The relationship between concept attainment and level of maturity

Evidence supporting instructional sequences for and grade placements of concepts relating to the biological cell is given in this report on a pilot study. Is replication possible?     

Efficient algorithms for ranking with SVMs

RankSVM (Herbrich et al. in Advances in large margin classifiers. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000; Joachims in Proceedings of the ACM conference on knowledge discovery and data mining (KDD), 2002) is a pairwise method for designing ranking models. SVMLight is the only publicly available software for RankSVM. It is slow and, due to incomplete training with it, previous evaluations show RankSVM to have inferior ranking performance. We propose new methods based on primal Newton method to speed up RankSVM training and show that they are 5 orders of magnitude faster than SVMLight. Evaluation on the Letor benchmark datasets after complete training using such methods shows that the performance of RankSVM is excellent.     

Can ‘pooling teaching tips’ be more than ‘pooling teaching tips’?

Abstract

There is increasing interest in how academic development of various kinds influences university teaching and student learning. To date the focus has been on formal, expert-led opportunities to learn how to teach. Our institution has developed a less formal, participant-led forum for teaching staff that was initially established to share ideas on teaching techniques and skills. We report here on participant-led research that explores if and how this model of group learning works, and how it might relate to other models that have been applied to tertiary teaching development. Authors adopted a self-study research framework incorporating a collaborative autoethnography. The data emphasises how participants use this forum as a community of practice, as a means for deep engagement with learning about teaching, and as a means to rationally manage their learning against a backdrop of challenges associated with learning to teach in research-led higher education.     

The economic impact of eight research universities on the Boston region

Abstract

The greater Boston region's eight research universities play a key role in the region's economic health and welfare. They are magnets for research and development talent and for billions of dollars in investment. These institutions contribute S7.4 billion dollars to the regional economy, jobs for about 50,000 university employees and 37,000 workers in related areas. They produce an annual talent pool of 31,000 graduates many of whom elect to remain in the region and contribute to the exploitation of university patents and licensed technology that sustain the regional economy, as well as its social and cultural institutions. Drawing on economic impact studies conducted for eight institutions in the Boston region we will describe the impact of these universities on the Boston region. We will review the implications of this large concentration of research activity on the region's economy, labour force, pre and post university educational structures, political leadership, funding sources and social and environmental quality. This paper will explore the issues facing these eight research institutions as they pursue their desire for sustained growth and development. Among these are changes in national research funding priorities, financial incentives for innovation, conflicts with non‐university sectors of the economy including competition for housing, manpower and economic resources.