Pooling for a Large-Scale Test Collection: An Analysis of the Search Results from the First NTCIR Workshop

We have conducted a study to: (1) verify the exhaustiveness of pooling for the purpose of constructing a large-scale test collection, and (2) examine whether a difference in the number of pool documents can affect the relative evaluation of IR systems. We carried out the experiments using search topics, their relevance assessments, and the search results that were submitted for both the pre-test and test of the first NTCIR Workshop.Our results verified the efficiency and the effectiveness of the pooling method, the exhaustiveness of the relevance assessments, and the reliability of the evaluation using the test collection based on the pooling method.     

Japanese and United States Preschool Children's Responses to Conflict and Distress

Japanese and U.S. preschool children's responses to hypothetical interpersonal dilemmas were examined as a function of culture, gender, and maternal child-rearing values. U.S. children showed more anger, more aggressive behavior and language, and underregulation of emotion than Japanese children, across different contexts of assessment. Children from the 2 cultures appeared more similar on prosocial and avoidant patterns, though in some contexts U.S. children also showed more prosocial themes. Girls from both cultures expressed more prosocial themes and sometimes more anger than boys. Maternal encouragement of children's emotional expressivity was correlated with anger and aggression in children. It was more characteristic of U.S. than Japanese mothers, while emphasis on psychological discipline (reasoning; guilt and anxiety induction) was more characteristic of Japanese than U.S. mothers. The relevance of a conceptual framework that focuses on differences in Eastern and Western cultures in self-construals regarding independence and interdependence is considered.     

Multilingual opinion holder identification using author and authority viewpoints

Opinion holder identification research is important for discriminating between opinions that are viewed from different perspectives. We propose a new opinion holder identification method that is based on a differentiation between the author and authority viewpoints in opinionated sentences. In our method, the author- and authority-opinionated sentences were extracted, respectively, by utilizing the different features because their writing styles were different. Although the researchers have not focused on it, this differentiation is important for correctly identifying opinion holders. We describe our participation in the NTCIR-6 Opinion Analysis Pilot Task by focusing on the opinion holder identification results in Japanese and English. The evaluation results showed that our system performed fairly well with respect to Japanese documents, and postsubmission analysis has revealed that improvements could be made with respect to English documents as well.     

Evaluation and decentralised governance: Examples of inspections in polycentric education systems

Across Europe schools and other service providers increasingly operate in networks to provide inclusive education or develop and implement more localized school-to-school improvement models. As some education systems move towards more decentralized decision-making where multiple actors have an active role in steering and governing schools, the tasks and responsibilities of Inspectorates of Education must also change. This paper reflects on these changes and suggests ‘polycentric’ inspection models that fit such a decentralized context. Examples of inspection frameworks and methods from Northern Ireland, England and the Netherlands are provided, as well as a brief discussion of the potential impact of such ‘polycentric’ models.     

Adopting and adapting: school leaders in the age of data-informed decision making

The concept of data-informed decision making (DIDM), a term used interchangeably with data-driven decision making (DDDM) and data-based decision making (DBDM), is relatively new to Irish education and the school planning process. This research sought to clarify what data principals use and how they use that information for school improvement considering new school self-evaluation requirements. The paper begins by charting the rise internationally of data use in school planning, decision making and accountability. It proceeds to describe the policy context in this area in Ireland and then reports recent research with school leaders around how data is collected and used in their work. Although the paper focusses on Ireland, it is tentatively suggested that school leaders, teachers and policymakers in other countries, and there are many, which have come late to the expectation that school improvement and accountability should be heavily data-informed may find the efforts of Irish principals in this regard of interest.     

Longitudinal Effects of PostDivorce Interparental Conflict on Children’s Mental Health Problems Through Fear of Abandonment: Does Parenting Quality Play a Buffering Role?

In a sample of 559 children (ages 9–18), researchers investigated whether: (a) fear of abandonment mediated the association between postdivorce interparental conflict (IPC) and mental health problems, and (b) parent–child relationship quality moderated the association between IPC and fear of abandonment. Mediation analyses indicated that pretest IPC predicted fear of abandonment 3 months later, which then predicted child- and teacher-reported mental health problems 10 months later. The hypothesized protective effect of a high-quality parent–child relationship was not observed. IPC predicted fear of abandonment for all children, except for those with low- and moderate-quality father–child relationships, for whom IPC was not significantly related to fear of abandonment. Findings highlight the need to optimize child coping programs and improve parenting-after-divorce programs to reduce IPC.     

Aiding culturally responsive assessment in schools in a globalising world

Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability - Across the world, teachers’ classroom assessment tasks and responsibilities are becoming more diverse due to increased migration. In...