The role of outdoor recreation in family enrichment

The family is the fundamental unit in society and perhaps the oldest and most important of all human institutions. Several studies have indicated a positive correlation between strong, successful families and family participation in outdoor recreational activities. This paper addresses the role of structured outdoor recreation programming in family enrichment. Findings from two studies based in the United States are presented: one on the effect of a one-day family outdoor adventure program on parental and child perceptions of family functioning and the other from a qualitative inquiry into the meaning of family residential camping experiences. The first study collected both quantitative and qualitative data from 24 families who participated in an 8-hour outdoor adventure program. The second study utilized structured interviews with 11 families participating in a residential camp experience. Findings from both studies demonstrate that structured outdoor family recreation programming has a strong positive relationship with family strength. Furthermore, findings indicate that the type of outdoor adventure activities being used in the treatment of dysfunctional and maladaptive families is also effective in providing family enrichment experiences.     

Measuring educational quality by appraising theses and dissertations: pitfalls and remedies

In this paper, we argue that, as indicators of the educational quality of graduate degree programs, student theses and dissertations are best used in specific contexts. High-quality theses and dissertations, that is, may be the result of factors such as verbal skills students already possessed at admission or of complex interactions between supervisors and students, not only effective class design or offerings. Consequently, this paper recommends ways for programs to avoid making post hoc errors in assessing educational quality and suggests strategies to make the critical appraisal of theses and dissertations a productive, quality-enhancing activity.     

A joint learning approach with knowledge injection for zero-shot cross-lingual hate speech detection

Hate speech is an increasingly important societal issue in the era of digital communication. Hateful expressions often make use of figurative language and, although they represent, in some sense, the dark side of language, they are also often prime examples of creative use of language. While hate speech is a global phenomenon, current studies on automatic hate speech detection are typically framed in a monolingual setting. In this work, we explore hate speech detection in low-resource languages by transferring knowledge from a resource-rich language, English, in a zero-shot learning fashion. We experiment with traditional and recent neural architectures, and propose two joint-learning models, using different multilingual language representations to transfer knowledge between pairs of languages. We also evaluate the impact of additional knowledge in our experiment, by incorporating information from a multilingual lexicon of abusive words. The results show that our joint-learning models achieve the best performance on most languages. However, a simple approach that uses machine translation and a pre-trained English language model achieves a robust performance. In contrast, Multilingual BERT fails to obtain a good performance in cross-lingual hate speech detection. We also experimentally found that the external knowledge from a multilingual abusive lexicon is able to improve the models’ performance, specifically in detecting the positive class. The results of our experimental evaluation highlight a number of challenges and issues in this particular task. One of the main challenges is related to the issue of current benchmarks for hate speech detection, in particular how bias related to the topical focus in the datasets influences the classification performance. The insufficient ability of current multilingual language models to transfer knowledge between languages in the specific hate speech detection task also remain an open problem. However, our experimental evaluation and our qualitative analysis show how the explicit integration of linguistic knowledge from a structured abusive language lexicon helps to alleviate this issue.     

Assessing emergent literacy in preschool classrooms

Recent research on the literacy development of children during the preschool years has emphasized the notion of “emergent literacy,” according to authors Kontos (1986) and Teale and Sulzby (1986). According to this view, preschool children learn about reading and writing as they participate in a literate culture. Early social interactions involving print are crucial to children's reading and writing development, according to the Early Childhood and Literacy Development Committee (1986).     

A Case Study of ROI in Organizational Performance of Working at Home

With the growing suburban population, many employees in metro areas are facing long commutes to and from the workplace. According to the 2011 Texas Transportation Institute's Urban Mobility Report, the average commuter experiences 34 hours of delay per year and spends an extra $713 on fuel (see http://tti.tamu.edu/documents/mobility‐report‐2011.pdf ). This not only causes stress for the employee but also has a serious impact on the organization and the environment.     

The bells: A re‐appraisal

The Bells, although universally described by critics as melodrama, departs markedly from the traits most usually associated with the form. An investigation of this seeming contradiction leads to the testing of an alternate model for melodrama and an illumination of the play's structure by means of this model. The resulting analysis points clearly to the need for more theoretical work into the nature of melodrama.