Breaking Down Barriers for Student Parents and Caregivers with Family-Friendly Library Spaces

Abstract

In 2016, J. Murrey Atkins Library at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte opened a reservable study room where student parents and caregivers can study with their children on campus. In 2018, the library opened a second family-friendly study room to meet the needs of our growing campus community. To inform the room design, the library conducted a mixed methods research study that included a user survey, an examination of room reservation and usage data, and one-on-one user interviews. This paper focuses on the user-centered design process used to inform the development of the second, family-friendly, library study room.     

大学图书馆成效评估及其指标体系构建探索

大学图书馆成效评估是对用户在接触图书馆所提供的资源、服务和活动之后所发生的改变进行评估。绩效评估关注图书馆投入与产出的效率,成效评估关注图书馆服务的影响与效果。大学图书馆成效评估的内容主要包括对学习、研究、教学的影响评估。该文结合国外大学图书馆成效评估的实践案例,对大学图书馆成效评估的定义、内容、意义以及评估指标体系等进行探索。成效评估是基于用户为中心的新的评估理论和方法,有利于争取社会各界对图书馆的支持和提高图书馆服务质量。     

Reflective peer coaching: Crafting collaborative self-assessment in teaching

Reflective peer coaching is a formative model for improving teaching and learning by examining intentions prior to teaching, then reflecting upon the experience. The goal of reflective peer coaching is to promote self-assessment and collaboration for better teaching and ultimately better learning. There are obvious benefits to colleagues collaborating and sharing ideas, thoughts, and observations. However, many models of assessing teaching effectiveness focus on summative evaluation in which colleagues observe each other once or twice a year and fill out institutional evaluation forms. Rarely do colleagues engage in formative conversations about teaching that are guided by the instructor's personal goals and objectives. Reflective peer coaching necessitates a ten-minute planning conversation prior to the actual lesson and a ten-minute reflective conversation after the lesson. These conversations happen regularly and frequently to build self-awareness and self-assessment of the personal craft of teaching. The following article outlines the dynamics of the reflective peer coaching process as a formative assessment model that leads to better learning through improved teaching.     

高等教育国际化:大学生国际能力测评及影响因素实证研究

经济全球化和高等教育国际化对当前大学毕业生提出了新的要求,即具备"国际能力"。依据课题组开发的国际能力测评量表,对北京地区8所院校的大学生进行了抽样测评。研究发现:(1)大学生国际能力表现平平,国际能力的三个维度的平均水平有明显差异;(2)大学生国际能力在学生个人特征和家庭背景等方面存在差异,对学生国际能力有显著影响;(3)在控制了个体特质和家庭背景等方面的变量后,国际能力受到学生的国际化活动参与度变量的显著影响。     

Connecting Forensics and Assessment in the Twenty-First Century

A major feature of education in the twenty-first century is assessment. Forensic educators should heighten the importance of learning outcomes and utilize assessment efforts to directly measure how forensic programs develop educational foundations for students. This article focuses on the use of tournaments and noncompetitive educational outcomes, such as engagement within academic communities, service-learning, and the promotion of the value of forensics, to connect the educational benefits of the activity to help define the mission of forensics in the twenty-first century.     

Motivation and transfer in professional training: A meta-analysis of the moderating effects of knowledge type, instruction, and assessment conditions

This meta-analysis (148 studies, k = 197, N = 31,718) examined the relationship between motivation and transfer in professional training. For this purpose, motivation was conceptualized in the following nine dimensions: motivation to learn, motivation to transfer, pre- and post-training self-efficacy, mastery orientation, performance orientation, avoidance orientation, expectancy, and instrumentality. Population correlation estimates ranged between −0.11 and 0.52. Three moderator effects were estimated. First, correlations were higher when the training focused on declarative and self-regulatory, rather than on procedural, knowledge. Second, learner-centered environments tended to show greater numbers of positive correlations than did knowledge-centered environments. Third, when compared with external, supervisory, or peer assessment, self-assessment of transfer produced upwardly biased population estimates irrespective of the transfer criterion. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for theories of training effectiveness and their significance for the practice of training evaluation.     

The influence of three approaches to feedback on L2 writing task improvement and subsequent learning

This research examined the effects of using rubrics, exemplars, and self-assessment as forms of feedback in an L2 writing development course in English with Chinese speakers. The sample consisted of 114 L2 students at a university in Macau. Participants were randomly assigned to treatment groups and provided feedback on an English writing task using either rubrics, exemplars, self-assessment, or a control condition. The efficacy of these treatments was examined for both performance (on the writing task at hand) and learning (as demonstrated by performance on a new, similar writing task). Results indicate that rubrics and exemplars were effective as compared to the control condition, but the self-assessment approach was not.     

An evaluation framework for cross-lingual link discovery

Cross-Lingual Link Discovery (CLLD) is a new problem in Information Retrieval. The aim is to automatically identify meaningful and relevant hypertext links between documents in different languages. This is particularly helpful in knowledge discovery if a multi-lingual knowledge base is sparse in one language or another, or the topical coverage in each language is different; such is the case with Wikipedia. Techniques for identifying new and topically relevant cross-lingual links are a current topic of interest at NTCIR where the CrossLink task has been running since the 2011 NTCIR-9. This paper presents the evaluation framework for benchmarking algorithms for cross-lingual link discovery evaluated in the context of NTCIR-9.     

评“社科期刊编排规范化”

《中国高等学校社会科学学报编排规范》是在《中国学术期刊(光盘版)检索与评价数据规范》基础上制作完成的,带有明显的光盘版特征和痕迹,而后者则是基于电子网络平台的电子版规范,它的作用和功能主要是用于对原创学术论文以及期刊源的检索与评价。《中国高等学校社会科学学报编排规范》不仅存在着"形式主义化"的问题,而且存在大量违背《著作权法》以及国家标准的条款,由于它不适合纸质期刊的编排规律和实际,因而遭到越来越多的批评。"新规范"的思想认识基础,不外乎两条:一是认为随着全球化的到来,"与国际接轨"是必然的,因此,在标准的制定上要国际化,甚至不惜与中国的传统全面"脱轨";二是认为随着信息化、数字化、网络化时代的到来,印刷型期刊"为文献检索与计量评价机构提供服务"是必然的要求。     

Multiple‐Choice Tests and Student Understanding: What Is the Connection?

Instructors can use both “multiple‐choice” (MC) and “constructed response” (CR) questions (such as short answer, essay, or problem‐solving questions) to evaluate student understanding of course materials and principles. This article begins by discussing the advantages and concerns of using these alternate test formats and reviews the studies conducted to test the hypothesis (or perhaps better described as the hope) that MC tests, by themselves, perform an adequate job of evaluating student understanding of course materials. Despite research from educational psychology demonstrating the potential for MC tests to measure the same levels of student mastery as CR tests, recent studies in specific educational domains find imperfect relationships between these two performance measures. We suggest that a significant confound in prior experiments has been the treatment of MC questions as homogeneous entities when in fact MC questions may test widely varying levels of student understanding. The primary contribution of the article is a modified research model for CR/MC research based on knowledge‐level analyses of MC test banks and CR question sets from basic computer language programming. The analyses are based on an operationalization of Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning Goals for the domain, which is used to develop a skills‐focused taxonomy of MC questions. However, we propose that their analyses readily generalize to similar teaching domains of interest to decision sciences educators such as modeling and simulation programming.