The turning point in 1985. The history of appraisal and disposal of records in Iceland

The article sets off with a brief summary of the history of appraisal and disposal of records as processed at the National Archives of Iceland (NAI) since its establishment in 1882 to present times. Rules on appraisal and disposal of records introduced in 1900, 1911, and 1916 were ignored and all records were kept. Status quo remained until 1985 when a new National Archives Act was passed. The appraisal and disposal process adopted then is described and explained. It included the publication of instructions on records management as well as forms relating to records management. The influence of acts of law on the appraisal and disposal process is explained. Finally the experience with the arrangement of organised appraisal in Iceland is described.     

Policy-Practice Proximity: The Scope for College-Based Higher Education and Cross-Sector Collaboration in Wales

In relation to the size of its population, Wales has a relatively large number of higher education institutions, several of which are small and located in rural areas. Compared with other parts of the United Kingdom, only a small number of higher education students are taught in Welsh further education colleges. Nevertheless, efforts have been made to increase higher education provision in the colleges, beginning in the late 1980s with the encouragement of franchising arrangements by the Wales Advisory Body and later with a joint initiative by the Higher and Further Education Funding Councils for Wales to expand some sub‐degree higher education in the colleges by direct funding. These developments represent just one strand of activity linking the higher and further education sectors in Wales and have not been a subject of major or regular policy attention. For reasons of scale and geography, and through the enabling structures and processes serving both funding councils, cross‐sector initiatives and collaboration have generally been given high priority in strategies to widen access and build progression. The administrative devolution reflected in these arrangements has been increased by political devolution since 1999, with as yet unclear implications for the future development of higher education in the colleges.     

Retrieving and classifying instances of source code plagiarism

Automatic detection of source code plagiarism is an important research field for both the commercial software industry and within the research community. Existing methods of plagiarism detection primarily involve exhaustive pairwise document comparison, which does not scale well for large software collections. To achieve scalability, we approach the problem from an information retrieval (IR) perspective. We retrieve a ranked list of candidate documents in response to a pseudo-query representation constructed from each source code document in the collection. The challenge in source code document retrieval is that the standard bag-of-words (BoW) representation model for such documents is likely to result in many false positives being retrieved, because of the use of identical programming language specific constructs and keywords. To address this problem, we make use of an abstract syntax tree (AST) representation of the source code documents. While the IR approach is efficient, it is essentially unsupervised in nature. To further improve its effectiveness, we apply a supervised classifier (pre-trained with features extracted from sample plagiarized source code pairs) on the top ranked retrieved documents. We report experiments on the SOCO-2014 dataset comprising 12K Java source files with almost 1M lines of code. Our experiments confirm that the AST based approach produces significantly better retrieval effectiveness than a standard BoW representation, i.e., the AST based approach is able to identify a higher number of plagiarized source code documents at top ranks in response to a query source code document. The supervised classifier, trained on features extracted from sample plagiarized source code pairs, is shown to effectively filter and thus further improve the ranked list of retrieved candidate plagiarized documents.     

Mastery motivation,parenting, and school achievement among Hungarian adolescents

European Journal of Psychology of Education - Children’s motivation to master challenging tasks is an important predictor of school success, and yet, such motivation declines during...     

Orthographic-Phonological Mapping and the Emergence of Visual Expertise for Print: A Developmental Event-Related Potential Study

The N1 effect is an electrophysiological marker of visual specialization for print. The phonological mapping hypothesis (Maurer & McCandliss, 2007) posits that the left-lateralized effect reflects grapheme-phoneme integration. In this event-related potential study, first (age = 7.06 years, N = 32) and third-grade readers (age = 9.29 years, N = 28) were presented with pairs of pseudowords and Armenian character strings in a novel implicit same-different paradigm. To test the phonological mapping hypothesis, stimuli were presented in visual-only and audiovisual conditions. The results demonstrated that tuning for print already emerges in first grade. Moreover, the parallel presentation of auditory stimuli enhanced the N1 effect suggesting a role of orthographic-phonological mapping in the development of specialization for print.     

Using Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to Foster Literacy and Facilitate Discourse Within the Classroom

The literacy skills of students is an issue of great policy importance which has attracted considerable interest in the literature. At the same time, much recent work has been done on the efficacy of learning communities. This paper examines the extent to which fostering learning communities can improve literacy skills. It is shown that it is possible to achieve large improvements in writing and reading by fostering a community of learners that focuses on scientific inquiries utilizing computer technology. The results lend support to the hypothesis that learning communities may be an important instrument in enhancing the reasoning, problem solving and learning strategies of students. This suggests that more work needs to be done in this area of educational research.

