Education Research for Policy and Practice: Secondary Education Reforms in Sri Lanka

With the establishment of a host of new education institutions, educational policy making in Sri Lanka demonstrated a marked change during the last fifteen years. The idea of a national education policy that emerged during this period attempted to ensure continuity of educational policy while at the same time contributing to the production of trainable youths who could become successful in any type of activity they selected for their future. The policy was formulated with the intention of providing a good general education to the young of the nation and began to be implemented in 1998. The high academic bias, rigidity of curricula, and the widening mismatch between education and employment are the priority issues that gave rise to new education reforms in secondary education. A number of strategies are tried out today at junior secondary (grades 6 to 9) and senior secondary (grades 10 to 13) levels of the general education system to address these issues while paying attention to ways and means of strengthening the link between research and policy. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The American Filter

This study explored the television viewing habits of a cohort of Asian Indians who migrated to the US more than 40 years ago. This cohort eventually became acculturated into watching Indian television via the satellite dish. The study used the integrative communication theory and examined how two concepts of the theory relate to adaptation: enculturation and acculturation. The study produced findings that described how these Asian Indians used American television to acculturate to the US, but used American television as a filter through which they judged Indian television and distinguished between what they believed to be good and bad programming.     

Multiple Aims in the Development of a Major Reform of the National Curriculum for Science in England

In the context of a major reform of the school science curriculum for 14–16‐year‐olds in England, we examine the aims ascribed to the reform, the stakeholders involved, and the roles of differing values and authority in its development. This reform includes an emphasis on socioscientific issues and the nature of science; curriculum trends of international relevance. Our analysis identifies largely ‘instrumental’ aims, with little emphasis on ‘intrinsic’ aims and associated values. We identify five broad categories of stakeholders focusing on different aims with, for example, a social, individual, political, or economic emphasis. We suggest that curriculum development projects reflecting largely social and individual aims were appropriated by other stakeholders to serve political and economic aims. We argue that a curriculum reform body representing all stakeholder interests is needed to ensure that multiple aims are considered throughout the curriculum reform process. Within such a body, the differentiated character of the science teaching community would need to be represented.     

Neural information retrieval: at the end of the early years

A recent “third wave” of neural network (NN) approaches now delivers state-of-the-art performance in many machine learning tasks, spanning speech recognition, computer vision, and natural language processing. Because these modern NNs often comprise multiple interconnected layers, work in this area is often referred to as deep learning. Recent years have witnessed an explosive growth of research into NN-based approaches to information retrieval (IR). A significant body of work has now been created. In this paper, we survey the current landscape of Neural IR research, paying special attention to the use of learned distributed representations of textual units. We highlight the successes of neural IR thus far, catalog obstacles to its wider adoption, and suggest potentially promising directions for future research.     

Color,Caste and the Public Sphere

Broadcast network newsrooms are powerful gatekeepers, setting cultural standards and attitudes for America at large via the stories they tell and the images they project. In 1968, the federal Kerner Commission chastised American news media for ignoring race, and seeing through the “white man’s eyes” and speaking from “the white perspective.” Grounded in critical and cultural studies and organizational theory, this study analyzes the experiences of 23 post-Civil Rights generation black journalists working in broadcast newsrooms who continue to struggle against anti-black cultural norms and attitudes at great physical, psychological and financial cost.     

A review of the characteristics of intermediate assessment and their relationship with student grades

In-course assessment, such as midterms, quizzes or presentations, is often an integral part of higher education courses. These so-called intermediate assessments influence students’ final grades. The current review investigates which characteristics of intermediate assessment relate to these grades. In total, 88 articles were reviewed that examined the relationship between intermediate assessment and student grades. Four main characteristics were identified: the use of feedback, whether the assessment is mandatory, who is the assessor, and the reward students get for participating. Results indicate that corrective feedback leads to the most positive results, but elaborate feedback may benefit lower achieving groups. No difference in results was found for mandatory versus voluntary intermediate assessments. Peer assessment seemed to be beneficial, and rewarding students with course credit improves grades more than other rewards. Three scenarios are presented on how teachers can combine the different characteristics to optimise their intermediate assessment.     

Teacher and student perceptions of intermediate assessment in higher education

Universities introduce intermediate assessment because it is understood to have positive effects on student behaviour and achievement. Yet, how intermediate assessment is perceived might be conditional for its success. The current study investigates both teachers’ and students’ perceptions of intermediate assessment. Teachers and students were interviewed and Student Evaluations of Teaching were examined. Results indicate that both teachers and students had generally positive perceptions of intermediate assessment. However, the two groups provided different reasons for their positive perceptions. Teachers and students agreed that intermediate assessment helps students to keep up with their study work. Moreover, teachers mentioned that they could assess various knowledge and skills with intermediate assessment, whereas students preferred intermediate assessments to test the same knowledge and skills as the final exam. This finding suggests that teachers and students in our study had different goals for intermediate assessment.     

Carboxylation of myoglobin in rats exposed to cigarette smoke

The effect of exposure to cigarette smoke on carboxylation of myoglobin was studied in rats. The amount of carboxymyoglobin in the body tissues of rats exposed to smoke was measured and compared with normal rats. A significant quantity of myoglobin carboxylated spontaneously due to smoke was detected in the body tissues of experimental rats. Despite an adaptive elevation of total myoglobin content, a considerable reduction in the free myoglobin was observed in all tissues made under observation. This free myoglobin depletion may be the cause for increased heart rate and respiratory rate coupled with low physical activities observed in smokers.