“That’s a Big Bad Wolf!”: Learning through Teacher-Child Talk During Shared Reading of a Story Book App

Early Childhood Education Journal - Touch screen tablets and story book apps provide opportunities for teachers to support young children’s shared reading experiences. Much research has...     

Taking a Different Route: Contribution of Articulation and Metacognition to Intervention With At-Risk Third-Grade Readers

This study compared the impact of 2 types of small-group interventions targeting below-level 3rd-grade students. The study compared WordWork decoding and spelling instruction (Calfee, Miller, Norman, Wilson, &; Trainin, 2006 Calfee, R. C., Miller, R. G., Norman, K., Wilson, K., &; Trainin, G. (2006). Learning to do educational research. In M. A. Constas &; R. J. Sterenberg (Eds.), Translating theory and research into educational practice: Developments in content domains, large scale reform, and intellectual capacity (pp. 77–103). New York, NY: Routledge. [Google Scholar]; Calfee &; Patrick, 1995 Calfee, R. C., &; Patrick, C. L. (1995). Teach our children well: Bringing K–12 education into the 21st Century. Stanford, CA: Stanford Alumni Assoc. [Google Scholar]), which includes attention to articulation and metacognition, with a more traditional phonological awareness program (Torgesen &; Bryant, 1993 Torgesen, J. K., &; Bryant, B. R. (1993). Phonological awareness training for reading. Austin, TX: Pro-Ed. [Google Scholar]). University education students delivered the interventions with equal instructional time and fidelity, to both groups. Students in both intervention groups engaged in repeated readings of connected text to promote transfer. The impact of training was assessed through decoding, spelling, and oral reading fluency measures. Results indicated that WordWork produced more positive results in decoding, spelling, and fluency, and had significantly fewer treatment resisters.     

Euro-Philiacs,Euro-Sceptics and Europhobics: Higher Education Policy,Values and Institutional Research

The European higher education landscape is inhabited by three clans: the Euro-philiac, his wicked twin, the Euro-phobic and most interesting of all, the Euro-sceptic. This unholy trinity has long been with us. Though the recent Euro electoral fiasco has in all probability served to bolster the ranks of the second and third tribes1     

Stress in elite sport performers: a comparative study of competitive and organizational stressors

The purpose of this study was to compare the content and quantity of competitive and organizational stressors in elite athletes. Ten international performers were interviewed about sources of stress. Content analysis of the data involved categorizing the demands associated primarily and directly with competitive performance (#CS = 21) under the post hoc dimension "performance issues", and the demands associated primarily and directly with the sport organization (#OS = 72) under one of the following four post hoc dimensions: "environmental issues", "personal issues", "leadership issues" and "team issues". Frequency analysis revealed that the participants mentioned the competitive stressors (sigma = 95) less than the organizational stressors (sigma = 215). Further analysis within these categories showed that the mean number of participants citing individual competitive stressors (M = 4.52) was greater than the mean number of participants citing individual organizational stressors (M = 2.99). The findings indicate that elite athletes experience and recall more demands associated primarily and directly with the sport organization than with competitive performance. Furthermore, this population appears more likely to mention similar competitive stressors but varied organizational stressors, probably because the former are inherent and endemic to elite sport, whereas the latter are essentially extraneous and widely distributed.     

Soft approaches to information access on the Web: An introduction to the special issue

Soft Computing (SC) tools present a great potential in real-life problems related with engineering, industrial applications, medicine, finances, etc. In this special issue we present a set of seven papers that report original research about the use of SC techniques to solve the problems in the field of information access on the Web.     

Learning to rank with (a lot of) word features

In this article we present Supervised Semantic Indexing which defines a class of nonlinear (quadratic) models that are discriminatively trained to directly map from the word content in a query-document or document-document pair to a ranking score. Like Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), our models take account of correlations between words (synonymy, polysemy). However, unlike LSI our models are trained from a supervised signal directly on the ranking task of interest, which we argue is the reason for our superior results. As the query and target texts are modeled separately, our approach is easily generalized to different retrieval tasks, such as cross-language retrieval or online advertising placement. Dealing with models on all pairs of words features is computationally challenging. We propose several improvements to our basic model for addressing this issue, including low rank (but diagonal preserving) representations, correlated feature hashing and sparsification. We provide an empirical study of all these methods on retrieval tasks based on Wikipedia documents as well as an Internet advertisement task. We obtain state-of-the-art performance while providing realistically scalable methods.     

Lessons from new experiences in extension in West Africa: Management advice for family farms and farmers' governance

The emergence of Management Advice for Family Farms in West Africa is closely related to the increased integration of farmers into an open market economy. This is creating a strong demand from farmers for advisory support services, focusing on management of the farm. With the gradual withdrawal of the State from extension services delivery, a stimulating context exists for reviewing approaches and systems of support delivery facilities for producers. In response to these developments, several experiments based on the concepts of Management Advice for Family Farms are going on in West Africa. Beyond a variety of objectives and implementation procedures analysed in this paper, common features and a considerable degree of consensus on concepts emerge. Strengthening the producers' capacity for assessment, decision-making, and management of their farms is a common objective. Differences exist between procedures for delivery of advice, methods, tools used, and emphasis put on different aspects of management. All experiments stress the importance of training, enhancing group dynamics, and individual learning. They are all farmer and farm family targeted. Expression of farmers' objectives, needs, and demands is essential. Advice is based on data gathering and assessment by the farmers themselves. From mere technicians, extension workers become advisors and facilitators. In all cases, Farmers' Organisations are involved in governing the delivery services, though at different degrees. In several cases priority is given towards strengthening farmers' capacity in the management of delivery at both local and global levels. Significant improvements in farm performances have been reported. Cost sharing is generally accepted, but insufficient to cover all costs. However, to reach sustainability for farmers' driven and governed advice delivery services, innovative agricultural policies, and public finance are needed.     

Complementing subjective with objective data in analysing expertise: A machine-learning approach applied to badminton

ABSTRACT

This study aimed to assess which combination of subjective and empirical data might help to identify the expertise level. A group of 10 expert coaches classified 40 participants in 5 different expertise groups based on the video footage of the rallies. The expertise levels were determined using a typology based on a continuum of 5 conative stages: (1) structural, (2) functional, (3) technical, (4) contextual, and (5) expertise. The video allowed empirical measurement of the duration of the rallies, and tri-axial accelerometers measured the intensity of the player’s involvement. A principal component analysis showed that two dimensions explained 54.9% of the total variance in the data and that conative stage and empirical parameters during rallies (duration, intensity of the game) were correlated with axis 1, whereas duration and acceleration data between rallies were correlated with axis 2. A random forest algorithm showed that among the parameters considered, acceleration, duration of the rallies, and time between rallies could predict conative stages with a prediction accuracy above possibility.

This study suggests that performance analysis benefits from the confrontation of subjective and objective data in order to design training plans according to the expertise level of the participants.     

The Perceived Impact of Eight Systemic Factors on Scientific Capital Accumulation

Minerva - In the global academic capitalist race, academics, institutions and countries’ symbolic power results from the accumulation of scientific capital. This paper relies on the...