Measuring attitude towards RE: factoring pupil experience and home faith background into assessment

Recent studies have increasingly favoured contextualisation of religious education (RE) to pupils’ home faith background in spite of current assessment methods that might hinder this. For a multi-religious, multi-ethnic sample of 369 London school pupils aged from 13 to 15?years, this study found that the participatory, transformative and dialogical activities of church visits, computer use and classroom debate improved attitude to RE. It revealed more readiness in girls to apply RE to their own religiosity and particularly negative attitudes to RE in pupils with no religious background. Besides indicating the validity, reliability and unidimensionality of a new short quantitative measure of pupil attitude to RE which acknowledges pupil experience and home context, the findings suggest ways to move beyond ‘banking’ paradigms to which RE remains prone.     

Inferring user knowledge level from eye movement patterns

The acquisition of information and the search interaction process is influenced strongly by a person’s use of their knowledge of the domain and the task. In this paper we show that a user’s level of domain knowledge can be inferred from their interactive search behaviors without considering the content of queries or documents. A technique is presented to model a user’s information acquisition process during search using only measurements of eye movement patterns. In a user study (n = 40) of search in the domain of genomics, a representation of the participant’s domain knowledge was constructed using self-ratings of knowledge of genomics-related terms (n = 409). Cognitive effort features associated with reading eye movement patterns were calculated for each reading instance during the search tasks. The results show correlations between the cognitive effort due to reading and an individual’s level of domain knowledge. We construct exploratory regression models that suggest it is possible to build models that can make predictions of the user’s level of knowledge based on real-time measurements of eye movement patterns during a task session.     

“Go,little book ...”: Getting a book to readers

An author, editor, agent, marketing director, and bookseller describe in turn how one book—Facing the Music: Short Stories by Larry Brown—made the journey from a writer's brain to readers' brains. Larry Brown is the author of two novels,Dirty Work andJoe, and two short-story collections,Facing the Music andBig Bad Love. His next book,On Fire, is a nonfiction account of his experiences in the Oxford, Mississippi, Fire Department. Liz Darhansoff is a literary agent with Darhansoff and Verrill Literary Agency, New York. Richard Howorth is an Oxford bookseller who serves on theParis Review's Booksellers' Advisory Board, the Board of Directors of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Board of Directors of the American Booksellers Association. He chairs the ABA's Publisher Relations Committee and in 1986 was awarded the Charles S. Haslam Award for excellence in bookselling. Shannon Ravenel is editorial director of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill and the editor of its annualNew Stories from, the South. From 1977 to 1990 she was series editor forBest American Short Stories, and she editedThe Best American Short Stories of the Eighties. Ina Stern is marketing director of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.