concludes by arguing that Britain's higher education policy vis a vis Europe re‐states a dilemma which these Islands have had to tackle for the best part of the past 250 Years. This dilemma is whether to lay priority on higher education as a global instrument or to endorse a more limited, less ambitious agenda of ‘European’ integration.     

Peer choice – does reviewer self‐selection work?

The British Journal of Educational Technology (BJET) uses a novel system for obtaining referees by e‐mailing the abstracts of submissions to a panel of over 250 referees and allowing these individuals to choose which papers they would like to review. An analysis of 13 experienced referees showed that, of 473 reviews assessed, these referees were slightly more lenient than the editor and that electronic records provide useful data that can be mined in interesting ways.     

From unbundling to market making: reimagining,reassembling and reinventing the public university

ABSTRACT

In Britain and New Zealand the neoliberal assault on universities has shifted from new public management and funding models to the special status of the public university. The project aims to complete neoliberal business initiated 25 years ago by more fully marketising and financialising universities, starting with ‘unbundling’ and outsourcing and culminating in new forms of privatisation, rent-extraction and rebundling. This paper analyses two documents commissioned beyond government to create political momentum for this project: Avalanche is Coming and The University of the Future. These both capture the zeitgeist of reform while simultaneously creating the university futures that they portend. We examine the market-making work they perform in reimagining and reinventing universities ahead of policy reform. We argue that claims made to support fundamental restructuring of public universities lack substance or evidence. Rather, each is underpinned by different configurations of ideology and self-interest that together envelope universities in new agendas of marketisation, financialisation and privatisation. We suggest that in this latest restructuring of public universities critics should pay more attention to the work of consultancies and think tanks alongside the micro-details of market making. By doing so, they too might reimagine public universities, but for a different political project.     

A comparison of self-focus versus attentional explanations of choking

This study examined attentional processes underlying skilled motor performance in threatening situations. Twenty-four trained participants performed a simulated rally driving task under conditions designed either to direct the focus of attention toward the explicit monitoring of driving or a distracting secondary task. Performance (lap time) was compared with a "driving only" control condition. Each condition was completed under nonevaluative and evaluative instructional sets designed to manipulate anxiety. Mental effort was indexed by self-report and dual-task performance measures. The results showed little change in performance in the high-threat explicit monitoring task condition, compared with either the low-threat or the high-threat distraction conditions. Mental effort increased, however, in all high- as opposed to low-threat conditions. Performance effectiveness was therefore maintained under threat although this was at the expense of reduced processing efficiency. The results provide stronger support for the predictions of processing efficiency theory than self-focus theories of choking.