Graduate Studies in the UK: Some Impressions and Suggestions

Many western countries are paying increasing attention to the organization and administration of graduate studies. Such attention has developed from primary concerns about completion times, completion percentages, programme quality, and student quality, as well as secondary concerns about supervisors, funding, coursework, inter-organizational co-operation, and policies and practices of both universities and research councils. Using information about British graduate programmes as a basis, the article presents policy issues related to research councils, funding councils, and control, followed by discussion of the themes of the nature of programmes, supervision and evaluation, completion time, quality, and innovation. The final sections address several concerns and offer some suggestions.     

A Corpus-Based Learning Method of Compound Noun Indexing Rules for Korean

In Korean information retrieval, compound nouns play an important role in improving precision in search experiments. There are two major approaches to compound noun indexing in Korean: statistical and linguistic. Each method, however, has its own shortcomings, such as limitations when indexing diverse types of compound nouns, over-generation of compound nouns, and data sparseness in training. In this paper, we propose a corpus-based learning method, which can index diverse types of compound nouns using rules automatically extracted from a large corpus. The automatic learning method is more portable and requires less human effort, although it exhibits a performance level similar to the manual-linguistic approach. We also present a new filtering method to solve the problems of compound noun over-generation and data sparseness.     

Measuring Cultural Dimensions of Classroom Interactions

We trace the development and analyze the generalizability of the Classroom Assessment of Sociocultural Interactions (CASI), an observation system designed to measure cultural dimensions of classroom interactions. We establish CASI measurement properties by analyzing panoramic videos of 4th and 5th grade classrooms from the Measures of Effective Teaching project, and argue for its significance in terms of achievement opportunity for minoritized students and needed evidence regarding equitable teaching. We frame ten dimensions of sociocultural interactions within three domains: Life Applications (i.e., connections with what students know and do outside of school); Self in Group (i.e., interdependence to motivate learning and foster social identities); and Agency (i.e., how freedom and choice are managed).

We demonstrate how measurement error is associated with raters, lessons, and lesson segments, and discuss implications for CASI refinement, as well as appropriate instrument uses to enrich learning opportunities for minoritized students across a variety of classroom settings.     

Manufacture and Date of a Goryeo dynasty Sutra Box with Mother-of-pearl Inlaid Decoration at the Rijksmuseum,Amsterdam

Currently, about ten Goryeo dynasty (918–1392 CE) sutra boxes are preserved in museums in Korea, Japan, the United States, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. This article is the result of an examination of a sutra box in the collection of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (hereafter ‘Rijksmuseum sutra box’), which was first introduced to a European audience in the Transactions and Proceedings of the Japanese Society, in 1913–1914. The Rijksmuseum sutra box differs from other Goryeo sutra boxes. With its altered structure and modified motifs, this box bears significant value, not only for the research of thirteenth-century Goryeo mother-of-pearl art, but also for the study of cross-cultural adaptations in East Asian lacquer art. This article investigates the date of manufacture of the sutra box by analysing the manufacturing techniques and its various original and modified parts. For this, an X-ray radiograph was carried out for the first time. As a result, discoveries have been made regarding the structure and decoration of the lower part, which has been modified and is different from Goryeo mother-of-pearl sutra boxes. Finally, this paper reconsiders conservation and repair of Goryeo sutra boxes, as illuminated by an understanding of the original and repaired parts of this box.