Hemodynamic changes in depressive patients

Objective： This study is aimed at exploring the relationship between hemodynamic changes and depressive and anxious symptom in depression patients. Methods： The cardiac function indices including the left stroke index （LSI）, ejection fraction （EF）, heart rate （HR）, diastolic pressure mean （DPM）, systolic pressure mean （SPM）, left ventricle end-diastolic volume （LVDV）, effective circulating volume （ECV）, resistance total mean （RTM） and blood flow smooth degree （BFSD） were determined in 65 patients with major depressive disorders and 31 healthy normal controls. The clinical symptoms were assessed with Hamilton depression scale （HAMD） and Hamilton anxiety scale （HAMA）. Results： In patients with depression without anxiety, LSI, EF, LVDV, DPM, SPM, ECV, BFSD were significantly lower than those in controls, while RTM was higher than that in controls. Patients with comorbidity of depression and anxiety showed decreased LVDV, ECV, BFSD, and increased HR in comparison with the controls. The anxiety/somatization factor score positively correlated with LSI, EF, LVDV, but negatively correlated with RTM. There was negative correlation between retardation factor score and DPM, SPM, LVDV. Conclusion： The study indicated that there are noticeable changes in left ventricle preload and afterload, blood pressure, peripheral resistance, and microcirculation in depressive patients, and that the accompanying anxiety makes the changes more complicated.     

大学英语四、六级机考对宜宾学院产生的教与学思考

大学英语四、六级机考突出听说内容,体现语言交流实践应用能力,也为英语教学改革指明方向。本文通过对机考题型和内容的剖析,帮助宜宾学院更多的师生思考,调整教学重心,培养学生自主学习能力等,以实现英语教与学的实践应用目的。     

Testing Shakespeare to the limit: Teaching Macbeth in a Year 9 classroom

Through close examination of two year 9 lessons, this article sets out to investigate ways in which the discourse of the SATs (National Curriculum tests) impacts upon these students' interactions with the playtext. It raises questions about pedagogic purpose and queries received assumptions about 'active Shakespeare' methods.     

Treadmill tests of anaerobic capacity

Practical, running-based treadmill tests of anaerobic capacity are needed and welcome, as long as they are validated against appropriate running performance. It is fundamentally wrong to validate them against the cycling-based Wingate Anaerobic test regardless of its proven validity and reliability.     

Seeking Redemption for Our Psychometric Sins

Many American children are currently receiving a reduced quality education because of the increasingly widespread misuse of educational tests. Employing a religious metaphor, the author argues that members of the educational measurement community are culpable, at least in part, for this calamity. During recent decades, our nation's assessment personnel have failed to speak out vigorously against the increasingly prevalent improper use of traditionally constructed achievement tests to appraise school quality. This absence of action, it is claimed, constitutes a nontrivial sin of omission. To secure absolution for that sin, it is contended that measurement specialists must promote widespread assessment literacy.     

Instructional Tools in Educational Measurement and Statistics (ITEMS) for School Personnel: Evaluation of Three Web-Based Training Modules

In the current No Child Left Behind era, K‐12 teachers and principals are expected to have a sophisticated understanding of standardized test results, use them to improve instruction, and communicate them to others. The goal of our project, funded by the National Science Foundation, was to develop and evaluate three Web‐based instructional modules in educational measurement and statistics to help school personnel acquire the “assessment literacy” required for these roles. Our first module, “What's the Score?” was administered in 2005 to 113 educators who also completed an assessment literacy quiz. Viewing the module had a small but statistically significant positive effect on quiz scores. Our second module, “What Test Scores Do and Don't Tell Us,” administered in 2006 to 104 educators, was even more effective, primarily among teacher education students. In evaluating our third module, “What's the Difference?” we were able to recruit only 33 participants. Although those who saw the module before taking the quiz outperformed those who did not, results were not statistically significant. Now that the research phase is complete, all ITEMS instructional materials are freely available on our Website.     

