Six Leadership Models for Professional Development in Science and Mathematics

Journal of Science Teacher Education -     

Positive behavioral contrast,autoshaping, and omission responding in the goldfish (Carassius auratus)

Two experiments with goldfish were performed to investigate the role of stimulus-reinforcer vs. response-reinforcer relationships in omission training and the role of stimulus localizability in a positive behavioral contrast paradigm. The directed behavior of fish, like that of pigeons and rats in other studies, was greatly influenced by positive stimulus-reinforcer correlations, as evidenced by maintained contacts of a signal for food, even though such responses terminated the signal and cancelled reinforcement delivery. Goldfish exhibited positive behavioral contrast when the signals for reinforcement and nonreinforcement were displayed directly on the response key, but no contrast was observed when variations in a diffuse houselight stimulus were used as signals for reinforcement or nonreinforcement. Analysis of sequential-trial data yielded effects analogous to Pavlovian positive and negative induction. Theoretical and methodological problems were briefly considered.     

The internet

Conclusion Despite the claims of some, listservs do not supplant the need for professional print journals. Most messages are short (5,000 bytes, the equivalent of one single-spaced page, is considered lengthy) and revolve around useful day-to-day professional information exchanges. This type of information is valuable and extremely useful-where else can one post a plea for advice which will be read by hundreds of professional peers within 24 hours? However, there is no reason why this same vehicle cannot be used to substantively examine the professional literature and facilitate reporting on talks and/or sessions from professional meetings. Given the wide scope of cultural and organizational institutions employing list subscribers, listservs provide a fertile forum for communication on user populations. A more robust understanding of our clientele and the sharing of data about them will allow our professions to more propitiously position ourselves both within society and with those with the power of the purse.     

Neural information retrieval: at the end of the early years

A recent “third wave” of neural network (NN) approaches now delivers state-of-the-art performance in many machine learning tasks, spanning speech recognition, computer vision, and natural language processing. Because these modern NNs often comprise multiple interconnected layers, work in this area is often referred to as deep learning. Recent years have witnessed an explosive growth of research into NN-based approaches to information retrieval (IR). A significant body of work has now been created. In this paper, we survey the current landscape of Neural IR research, paying special attention to the use of learned distributed representations of textual units. We highlight the successes of neural IR thus far, catalog obstacles to its wider adoption, and suggest potentially promising directions for future research.     

The prediction of academic and clinical performance in medical school

Prior studies have suggested the importance of distinguishing between performance in the earlier and later years of medical education. Factor analysis of grades by year and faculty ratings of clinical and general medical competence for 661 medical students identified two uncorrelated factors clearly reflecting this distinction. The clinical performance factor, accounting for 48% of the communality of the matrix, was more or less unpredictable from aptitude and premedical academic achievement indices; it was marginally predictable from scales on the Adjective Check List. The academic performance factor, accounting for 31% of the variance among criteria, was forecast with acceptable accuracy (cross-validated R=0.43) by equations based on the Medical College Admission Test and premedical grade point average. Future study should stress the clinical performance factor; this criterion appears to be more important than academic attainment, and it is also less accurately predicted by current measures.