European Journal of Special Needs Education Vol. 18, No. 3, October 2003 erratum

The current paper reports on the outcome of an ongoing action research project at a school for higher-functioning students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in Sweden. The overall aim of the study was to develop and evaluate a questionnaire that captures social and individual aspects of classroom learning suitable for use with students with ASD. Interview data is presented on the perceived utility of the questionnaire for understanding and planning classroom instruction for the children with ASD through the eyes of the students’ teachers and their parents, as assessed during an Individual Education Plan meeting. Further, teacher ratings obtained by means of the instrument were found to differentiate a group of students with ASD (n = 10) from a group of typically developing children matched with regard to grade year, word reading ability and receptive vocabulary (n = 10). Implications and future directions are discussed, as are limitations of this pilot study.     

A pipelined architecture for distributed text query evaluation

Two principal query-evaluation methodologies have been described for cluster-based implementation of distributed information retrieval systems: document partitioning and term partitioning. In a document-partitioned system, each of the processors hosts a subset of the documents in the collection, and executes every query against its local sub-collection. In a term-partitioned system, each of the processors hosts a subset of the inverted lists that make up the index of the collection, and serves them to a central machine as they are required for query evaluation. In this paper we introduce a pipelined query-evaluation methodology, based on a term-partitioned index, in which partially evaluated queries are passed amongst the set of processors that host the query terms. This arrangement retains the disk read benefits of term partitioning, but more effectively shares the computational load. We compare the three methodologies experimentally, and show that term distribution is inefficient and scales poorly. The new pipelined approach offers efficient memory utilization and efficient use of disk accesses, but suffers from problems with load balancing between nodes. Until these problems are resolved, document partitioning remains the preferred method. Alistair Moffat was supported by the Australian Research Council, the ARC Special Research Center for Perceptive and Intelligent Machines in Complex Environments, and the NICTA Victoria Laboratory. William Webber and Justin Zobel were supported by the Australian Research Council. Ricardo Baeza-Yates was supported by Grant P01-029-F from Millennium Initiative of Mideplan, Chile; and by the University of Melbourne as a visiting scholar at the time this project was undertaken.     

Impact of question-answering tasks on search processes and reading comprehension

This study examined the effect of (a) high- and low-level questions and (b) reading the text before the questions asked on performance, delayed text recall, and deep text comprehension, as well as on specific text-inspection patterns. Participants were 37 undergraduate students who answered either high- or low-level questions using the software Read&Answer to read and answer questions on the computer screen. Additionally, half of the sample read first a text and then answered the questions (reading-first condition), whereas the other half answered the questions without having read the text in advance (no-reading-first condition). All participants had the text available to search for the answer. Results indicated that high-level questions facilitated deep comprehension but not immediate performance or delayed recall of text, independently of the reading condition, and that high- and low-level questions differentially affected text-inspection patterns.