The Impact of School Disadvantage on Senior Secondary Science: a Study of Patterns of Participation and Achievement in Government Secondary Schools in Victoria,Australia

Research in Science Education - Science and science education are recognised internationally as essential for ensuring a sustainable and prosperous future. At the same time, significant equity...     

An assessment of social sciences coverage by four prominent full-text online aggregated journal packages

The cost effectiveness and quality of full-text journals are analyzed for four prominent online aggregated journal packages: EBSCOhost Academic Search FullTEXT, UMI Proquest Direct Periodicals Research II, IAC’s Expanded Academic ASAP, and H.W. Wilson’s OmniFile. Price data from EBSCO’s Librarians’ Handbook are used to assess the total and average value of social sciences journals in each package. Quality of social sciences journals coverage is compared based on citation impact factors as recorded in Journal Citation Reports—Social Sciences Edition.     

Bayes not Bust! Why Simplicity is no Problem for Bayesians

The advent of formal definitions of the simplicity of a theoryhas important implications for model selection. But what isthe best way to define simplicity? Forster and Sober ([1994])advocate the use of Akaike's Information Criterion (AIC), anon-Bayesian formalisation of the notion of simplicity. Thisforms an important part of their wider attack on Bayesianismin the philosophy of science. We defend a Bayesian alternative:the simplicity of a theory is to be characterised in terms ofWallace's Minimum Message Length (MML). We show that AIC isinadequate for many statistical problems where MML performswell. Whereas MML is always defined, AIC can be undefined. WhereasMML is not known ever to be statistically inconsistent, AICcan be. Even when defined and consistent, AIC performs worsethan MML on small sample sizes. MML is statistically invariantunder 1-to-1 re-parametrisation, thus avoiding a common criticismof Bayesian approaches. We also show that MML provides answersto many of Forster's objections to Bayesianism. Hence an importantpart of the attack on Bayesianism fails.

1. Introduction
2. TheCurve Fitting Problem

   2.1 Curves and families of curves

   2.2 Noise

   2.3 Themethod of Maximum Likelihood

   2.4 ML and over-fitting

3. Akaike's Information Criterion(AIC)
4. The Predictive Accuracy Framework
5. The Minimum MessageLength (MML) Principle

   5.1 The Strict MML estimator

   5.2 Anexample: Thebinomial distribution

   5.3 Properties ofthe SMML estimator

   5.3.1  Bayesianism

   5.3.2  Languageinvariance

   5.3.3Generality

   5.3.4  Consistencyand efficiency

   5.4 Similarity to false oracles

   5.5 Approximationsto SMML

6. Criticisms of AIC

   6.1 Problems with ML

   6.1.1  Smallsample biasin a Gaussian distribution

   6.1.2  Thevon Misescircular and von Mises—Fisherspherical distributions

   6.1.3  The Neyman–Scottproblem

   6.1.4  Neyman–Scott,predictive accuracyandminimum expected KL distance

   6.2 Otherproblems with AIC

   6.2.1  Univariate polynomial regression

   6.2.2  Autoregressiveeconometric time series

   6.2.3  Multivariatesecond-orderpolynomial modelselection

   6.2.4  Gapor no gap:a clustering-like problem forAIC

   6.3 Conclusionsfrom the comparison of MML and AIC

7. Meeting Forster's objectionsto Bayesianism

   7.1 The sub-family problem

   7.2 Theproblem of approximation,or, which framework forstatistics?

8. Conclusion

1. Details of the derivation of the Strict MMLestimator
2. MML, AIC and the Gap vs. No Gap Problem

   B.1 Expectedsize of the largest gap

   B.2 Performanceof AIC on thegap vs. no gap problem

   B.3 Performanceof MML in thegap vs. no gap problem

     

The effectiveness of online instructional videos in the acquisition and demonstration of cognitive,affective and psychomotor rehabilitation skills

The use of instructional videos to teach clinical skills is an ever growing area of e‐learning based upon observational learning that is cited as one of the most basic yet powerful learning strategies. The aim of the current study is to evaluate the effectiveness of online instructional videos for the acquisition and demonstration of cognitive, affective and psychomotor skills among undergraduate students, throughout formative assessments with two different durations of instructional videos. The research suggests that the use of videos to support traditional learning should be encouraged. While a conclusive evidence—base for their usage has not yet been established they are a medium which is likely to benefit a proportion of a cohort, and it is very unlikely that they will be harmful to students' learning.     

Reflections on the British Government and Higher Education

This article offers a small contribution towards writing the history of higher education in the United Kingdom in the 1980s. Its emphasis is on what the Government did in that period and the effects of this, and on how relations stood and developed between the Government and the higher education community. Three main topics are identified: resourcing, quality, structure. Across all these the general message is that a pragmatic approach was taken to the evolution and pursuit of policy.