The relationship of deep and surface study approaches on factual and applied test‐bank multiple‐choice question performance

With the advent of online test banks and large introductory classes, instructors have often turned to textbook publisher‐generated multiple‐choice question (MCQ) exams in their courses. Multiple‐choice questions are often divided into categories of factual or applied, thereby implicating levels of cognitive processing. This investigation examined the influence student study approaches have on performance of shallow compared to deep, cognitive process outcomes measured by scores on factual versus application MCQ test bank questions respectively. Fifty‐six introduction to psychology students, aged 18–52 years, completed a modified version of the Revised Two‐Factor Study Process Questionnaire (R‐SPQ‐2F) to access deep or surface study approaches. Mid‐term and final exam MCQ were equally divided between factual and application questions from the textbook publisher test bank. Overall, students performed significantly better on factual MCQ, with older students achieving higher factual and applied scores. Results suggest younger students tend to use a surface approach to study, with reproduction of what was taught to meet minimum requirements. With age statistically controlled, analyses demonstrated that the surface learning approach negatively impacts MCQ performance on questions categorised as factual and applied more than a deep learning approach benefits MCQ performance.     

从功能翻译理论浅析旅游文本中文化信息的翻译

我在旅游文本的翻译过程中,文化信息的有效传递是旅游资料英译中要解决的难题。根据彼得·纽马克的理论,认为旅游资料属于以呼唤功能为主的文章,其核心是读者,其英译而应以传递信息为第一要务。结合汉译英旅游资料,对功能理论在旅游翻译中的应用进行了具体分析。认为译者在旅游资料英译过程中应从译语读者的角度出发,最大限度地传递出原文的核心信息,根据译文的预期目的来决定自己的翻译策略与方法。灵活运用增译、省译、改写的翻译策略,使译文能够达到,较好的沟通交流效果。     

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.     

中国产业结构变动和FDI间的动态关系研究

本文采用1982-2003年度全国的时间序列数据,运用现代协整理论,对中国的产业结构变动和FDI之间的长短期关系进行Granger因果关系检验。结果表明:中国的产业结构和FDI之间存在长期的双向Granger因果关系;而短期中,中国的产业结构变动对FDI的变化则具有单向的Granger因果关系:中国产业结构的变动对FDI的增长率具有正的影响,而FDI的变化却不是推动中国产业结构变动的主要原因;滞后一期的FDI对FDI的流入具有显著的影响;滞后一期的产业结构变动对FDI产生正的影响,而滞后两期的产业结构变动对FDI产生负的影响。     

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.