Integration of an intelligent tutoring system in a course of computer network design

INTUITEL is a research project aiming to offer a personalized learning environment. The INTUITEL approach includes an Intelligent Tutoring System that gives students recommendations and feedback about what the best learning path is for them according to their profile, learning progress, context and environmental influences. INTUITEL combines efficient pedagogical-based recommendations with freedom of choice and it introduces this tutoring support in different Learning Management Systems. During the INTUITEL project various software and pedagogical testing procedures were defined to provide the development teams with feedback, both summative and formative. The current paper describes the initial user test, which was conducted at the University of Valladolid for the course “Network Design”. The experiment was focused on real learners’ reactions to INTUITEL recommendations received by an INTUITEL-enabled LMS. Nineteen students participated in a two phase testing procedure in order to analyze the learners’ behavior with INTUITEL, as well as obtaining information about how learners perceive the influence and usefulness of the tutoring system in online learning courses. Results show that students with INTUITEL follow learning paths that are more suitable for them. Besides, the general satisfaction level of participants is high. Most learners appreciate INTUITEL, would follow its recommendations and consider the messages shown by INTUITEL as useful and caring.     

Attitudes of Parents Toward War Play in Young Children

A questionnaire on attitudes toward war play was given to 316 Italian parents and 84 English parents of children aged 2 to 6 years. In both cultures, boys were significantly more likely to engage in war play, either social or solitary—most commonly weapon play, but also play with combat figures and acting out a combat role. Parental attitudes, television, and peers (including older siblings), appeared as common sources of influence. Parents expressed a range of views about how to respond to war play, varying from discouraging it (more common if their children did not engage in war play), to allowing it with limits, to allowing it unconditionally. There was more of a consensus that war toys should not be allowed in school and that playgroup supervisors and teachers should try to turn war play toward more constructive ends. Analysis of a range of attitudinal scales confirmed a general dimension of restrictiveness-permissiveness with regard to war play activities, linked to attitudes about rough-and-tumble play (R & T) and pretend play in the Italian sample but not in the English sample.     

Teaching interactive practices and burnout: a study on Italian teachers

The purpose of the present study was to analyse the role played by teaching interactive practices (measured through a self-report Likert scale) in predicting teacher burnout, after controlling for school grade (primary vs. secondary school) and teaching experience. Participants were 282 Italian teachers equally distributed between primary and secondary schools. Teaching interactive practices were investigated through a purpose-built questionnaire concerning teacher- versus student-centred practices. Burnout was studied using the Maslach Burnout Inventory in its three-dimensional—Emotional Exhaustion, Low Personal Accomplishment and Depersonalization—Italian version. An explorative factor analysis on the questionnaire displayed three dimensions of teaching practices, namely student-centred practices focused on flexibility, student-centred practices focused on participation and teacher-centred practices. The main results showed that, irrespective of school grade and teaching experience, the adoption of interactive practices favouring students’ participation negatively predicted burnout; on the contrary, teacher-centred practices and flexibility positively predicted it. The result implications for educational processes and teacher training are discussed in the conclusion.     

Making a Science Education Video: a teacher trainer's perspective

This article explores the area of teacher‐training by video‐led distance learning materials. The focus is on the role of educators in the process of developing a video programme for in‐service teacher training in the area of science, in the context of an overall plan of in‐service teacher training. Illustrations are given of the tension between creative ideas and pragmatic consideration, the demand of the medium and the subject matter, the criteria adopted by educationalists and those used by producers. Some practical points are made about techniques devised to communicate specific ideas which are hopefully of some relevance not only to educators but also to professionals in educational television.     