A goodness of fit test approach in information retrieval

In many probabilistic modeling approaches to Information Retrieval we are interested in estimating how well a document model “fits” the user’s information need (query model). On the other hand in statistics, goodness of fit tests are well established techniques for assessing the assumptions about the underlying distribution of a data set. Supposing that the query terms are randomly distributed in the various documents of the collection, we actually want to know whether the occurrences of the query terms are more frequently distributed by chance in a particular document. This can be quantified by the so-called goodness of fit tests. In this paper, we present a new document ranking technique based on Chi-square goodness of fit tests. Given the null hypothesis that there is no association between the query terms q and the document d irrespective of any chance occurrences, we perform a Chi-square goodness of fit test for assessing this hypothesis and calculate the corresponding Chi-square values. Our retrieval formula is based on ranking the documents in the collection according to these calculated Chi-square values. The method was evaluated over the entire test collection of TREC data, on disks 4 and 5, using the topics of TREC-7 and TREC-8 (50 topics each) conferences. It performs well, outperforming steadily the classical OKAPI term frequency weighting formula but below that of KL-Divergence from language modeling approach. Despite this, we believe that the technique is an important non-parametric way of thinking of retrieval, offering the possibility to try simple alternative retrieval formulas within goodness-of-fit statistical tests’ framework, modeling the data in various ways estimating or assigning any arbitrary theoretical distribution in terms.     

The Aptitude–Achievement Function: An Aid for Allocating Educational Resources, with an Advanced Placement Example

We fit a functional relationship between aptitude and achievement test scores and show how to use it to allocate educational resources. As an example we use the PSAT–Mathematics test to predict performance on the College Board's Advanced Placement Test in calculus, as a guide to student and school participation, for school or system assessment, and to project future nationwide expansion. In addition to the PSAT-AP test score relations, we consider the distribution of student ability, school policies of student selection and recruitment, and teacher skill in presenting the material and in motivating students. This overall result provides an indication of just how remarkable was Jaime Escalante's accomplishment in Los Angeles's Garfield High School. We find little evidence for differences in educational quality between such diverse schools as in the inner city of Detroit and the affluent suburb of La Cañada, California. We comment briefly on the role of the AP in international assessments.     

Using TIMSS and PISA results to inform educational policy: a study of Russia and its neighbours

In this paper, we develop a multi-level comparative approach to analyse Trends in International Mathematics and Science Survey (TIMSS) and Programme of International Student Achievement (PISA) mathematics results for a country, Russia, where the two tests provide contradictory information about students’ relative performance. Russian students do relatively well on the TIMSS mathematics test but relatively poorly on the PISA. We compare the performance of Russian students with different levels of family academic resources over the past decade on these tests compared to students with similar family resources in Russia’s neighbours and to Russian students studying in Latvian and Estonian Russian-medium schools. These comparisons and interviews with educators in Latvia and Estonia help us understand why students in Russia may perform lower on the PISA and to draw education policy lessons for improving international test performance generally and Russian students’ PISA mathematics performance specifically.     

体质测试中力量素质评价指标与测试方法的国际比较与启示

力量素质测试是当前世界各国和地区体质测试的重要组成部分,基于各国的不同测试理念,各个测试体系表现出不同程度的共性与差异。首先,由于人体运动的解剖结构特点,形成了测试指标在不同身体部位的“体块”分布,各“体块”指标数量限定严格;上肢可选指标多却相对集中;下肢测试必要性存在分歧;同一部位相同指标的适用年龄及性别差异较大。其次,上肢力量测试指标以修正引体向上、标准俯卧撑（男）和修正（屈膝）俯卧撑（女）的可靠性及有效性较高;躯干侧重屈肌力量测试而忽视伸肌力量考察且屈肌测试指标‐仰卧起坐测试要求差异较大,双脚不固定、躯干运动幅度为35°～45°等动作形式要求与节奏测试的可靠性与有效性较高;补充躯干指标以90°Dynamic Trunk Extension 及平板支撑为参考;下肢指标立定跳远存在“技术性”争议,连同两种下蹲跳需进行重新验证。