Numerical aspects of nonreinforcement: The same-phase nonreinforcement procedure

To test the hypothesis that distinctive internal representations are associated with number of successively presented nonreinforcements, four investigations employed rats in a discrete trial runway task (go/no-go), in which the smaller number of nonreinforcements was a signal for reinforcement (S+ cue), the larger number of nonreinforcements was a signal for nonreinforcement (S? cue). Consistent with the hypothesis under test, discriminative responding increased as the numerical difference between the S+ and S? cues increased. These results are highly similar to those previously obtained employing the conventional extinction procedure. However, unlike extinction data, the present findings cannot be interpreted without reference to numerical representations because better experimental control was employed here than has been in conventional extinction investigations. It was suggested that rats are capable of enumerating, or counting, successive nonreinforcements and that the tendency of rats to enumerate all types of reinforcing events is of importance for understanding not merely extinction, but a wide array of learning phenomena.     

The Challenge and Opportunity of Competency‐Based Counselor Education

There is increased responsibility for programs to demonstrate evidence of student learning and skill. Application of competency‐based education is delineated, including prior learning assessment and personalized learning. Implications such as awarding credit for experience in admissions or variable clinical training timelines and requirements are explored.     

The Role of PETE in Developing Joy-Oriented Physical Educators

The current focus on utilitarian outcomes (e.g., fitness, health, skill development) in physical education has not been effective in producing life-long movers and makes physical activity a duty to be performed. An alternative to a utilitarian focus is to have a joy-oriented focus in which physical activity is promoted because it is joyful, pleasurable, and personally meaningful. In this paper, we present factors that inhibit a joy-oriented focus in physical education and reasons physical education teacher education (PETE) programs have thus far failed to produce joy-oriented physical education teachers. We then present a new approach to PETE—the foundational approach—in which the joy of movement forms the foundation of and is threaded throughout the program. Ten specific changes to PETE programs are proposed to produce joy-oriented physical education teachers.     

No scholar is an island: The impact of sharing in the work life of scholars

The sharing of scholarly articles is an intrinsic and often ignored facet of the value and mission of scholarship. It is so entwined in the daily work life of scholars that it has almost become second nature, an integral part of the research process itself. This article addresses this often overlooked area of research in usage studies. In an international survey of 1,000 published scholars, the Beyond Downloads project examined their sharing behaviours in order to gain a more contextualized and accurate picture of their usage beyond download patterns and citation counts. Scholars share published articles with others as a mode of content discovery and dissemination, particularly if they work in groups, and most expect to increase their sharing in the future. While their methods of sharing articles may change, and their reasons for sharing may vary from self‐promotion to the more altruistic motives of scientific progress, they desire to share the final published versions of articles with their colleagues.     

Criticality in international higher education research: a critical discourse analysis of higher education journals

The current study utilizes the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 50, 179–211 Ajzen 1991) to examine an instructor confirmation-interaction model in the instructional communication context to discover a means by which instructors might cultivate positive student attitudes and increase beliefs that interactions with instructors would be beneficial in the future. Specifically, the model examines how teacher confirmation (Ellis 2000) influences students’ behavioral intention to communicate with instructors. Surveys were distributed to 343 college students (41.7% male and 58.1% female) in a basic communication course. Results were primarily consistent with the proposed model; teacher confirmation was significantly related to attitudes toward communicating with an instructor, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control. Subjective norms and perceived behavioral control were also positively related to students’ behavioral intention to communicate with the instructor. However, results reveal attitudes toward communicating do not predict students’ behavioral intention to communicate with instructors. It is recommended that future models examine a more contemporary, hi-tech representation of attitude toward student-instructor interactions as it may produce a significant association with students’ behavioral intent to communicate with them. The study concludes with theoretical and practical implications to examine student classroom communication via the confirmation-interaction model and the theory of planned behavior.     

Dealing with temporal variation in patent categorization

In this paper, we quantify the existence of concept drift in patent data, and examine its impact on classification accuracy. When developing algorithms for classifying incoming patent applications with respect to their category in the International Patent Classification (IPC) hierarchy, a temporal mismatch between training data and incoming documents may deteriorate classification results. We measure the effect of this temporal mismatch and aim to tackle it by optimal selection of training data. To illustrate the various aspects of concept drift on IPC class level, we first perform quantitative analyses on a subset of English abstracts extracted from patent documents in the CLEF-IP 2011 patent corpus. In a series of classification experiments, we then show the impact of temporal variation on the classification accuracy of incoming applications. We further examine what training data selection method, combined with our classification approach yields the best classifier; and how combining different text representations may improve patent classification. We found that using the most recent data is a better strategy than static sampling but that extending a set of recent training data with older documents does not harm classification performance. In addition, we confirm previous findings that using 2-skip-2-grams on top of the bag of unigrams structurally improves patent classification. Our work is an important contribution to the research into concept drift for text classification, and to the practice of classifying incoming patent applications.     

The Student Assistance Program: higher education’s Holy Grail

This paper outlines an exploratory study conducted within the Sport & Exercise Sciences department at a higher education institution in Wales. Prior to the study it was identified that personal tutors were spending an increasing amount of time dealing with pastoral issues. This research sought to investigate the implementation of the Student Assistance Program, a peer-support group, to reduce the pastoral burden on staff and improve retention and to assess any changes in student behaviour. At the end of the programme students were asked to evaluate the experience by means of a simple questionnaire that also gave them the opportunity to add some open-ended responses. In addition, the facilitators were also given the opportunity to comment on the programme using a similar open-ended questionnaire. Data were analysed using qualitative analysis. The results were encouraging and changes occurred within the students who participated in the pilot study.     

Online course design: a statistics course example

Classroom‐based learning has great value, but online classes are becoming quite popular in the academic world because of the tremendous opportunities they offer. This article outlines the author's journey through the planning, development and execution of an online statistics course.