Sweet sixteen ... Adolescents’ problems and the peer group as source of support

This survey reports on the coping process of adolescents with three relational problems, two personal problems, and two socio-institutional problems. Overall, 770 Italian adolescent between 14 and 20 years took part. They responded to a questionnaire consisting of four parts: a part querying demographic data, one on the peer group the adolescents join, the third was on life values, and in the final part seven developmental tasks were presented and aspects of the coping process were investigated. The study shows, first, that adolescents who strongly identify with their peers also feel close to their family, their best friend, and their school mates. Thus, identification with the peers does not lead to isolation from the family. Second, the study shows that identification with social entities, in part, is due to the similarity of value the adolescent and the respective entities have. The more similar life values are the more strongly the adolescents identify with the peers, the family, the best friend, or the school mates. Third, effective coping with developmental tasks was found to be dependent on the degree of identification with the peers. The type of group that adolescents join, be it a formal group or an informal street group, had no significant effect on the coping process. Highly identified adolescents more often relied on their family, peers, and other social entities for emotional and instrumental support, and trace more advantages out of a developmental problem for their future.     

Prevalence and outcomes for parents with disabilities and their children in an Australian court sample

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to obtain sound prevalence and outcomes data on parents with disabilities and their children in statutory child protection proceedings. METHOD: The court files of all care and protection matters initiated by the statutory child protection authority and finalized in a 9-month period (n=285) at two Children's Courts in NSW, Australia were reviewed. RESULTS: Parents with disabilities featured in almost one-third of the cases (29.5%). Parental psychiatric disability was most prevalent at 21.8% followed by parental intellectual disability (mental retardation) at 8.8%. Significant associations were found between parental disability and court outcome with a disproportionately large number of children of parents with intellectual disability being made wards of the state. CONCLUSIONS: The findings demonstrate that parents with disabilities are significantly over-represented in statutory child protection proceedings and that the outcomes of these proceedings vary according to disability type.     

Teachers negotiating discourses of gender (in) equality: the case of equal opportunities reform in Andalusia

This article is focused on the analysis of the narratives produced by a group of teachers, experts in coeducation, while they were discussing their everyday activities. They are responsible for the implementation of a Plan for Gender Equality in public secondary schools in Andalusia (Spain). This study is based on contributions about doing gender view, according to which gender is not an attribute of individuals, but a way of making sense of interactions and practising a complex system as functioning on three levels: sociocultural, interactional, and individual. We use these levels to understand gender culture in schools through teachers’ discourse. Our interest lies particularly in the meanings, contradictions, difficulties, and conflicts experienced by expert teachers in co-education. Our study was based on group discussions with teachers in charge of the plan for equal opportunities between women and men in school settings. Results show teachers’ conflicts about meanings and how they are supposed to apply the Equality Plan. We observed interactional levels during these conflicts and analysed how teachers construct and validate their discourse.     

A LPV modeling of turbocharged spark-ignition automotive engine oriented to fault detection and isolation purposes

This paper illustrates the derivation of a linear parameter varying (LPV) model approximation of a turbocharged Spark-Ignition (SI) automotive engine and its usage in designing a model-based fault detection and isolation (FDI) scheme. The LPV approximation is derived from a detailed nonlinear mathematical model of the engine on the basis of the well known Jacobian approach. The resulting LPV representation is then exploited for synthesizing a bank of LPV-FDI $H_{\infty }/H_{?}$ Luenberger observers. Each observer is in charge of detecting a particular class of fault and is designed for having low sensitivity to all other exogenous inputs so as to allow an effective fault isolation. The adopted FDI scheme is gain-scheduled and exploits a set of engine variables, assumed to be measurable on-line, as a scheduling parameters. The goodness of the LPV approximation of the engine model and the effectiveness of the LPV-FDI architecture are demonstrated by several numerical simulations.     

The innovative performance of firms in heterogeneous environments: The interplay between external knowledge and internal absorptive capacities

This paper investigates the link between firm-level innovative performance and innovation prone external environments where knowledgeable individuals tend to cluster. Organizational ambidexterity and absorptive capacities (potential and realized) make it possible for firms to leverage the availability of external knowledge and boost their innovation performance. The empirical analysis focuses on England and is based on a novel combination of Community Innovation Survey (CIS) firm-level data and patent data. The results show that only firms complementing potential and realized absorptive capacities are able to take advantage of favorable external environments by actively combining internal and external sources of knowledge.