THE OLDER HEARING‐IMPAIRED STUDENT: MANAGING OBSTACLES TO LEARNING

With the number of older Americans increasing, many colleges and universities are attempting to serve the needs of this population by offering tuition reductions, alternative scheduling, and special courses to older learners. Consequently, more and more older persons appear to be returning to colleges and universities on a part‐time or full‐time basis. However, many of these older students may not be receiving maximum benefit from their educational experiences, owing to hearing impairments. This article discusses obstacles and problems that confront the older hearing‐impaired student in the classroom and presents possible management solutions.     

An idea whose time has come: An exchange model for increasing faculty and staff mobility

The National Faculty Exchange, a membership network of U.S. colleges and universities, has been designed to provide faculty and staff with new challenges and stimuli away from accustomed faces and tasks. Implemented as one response to an increasing lack of mobility in higher education, the new network offers a centrally coordinated and campus supported structure to facilitate the exchange of faculty and staff. Unlike other domestic exchange models, NFE will be national in scope and will centrally broker or place individuals using a multilateral exchange approach, with procedures and timetables common to all campuses in the network.     

Assessing the influence of personal preferences on the choice of vocabulary for natural language generation

Referring expression generation is the part of natural language generation that decides how to refer to the entities appearing in an automatically generated text. Lexicalization is the part of this process which involves the choice of appropriate vocabulary or expressions to transform the conceptual content of a referring expression into the corresponding text in natural language. This problem presents an important challenge when we have enough knowledge to allow more than one alternative. In those cases, we need some heuristics to decide which alternatives are more appropriate in a given situation. Whereas most work on natural language generation has focused on a generic way of generating language, in this paper we explore personal preferences as a type of heuristic that has not been properly addressed. We empirically analyze the TUNA corpus, a corpus of referring expression lexicalizations, to investigate the influence of language preferences in how people lexicalize new referring expressions in different situations. We then present two corpus-based approaches to solve the problem of referring expression lexicalization, one that takes preferences into account and one that does not. The results show a decrease of 50% in the similarity error against the reference corpus when personal preferences are used to generate the final referring expression.     

Interest,inferences, and learning from texts

Topic interest and learning from texts have been found to be positively associated with each other. However, the reason for this positive association is not well understood. The purpose of this study is to examine a cognitive process, inference generation, that could explain the positive association between interest and learning from texts. In Study 1, sixty undergraduate students participated by reading two science texts, which differed in coherence levels, silently. The results replicated previous findings that topic interest is positively associated with recall and accurate answers to comprehension questions for both texts. In Study 2, sixty-nine undergraduate students participated by reading the same two science texts while thinking aloud. The results indicated that topic interest was positively associated with inference generation while reading for the more coherently-written text. Subsequent analyses indicated inference generation partly explained the positive association between topic interest and accurate answers to comprehension questions for the more coherently-written text. The findings from Study 2 were independent of the effects of reading comprehension skill. Theoretical implications of the findings, in regard to standards of coherence and depth of processing while reading, are discussed.