Subsidizing unmediated document delivery: Current models and a case study

New models for document delivery in libraries are emerging as technology enables end-user ordering through electronic interfaces. Recently Colorado State University (CSUL) tested the viability of providing subsidized unmediated document delivery to the entire university community using UnCover2. The project was analyzed and users were surveyed to evaluate the performance of the service.     

因子分析法在宁夏区县经济评析中的应用

运用因子分析法,通过统计软件SPSS,将反映经济发展的10个指标综合成4个因子,利用因子得分对2009年宁夏19个区县按经济发展情况进行排序和分类.结果表明,宁夏各地区经济发展存在着明显的不平衡,北部川区好于南部山区.最后给出几点建议.     

Visuospatial working memory in adolescents with poor performance in mathematics: variation depending on reading skills

The first purpose of this study was to investigate whether the visuospatial working memory (VSWM) skills of 15–16‐year‐old pupils with difficulties in mathematics differ from those of their normally achieving peers. The goal was to broaden the view of the complex system of VSWM. A set of passive and active VSWM tasks was used. The study’s second purpose was to investigate whether pupils with mathematical difficulties differed in their VSWM skills based on whether they had signs of reading deficits or not. Results indicate that the pupils with poor performance in maths showed poorer performance on certain VSWM tasks. The group with deficits only in maths had less capacity for storing passive visual simultaneous information, while the group with difficulties both in maths and reading had deficits in both storing (passive visual and visuospatial information) and processing, and had less ability to control irrelevant visuospatial information compared to their peers of the same age. The results indicate a general VSWM deficit in pupils with both mathematics and reading problems and a specific VSWM deficit in pupils with only mathematics problems.     

Understanding students’ game experiences throughout the developmental process of the number navigation game

Educational technology research and development - Serious games for learning have received increased attention in recent years. However, empirical studies on students’ gaming experiences...     

The development of children at familial risk for dyslexia: Birth to early school age

Children at risk for familial dyslexia (n = 107) and their controls (n = 93) have been followed from birth to school entry in the Jyvaskyla Longitudinal study of Dyslexia (JLD) on developmental factors linked to reading and dyslexia. At the point of school entry, the majority of the at-risk children displayed decoding ability that fell at least 1 SD below the mean of the control group. Measures of speech processing were the earliest indices to show both group differences in infancy and also significant predictive associations with reading acquisition. A number of measures of language, including phonological and morphological skill collected repeatedly from age three, revealed group differences and predictive correlations. Both the group differences and the predictive associations to later language and reading ability strengthened as a function of increasing age. The predictions, however, tend to be stronger and the spectrum of significant correlations wider in the at-risk group. These results are crucial to early identification and intervention of dyslexia in at-risk children.     

“Shut up and calculate”: the available discursive positions in quantum physics courses

Educating new generations of physicists is often seen as a matter of attracting good students, teaching them physics and making sure that they stay at the university. Sometimes, questions are also raised about what could be done to increase diversity in recruitment. Using a discursive perspective, in this study of three introductory quantum physics courses at two Swedish universities, we instead ask what it means to become a physicist, and whether certain ways of becoming a physicist and doing physics is privileged in this process. Asking the question of what discursive positions are made accessible to students, we use observations of lectures and problem solving sessions together with interviews with students to characterize the discourse in the courses. Many students seem to have high expectations for the quantum physics course and generally express that they appreciate the course more than other courses. Nevertheless, our analysis shows that the ways of being a “good quantum physics student” are limited by the dominating focus on calculating quantum physics in the courses. We argue that this could have negative consequences both for the education of future physicists and the discipline of physics itself, in that it may reproduce an instrumental “shut up and calculate”-culture of physics, as well as an elitist physics education. Additionally, many students who take the courses are not future physicists, and the limitation of discursive positions may also affect these students significantly.     

Longitudinal predictors of reading and spelling across languages varying in orthographic consistency

We examined the longitudinal predictors of nonword decoding, reading fluency, and spelling in three languages that vary in orthographic depth: Finnish, Greek, and English. Eighty-two English-speaking, 70 Greek, and 88 Finnish children were followed from the age of 5.5 years old until Grade 2. Prior to any reading instruction, they were administered measures of phonological awareness, letter knowledge, and rapid naming speed. In Grade 2, they were administered measures of nonword decoding, text-reading fluency, and spelling. The results showed that the model for nonword decoding in Greek was similar to that of Finnish (both have consistent grapheme-to-phoneme mappings) while the model for spelling in Greek was similar to that of English (both have some inconsistent phoneme-to-grapheme mappings). In addition, the models for nonword decoding and spelling in Finnish were similar, because Finnish is consistent in both directions. Letter knowledge dominated the prediction in each language. The predictable role of orthographic consistency on literacy acquisition is discussed.