Evaluating fifth- and sixth-grade students’ expository writing: task development, scoring, and psychometric issues

Drawing from multiple theoretical frameworks representing cognitive and educational psychology, we present a writing task and scoring system for measurement of students’ informative writing. Participants in this study were 72 fifth- and sixth-grade students who wrote compositions describing real-world problems and how mathematics, science, and social studies information could be used to solve those problems. Of the 72 students, 69 were able to craft a cohesive response that not only demonstrated planning in writing structure but also elaboration of relevant knowledge in one or more domains. Many-facet Rasch Modeling (MFRM) techniques were used to examine the reliability and validity of scores for the writing rating scale. Additionally, comparison of fifth- and sixth-grade responses supported the validity of scores, as did the results of a correlational analysis with scores from an overall interest measure. Recommendations for improving writing scoring systems based on the findings of this investigation are provided.     

Play to win! Using games in library instruction to enhance student learning

Research has shown that educational games can have positive impacts on student learning and motivation. The success of a game played in a library instruction class depends on the type of game selected, the development of learning outcomes, and the flexibility of the librarian during class. This article explains the benefits to students and librarians of using games, discusses the development and use of a Jeopardy-style game, and provides practical tips for librarians interested in developing and incorporating games into one-time library instruction sessions.     

Health literacy and consumer health information

The rigours of the past few years have demonstrated the importance of good health literacy levels with the imperative of being able to obtain and interpret information to maintain and improve one's health never more apparent. With this in mind, this issue is focused on consumer health information, the gender and population group differences that exist in information seeking behaviour, the challenges of understanding medical explanations and terminology, and existing criteria to assess and ultimately produce better consumer health information.     

Comparing Web search engine performance in searching consumer health information: evaluation and recommendations.

Identifying and accessing reliable, relevant consumer health information rapidly on the Internet may challenge the health sciences librarian and layperson alike. In this study, seven search engines are compared using representative consumer health topics for their content relevancy, system features, and attributes. The paper discusses evaluation criteria; systematically compares relevant results; analyzes performance in terms of the strengths and weaknesses of the search engines; and illustrates effective search engine selection, search formulation, and strategies.     

Retrieving and classifying instances of source code plagiarism

Automatic detection of source code plagiarism is an important research field for both the commercial software industry and within the research community. Existing methods of plagiarism detection primarily involve exhaustive pairwise document comparison, which does not scale well for large software collections. To achieve scalability, we approach the problem from an information retrieval (IR) perspective. We retrieve a ranked list of candidate documents in response to a pseudo-query representation constructed from each source code document in the collection. The challenge in source code document retrieval is that the standard bag-of-words (BoW) representation model for such documents is likely to result in many false positives being retrieved, because of the use of identical programming language specific constructs and keywords. To address this problem, we make use of an abstract syntax tree (AST) representation of the source code documents. While the IR approach is efficient, it is essentially unsupervised in nature. To further improve its effectiveness, we apply a supervised classifier (pre-trained with features extracted from sample plagiarized source code pairs) on the top ranked retrieved documents. We report experiments on the SOCO-2014 dataset comprising 12K Java source files with almost 1M lines of code. Our experiments confirm that the AST based approach produces significantly better retrieval effectiveness than a standard BoW representation, i.e., the AST based approach is able to identify a higher number of plagiarized source code documents at top ranks in response to a query source code document. The supervised classifier, trained on features extracted from sample plagiarized source code pairs, is shown to effectively filter and thus further improve the ranked list of retrieved candidate plagiarized documents.     

A Theory of Media Power and a Theory of Media Use: Different Stories,Questions, and Ways of Thinking

In this article, I compare the assumptions, concepts, and propositions of media system dependency (MSD) theory and uses and gratifications (U&G) theory at the microlevel of analysis. The epistemological origins of these theories are situated within the differing social and personal contexts that affected their development. Those MSD assumptions that serve as background to this comparison are specified, and major hypotheses concerning the social ecology of microeffects processes are discussed, particularly as they pertain to public opinion concerns. Following this elaboration of MSD theory, basic differences between MSD and U&G conceptions of the audience, interpersonal networks, the media system, and the nature of media power are addressed. I conclude with a brief comment on the implications of the Internet for theorizing micro media effects.     

Making Compliance Seem More Important: The “Just-One-More” Technique of Gaining Compliance

A new compliance-gaining technique is introduced called the “just-one-more” (JOM) technique that increases compliance rates by including the phrase “I just need one more person to help.” Two studies are reported (N = 160 in each). The first established the effectiveness of the technique as compared to a direct request. The second tested the hypothesis that goal difficulty moderates the technique's effectiveness in a 2 (JOM or direct request) × 2 (requester needs five surveys or 100). Results indicate that the JOM was substantially more effective than a direct request in the 100 surveys condition but not the five.     

CD-ROM MEDLINE use and users: information transfer in the clinical setting

Effective delivery of biomedical information to health professionals depends on the availability of systems that are compatible with the information-seeking patterns of health professionals. MEDLINE is a major source of biomedical information, but has been available primarily through libraries via telecommunications networks. The recent availability of MEDLINE on CD-ROM has made it possible to provide MEDLINE directly to clinicians without the associated problems of telecommunications and online use charges. The MEDLINE on CD-ROM Evaluation Forum sponsored by the National Library of Medicine reported on clinicians' use of CD-ROM MEDLINE at seven different clinical settings. This article summarizes the findings from these sites and places them in the context of current understanding of information-seeking behaviors of health professionals. Key issues in the design and development of information technologies in the clinical setting are also articulated.     

Creatine kinase activity weakly correlates to volume completed following upper body resistance exercise

In the current study, we examined the relationship between serum creatine kinase (CK) activity following upper body resistance exercise with a 1- or 3-min rest between sets. Twenty men performed two sessions, each consisting of four sets with a 10-repetition maximum load. The results demonstrated significantly greater volume for the 3-min condition (M = 4156 kg, SD = 867, for 3 min; vs. M = 3503 kg SD = 759, for 1 min; p < .001), with no significant differences in delta CK activity between conditions (p = .574). Nevertheless, there was a weak correlation between the delta CK activity and total volume of exercise completed (r = .55 with a 1-min rest, and r = .45 with a 3-min rest). Therefore, the volume following upper body resistance exercise correlates weakly with serum CK levels, irrespective of rest interval length between sets.