Quantification for complex assessment: uncertainty estimation in final year project thesis assessment

A quantitative method for estimating an expected uncertainty (reliability and validity) in assessment results arising from the relativity between four variables, viz examiner's expertise, examinee's expertise achieved, assessment task difficulty and examinee's performance, was developed for the complex assessment applicable to final year project thesis assessment including peer assessment. A guide map can be generated by the method for finding expected uncertainties prior to the assessment implementation with a given set of variables. It employs a scale for visualisation of expertise levels, derivation of which is based on quantified clarities of mental images for levels of the examiner's expertise and the examinee's expertise achieved. To identify the relevant expertise areas that depend on the complexity in assessment format, a graphical continuum model was developed. The continuum model consists of assessment task, assessment standards and criterion for the transition towards the complex assessment owing to the relativity between implicitness and explicitness and is capable of identifying areas of expertise required for scale development.     

A historical comparison of intellectual renaissance in the East and the West

It is not yet well known that there has been a selective bias in writing the ‘world’ history of higher education. Western hegemony prevails in this academic endeavour. To recover one of the many lost traditions of higher education, this paper will make a historical comparison of the two distinctive academic traditions representing the West and East: Scholasticism revived in the twelfth century and Korean Confucianism revived in the sixteenth century. If the University Paris was where Scholasticism blossomed in the medieval period, then it is in the material relation between a mentor and his disciples, through which a distinctive academic lineage was formed, where the renaissance of Korean Confucianism has taken place since the early sixteenth century. The paper examines some of the indisputable differences between the Western and Eastern methods of reaching academic excellence. The goals, subjects, methods and organisational bases of education in the two traditions do differ drastically. Instead of the centrality of the institution in the West, the centrality of relation was the key factor in the East. These differences however do not support for any value judgment of one tradition being superior to the other, as seen in many books on world history of higher education. A single minded analysis of a foreign model from the Western perspective will not provide a global history, but a historical comparison will.     

Teaching Repayment of Parents' Kindness

This article introduces a Buddhist Sutra about the deep kindness of mothers and ways of repaying mothers' kindness. The Sutra has been used to teach children about mothers' kindness and the obligation to repay to their mothers in their old age. It contains discourses about 10 types of kindness that a mother bestows on her child and how to repay the kindness in her old age. The paper discusses the profound nature of mothers' kindness, the way of repaying the kindness, the reciprocal caring relationship between the mother and the child, the status of mothers in Buddhism, and implications for aging.     

Integrating Research Proposals Into a Field Seminar: Feedback From Students

Teaching research to social work students continues to be the topic of an ongoing dialog within the profession. The literature suggests that some form of a “real-world” or “hands-on” learning opportunity has many benefits for teaching a subject that students often are reluctant to engage in. Using online survey methods, researchers gathered feedback from graduate students and their field supervisors about their experience of completing a field seminar that integrated an agency-based research proposal as part of the course requirement. Although there were limitations to this approach, many of the same benefits of actually implementing research were reported by students who completed only a proposal.     

Risk and Protective Factors for Homophobic Bullying in Schools: An Application of the Social–Ecological Framework

Homophobic bullying is a serious concern for students, parents, teachers, and school officials. This article reviews evidence on the status of this problem and how it may be addressed in a multilevel and multidisciplinary manner growing out of a social–ecological perspective on homophobic bullying as a social phenomenon. The ecological framework developed by Urie Bronfenbrenner (1977, 1979) is applied to organize this effort, which includes micro-, exo-, and macro-systems in which behavior and development are embedded. The inherent fluidity of experience postulated by Bronfenbrenner’s ecological approach offers hope that as practices and policy to promote diversity move forward, they will reshape the social ecology of sexual minority youth.     

Exploring children's understanding of death concepts

This study is an investigation of the effects of death education on children and their understanding of death. The participants of this study were eighty 5- and 6-year-olds who were enrolled in a suburban kindergarten in Korea. To examine the level of children's understanding of death, researchers interviewed each child in both the control and experimental groups. After the interview, researchers provided an intervention (11 educational activities) to the experimental group. No educational intervention was provided to the control group. Researchers re-interviewed children in both groups after the treatment. The overall mean score of the experimental group was significantly higher than that of the control group on all five categories of the death concept: causality, old age, irreversibility, finality, and inevitability. Implications regarding how death education can be approached in early childhood settings are also discussed.     

Connectivity-preserving approximation-free design for synchronized tracking of uncertain networked nonaffine nonlinear multi-agent systems

This paper presents a connectivity-preserving approximation-free design strategy for the distributed synchronized tracking of uncertain nonlinear multi-agent systems with limited communication ranges. All nonaffine nonlinearities in pure-feedback form are assumed to be unknown. The main contribution of this paper is to achieve approximation-free synchronized tracking while preserving the initial interaction patterns among agents. To this end, each synchronization error term is individually transformed to a nonlinear error function with a predefined time-varying function. The local tracking laws using only the relative output information among agents are designed via these nonlinear error terms. The connectivity preservation and preassigned tracking performance of the proposed synchronized tracking system are recursively analyzed in the Lyapunov sense, without employing any function approximators and potential functions. Finally, the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed strategy are demonstrated through simulation examples.     

Concept unification of terms in different languages via web mining for Information Retrieval

For historical and cultural reasons, English phases, especially proper nouns and new words, frequently appear in Web pages written primarily in East Asian languages such as Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Although such English terms and their equivalences in these East Asian languages refer to the same concept, they are often erroneously treated as independent index units in traditional Information Retrieval (IR). This paper describes the degree to which the problem arises in IR and proposes a novel technique to solve it. Our method first extracts English terms from native Web documents in an East Asian language, and then unifies the extracted terms and their equivalences in the native language as one index unit. For Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR), one of the major hindrances to achieving retrieval performance at the level of Mono-Lingual Information Retrieval (MLIR) is the translation of terms in search queries which can not be found in a bilingual dictionary. The Web mining approach proposed in this paper for concept unification of terms in different languages can also be applied to solve this well-known challenge in CLIR. Experimental results based on NTCIR and KT-Set test collections show that the high translation precision of our approach greatly improves performance of both Mono-Lingual and Cross-Language Information Retrieval.