Tweeting Facts,Facebooking Lives: The Influence of Language Use and Modality on Online Source Credibility

The present study examines how language use (e.g., personalized vs. depersonalized language) and modality (e.g., tweets vs. Facebook status updates) influence source credibility interdependently. A total of 257 participants read personalized or depersonalized health messages embedded in mock-up tweets or Facebook status updates. The results show that users perceive depersonalized tweets as more credible than depersonalized status updates posted on Facebook. On the other hand, personalized status updates on Facebook generate higher credibility judgments than personalized tweets. The findings are discussed in light of the MAIN model as well as the preconceived user expectations and communication norms of social media.     

Scientific Inquiry Self-Efficacy and Computer Game Self-Efficacy as Predictors and Outcomes of Middle School Boys’ and Girls’ Performance in a Science Assessment in a Virtual Environment

Journal of Science Education and Technology - The primary aim of the study was to examine whether performance on a science assessment in an immersive virtual environment was associated with changes...     

Middle School Science Teachers’ Discursive Purposes and Talk Moves in Supporting Students’ Experiments

Science & Education - The paper reports qualitative findings from a study about how science teachers enacted discursive purposes and talk moves to support the students’ experiments....     

The process of supervision in the turkish educational system: purpose, structure, operation

The aim of this study is to provide information on the purposes, structure and operation of the process of supervision in the Turkish educational system. In this paper, the historical development of supervision services in the Turkish educational system, as well as the purposes and principles of educational supervision in Turkey and the structure of supervision in the Turkish educational system are defined. Moreover, the organization of sub-systems of the Ministry of National Education and that of supervision at elementary schools, hiring supervisors, their training, duties and responsibilities as well as working principles are presented. In addition, a detailed analysis of the supervision of institutions and teachers by supervisors is included.     

Democracy Through Learner-Centered Education: a Turkish Perspective

Aimed at documenting the problems and constraints confronting learner-centered instruction in Turkey, this article first explains the link between democracy and education and the role of learner-centered instruction in realizing democratic ends. By drawing on John Dewey’s ideas and Turkish scholars’ perspectives on Turkish education, the article then presents the problems and constraints that pose threats to the implementation of learner-centered instruction in Turkey. The author also explains the problems within the Turkish educational system and teacher education programmes, and the challenges that in-service teachers and students may experience with learner-centered instruction.     

Crowdsourcing interactions: using crowdsourcing for evaluating interactive information retrieval systems

In the field of information retrieval (IR), researchers and practitioners are often faced with a demand for valid approaches to evaluate the performance of retrieval systems. The Cranfield experiment paradigm has been dominant for the in-vitro evaluation of IR systems. Alternative to this paradigm, laboratory-based user studies have been widely used to evaluate interactive information retrieval (IIR) systems, and at the same time investigate users’ information searching behaviours. Major drawbacks of laboratory-based user studies for evaluating IIR systems include the high monetary and temporal costs involved in setting up and running those experiments, the lack of heterogeneity amongst the user population and the limited scale of the experiments, which usually involve a relatively restricted set of users. In this paper, we propose an alternative experimental methodology to laboratory-based user studies. Our novel experimental methodology uses a crowdsourcing platform as a means of engaging study participants. Through crowdsourcing, our experimental methodology can capture user interactions and searching behaviours at a lower cost, with more data, and within a shorter period than traditional laboratory-based user studies, and therefore can be used to assess the performances of IIR systems. In this article, we show the characteristic differences of our approach with respect to traditional IIR experimental and evaluation procedures. We also perform a use case study comparing crowdsourcing-based evaluation with laboratory-based evaluation of IIR systems, which can serve as a tutorial for setting up crowdsourcing-based IIR evaluations.     

Crowdsourcing for information retrieval: introduction to the special issue

This introduction to the special issue summarizes and contextualizes six novel research contributions at the intersection of information retrieval (IR) and crowdsourcing (also overlapping crowdsourcing’s closely-related sibling, human computation). Several of the papers included in this special issue represent deeper investigations into research topics for which earlier stages of the authors’ research were disseminated at crowdsourcing workshops at SIGIR and WSDM conferences, as well as at the NIST TREC conference. Since the first proposed use of crowdsourcing for IR in 2008, interest in this area has quickly accelerated and led to three workshops, an ongoing NIST TREC track, and a great variety of published papers, talks, and tutorials. We briefly summarize the area in order to help situate the contributions appearing in this special issue. We also discuss some broader current trends and issues in crowdsourcing which bear upon its use in IR and other fields.