The cultural politics of national testing and test result release policy in South Korea: a critical discourse analysis

This paper examines the ideological construction of educational discourses embedded within the South Korean print media. Significantly, these discourses have recently promoted the resurrection of a sweeping national testing and test results release policy. Through careful examination of the “test plus release” policy, the authors show how the government has achieved hegemonic power by shaping public opinion through the national testing contexts. Drawing on a critical discourse analysis of educational policy texts from the government and top 10 print media sources, this paper analyses how discourses on “accountability”, “the right to know” and “the fairness of the tests” have been produced, reproduced and recontextualized to favour particular perspectives. The authors also examine how government and influential print media discourses interact with political and cultural factors such as “acclaiming the evaluative state”, “education fever” and “meritocratic beliefs” to achieve public consent for the new “test plus release” policy.     

The effectiveness of a marketing virtual reality learning simulation: A quantitative survey with psychophysiological measures

Virtual reality (VR) technology has been shown to be a promising teaching method in STEM subjects. Extending these findings, the current study is the first to develop and examine the feasibility of using a VR simulation in marketing (ie, a non-STEM subject). Specifically, the levels of immersion and three learning outcomes (learning attitude, enjoyment and performance) were compared between the marketing students who learned the same content through a VR simulation prototype versus a traditional static video presentation. Learning enjoyment was measured using facial electromyography, which served as a more objective measures for the feeling of enjoyment. Compared to the video condition, the results showed that VR resulted in a higher experience of immersion, learning attitude and learning enjoyment. Furthermore, immersion was found to fully mediate the positive effects of the VR simulation on learning attitude, but not enjoyment. Surprisingly, students in the video condition performed better on the knowledge-based test than those in the VR condition. The current study suggests that the current prototype of the VR simulations should be used as supplementary resource to increase the learning attitude and enjoyment, but not as a main teaching material to enhance knowledge-based performance in the marketing discipline.     

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.     

A probabilistic music recommender considering user opinions and audio features

A recommender system has an obvious appeal in an environment where the amount of on-line information vastly outstrips any individual’s capability to survey. Music recommendation is considered a popular application area. In order to make personalized recommendations, many collaborative music recommender systems (CMRS) focus on capturing precise similarities among users or items based on user historical ratings. Despite the valuable information from audio features of music itself, however, few studies have investigated how to utilize information extracted directly from music for personalized recommendation in CMRS. In this paper, we describe a CMRS based on our proposed item-based probabilistic model, where items are classified into groups and predictions are made for users considering the Gaussian distribution of user ratings. In addition, this model has been extended for improved recommendation performance by utilizing audio features that help alleviate three well-known problems associated with data sparseness in collaborative recommender systems: user bias, non-association, and cold start problems in capturing accurate similarities among items. Experimental results based on two real-world data sets lead us to believe that content information is crucial in achieving better personalized recommendation beyond user ratings. We further show how primitive audio features can be combined into aggregate features for the proposed CRMS and analyze their influences on recommendation performance. Although this model was developed originally for music collaborative recommendation based on audio features, our experiment with the movie data set demonstrates that it can be applied to other domains.     

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.     

Characterization of anomalous movements of spherical living cells on a silicon dioxide glassy substrate

The random walk of spherical living cells on a silicon dioxide glassy substrate was studied experimentally and numerically. This random walk trajectory exhibited erratic dancing, which seemingly obeyed anomalous diffusion (i.e., Lévy-like walk) rather than normal diffusion. Moreover, the angular distribution (−π to π) of the cells'' trajectory followed a “U-shaped pattern” in comparison to the uniform distribution seen in the movements of negatively charged polystyrene microspheres. These effects could be attributable to the homeostasis-driven structural resilient character of cells and physical interactions derived from temporarily retained nonspecific binding due to weak forces between the cells and substrates. Our results provide new insights into the stochastic behavior of mesoscopic biological particles with respect to structural properties and physical interactions.