Evaluating the reliability and validity of a learning styles inventory: a classroom-based study

Background Psychology and educational theory has a long tradition of research into learning styles. However, the current educational policy and practice interest in learning styles in the UK has resulted in concepts and practices being adopted with little rigorous empirical evaluation.

Purpose This small-scale, experimental study aimed to test the reliability and validity of an available inventory designed to identify learning styles (visual, auditory and kinaesthetic).

Sample, design and methods Nineteen children, aged 7–10 years, with different styles as identified by the inventory, participated in a class experimental evaluation of their differential response to the teaching of word spelling using different teaching methods.

Results The study found that the visual and auditory scales, but not the kinaesthetic scale, were reliable (internally and re-test). The three groups of pupils with different learning styles—visual only, auditory only and mixed visual and auditory—showed different gains to teaching that matched these styles (visual and auditory teaching approaches). Retention of word spelling was higher one week after the teaching when the teaching matched the learning style.

Conclusions The findings in this exploratory study suggest the significance of learning style for classroom-based teaching.     

How to Make your Audience Suffer: Melodrama,Masochism and Dead Time in Lars von Trier's Dogville

Abstract

Both fans and critics of Lars von Trier's work would likely agree with his capacity to make his audience suffer. This essay canvasses the devices through which the suffering of women in von Trier's melodramas is rendered excruciating to watch. Drawing on Deleuze's influential account of masochism, the first part of the essay discusses how von Trier's film Dogville foregrounds the complicated relationship that suffering has with pleasure and power. The second part of the essay focuses on the temporal dynamics of melodrama and the creative ways in which Lars von Trier disturbs the rhythms of suffering on screen. In particular I argue that von Trier introduces intervals of ‘dead time’ that make the passage of time itself painful to the audience and that open up a larger cultural history of temporal disorder. This part of the essay looks back to von Trier's early experiments with time in Psychomobile 1: The World Clock (2000) and forward to more recent innovative play with time and movement in Melancholia (2011) to make the case for rethinking the temporal dimensions of mediated suffering and the significance of time in the work of Lars von Trier.     

Sport selection in under-17 male roller hockey

Abstract

Characteristics of 32 international and 41 local under-17 (U-17) (14.5–16.5 years) roller hockey players were considered in the context of discrimination by competitive level using training history, anthropometry, skeletal maturation, and several laboratory and field performance tests. More international (42%) than local (22%) players were advanced in maturity status. International players had slightly less hockey experience (years), but had more practice sessions and match time (minutes) during the season. Local players were shorter and attained better performance in the 25-m dash, while international players performed better in sit-ups, ball throw and 20-m shuttle run. The fatigue index derived from the Wingate anaerobic test was higher among local players, while peak torques of knee extension and flexion were greater in international players. Stepwise discriminant function correctly classified 85% of players by competitive level based on grip strength, ratio of eccentric and concentric knee extension, number of training sessions, playing time and fatigue index. The results suggested an interaction among strength, anaerobic fitness and training plus game time as factors in discriminating international from local level players and by inference in the selection and development of youth roller hockey players.     

Document clustering of scientific texts using citation contexts

Document clustering has many important applications in the area of data mining and information retrieval. Many existing document clustering techniques use the “bag-of-words” model to represent the content of a document. However, this representation is only effective for grouping related documents when these documents share a large proportion of lexically equivalent terms. In other words, instances of synonymy between related documents are ignored, which can reduce the effectiveness of applications using a standard full-text document representation. To address this problem, we present a new approach for clustering scientific documents, based on the utilization of citation contexts. A citation context is essentially the text surrounding the reference markers used to refer to other scientific works. We hypothesize that citation contexts will provide relevant synonymous and related vocabulary which will help increase the effectiveness of the bag-of-words representation. In this paper, we investigate the power of these citation-specific word features, and compare them with the original document’s textual representation in a document clustering task on two collections of labeled scientific journal papers from two distinct domains: High Energy Physics and Genomics. We also compare these text-based clustering techniques with a link-based clustering algorithm which determines the similarity between documents based on the number of co-citations, that is in-links represented by citing documents and out-links represented by cited documents. Our experimental results indicate that the use of citation contexts, when combined with the vocabulary in the full-text of the document, is a promising alternative means of capturing critical topics covered by journal articles. More specifically, this document representation strategy when used by the clustering algorithm investigated in this paper, outperforms both the full-text clustering approach and the link-based clustering technique on both scientific journal datasets.     

Statistical Models for Monolingual and Bilingual Information Retrieval

This work reviews information retrieval systems developed at ITC-irst which were evaluated through several tracks of CLEF, during the last three years. The presentation tries to follow the progress made over time in developing new statistical models first for monolingual information retrieval, then for cross-language information retrieval. Besides describing the underlying theory, performance of monolingual and bilingual information retrieval models are reported, respectively, on Italian monolingual tracks and Italian-English bilingual tracks of CLEF. Monolingual systems by ITC-irst performed consistently well in all the official evaluations, while the bilingual system ranked in CLEF 2002 just behind competitors using commercial machine translation engines. However, by experimentally comparing our statistical topic translation model against a state-of-the-art commercial system, no statistically significant difference in retrieval performance could be measured on a larger set of queries.     

A case study of the development of WebPA: An online peer-moderated marking tool

Peer moderation of group work in higher education is rapidly advancing through the use of technological developments and is increasingly being informed by pedagogical research. The highly successful WebPA online assessment system has gone through a number of development phases over its 15-year history and has now evolved into a relatively mature and flexible tool for facilitating group work. This paper presents a case study of the approaches that have been used in the system's development from the technical perspective, and describes how the scope of the project has massively expanded and that the development has been continually backed by a sound and wide-ranging pedagogy. The benefits of using the online system are shown to be underpinned throughout by examples of good practice in the supervision of academic group work. A critical evaluation of the tool and surrounding pedagogical practices highlight future areas for technical expansion.     

Teaching subjects to pupils with profound and multiple learning difficultiesConsiderations for the new Framework

Nicola Grove, who lectures in speech and language therapy and works in a school for pupils with severe and profound learning difficulties, and Nick Peacey, Director of the Special Educational Needs Joint Initiative for Training (SENJIT) at the Institute of Education, discuss the development of a framework for teaching National Curriculum subjects to pupils with profound learning difficulties through discussion with mainstream specialists.