Les compétences des élèves en lecture sont un sujet d'extrème importance qui a provoqué un intérêt considérable dans la littérature. Au même moment beaucoup de travaux récents ont été menés sur l'efficacité des établissements d'enseigement. Cet article examine jusqu'à quel point il faut encourager des communautés d'apprentissage peut améliorer les compétences en lecture. Il montre qu'il est possible d'obtenir des améliorations importantes pour la lecture et l'écriture en développant une communauté d'apprenants qui se concentre sur les résultats scientifiques des enquêtes utilisant la technologie de l'ordinateur. Les résultats confirment l'hypothèse que les communautés d'apprentissage peuvent être un instrument important pour améliorer le raisonnement, la solution des problèmes et les stratégies d'apprentissage des élèves. L'article suggère qu'il faut travailler davantage dans ce domaine de la recherche en éducation.

Die Lese- und Rechtschreibfähigkeit von Studenten hat einen hohen politischen Rang, der auch ein entsprechendes Interesse in der Fachliteratur erzeugt hat. Gleichzeitig ist in der letzten Zeit viel Arbeit in die Untersuchung der Wirksamkeit von Lerngemeinschaften gesteckt worden. Dieses Papier überprüft, in welchem Umfang die Förderung der Lerngemeinschaften den Bildungsgrad verbessern kann. Es wird gezeigt, daß es möglich ist, große Verbesserungen im Schreiben und in der Lesefähigkeit durch Förderung einer Lerngemeinschaft, die sich auf wissenschaftliche Anfragen per Nutzung von Computertechnologie konzentriert, zu erreichen. Die Resultate stützen die Hypothese, dass Lerngemeinschaften ein wichtiges Instrument zur Verbesserung von Argumentationsfähigkeit, Problemlöseverhalten und das Entwickeln von Lernstrategien der Kursteilnehmer sein können. Daher sollte die Arbeit in diesem Bereich der pädagogischen Forschung verstärkt werden.     

How can pre-service primary teachers' perspectives contribute to a pedagogy that problematises the ‘practical’ in teacher education?

This study examined pre-service primary teachers' perspectives on teaching and learning experiences within college-based courses in ‘practical’ subject areas within a teacher education programme. Following three individual lectures (one each in art, music and physical education), pre-service teachers (n=11) participated in focus group interviews sharing their perspectives on the teaching and learning experiences. These data were analysed thematically and supported by teacher educators' (n=3) planning and reflection documentation. Although the problematic nature of the ‘practical’ suggests appeal and peril of the ‘practical’, the important nature of negotiating the ‘practical’ to enhance student learning is apparent. Students emphasised the value of practical engagement and expressed a strong preference for working in groups to create a safe learning environment to develop confidence and competence. These insights suggest key aspects of a pedagogy of teacher education in these ‘practical’ areas. The importance of being aware of and, in some cases, challenging student perspectives on how they learn best in these curricular areas is discussed.     

Biomechanical characteristics of adults walking forward and backward in water at different stride frequencies

The aim of this study was to examine spatiotemporal characteristics and joint angles during forward and backward walking in water at low and high stride frequency. Eight healthy adults (22.1 ± 1.1 years) walked forward and backward underwater at low (50 pulses) and high frequency (80 pulses) at the xiphoid process level with arms crossed at the chest. The main differences observed were that the participants presented a greater speed (0.58 vs. 0.85 m/s) and more asymmetry of the step length (1.24 vs. 1.48) at high frequency whilst the stride and step length (0.84 vs. 0.7 m and 0.43 vs. 0.35 m, respectively) were lower compared to low frequency (P < 0.05). Support phase duration was higher at forward walking than backward walking (61.2 vs. 59.0%). At initial contact, we showed that during forward walking, the ankle and hip presented more flexion than during backward walking (ankle: 84.0 vs. 91.8º and hip: 22.8 vs. 8.0º; P < 0.001). At final stance, the knee and hip were more flexed at low frequency than at high frequency (knee: 150.0 vs. 157.0º and hip: ?12.2 vs. –14.5º; P < 0.001). The knee angle showed more flexion at forward walking (134.0º) than backward walking (173.1º) (P < 0.001). In conclusion, these results show how forward and backward walking in water at different frequencies differ and contribute to a better understanding of this activity in training and rehabilitation.     

Differences in pedalling technique between road cyclists of different competitive levels

The purpose of this study was to compare the pedalling technique in road cyclists of different competitive levels. Eleven professional, thirteen elite and fourteen club cyclists were assessed at the beginning of their competition season. Cyclists’ anthropometric characteristics and bike measurements were recorded. Three sets of pedalling (200, 250 and 300 W) on a cycle ergometer that simulated their habitual cycling posture were performed at a constant cadence (~90 rpm), while kinetic and kinematic variables were registered. The results showed no differences on the main anthropometric variables and bike measurements. Professional cyclists obtained higher positive impulse proportion (1.5–3.3% and P < 0.05), mainly due to a lower resistive torque during the upstroke (15.4–28.7% and P < 0.05). They also showed a higher ankle range of movement (ROM, 1.1–4.0° and P < 0.05). Significant correlations (P < 0.05) were found between the cyclists’ body mass and the kinetic variables of pedalling: positive impulse proportion (r = ?0.59 to ?0.61), minimum (r = ?0.59 to ?0.63) and maximum torques (r = 0.35–0.47). In conclusion, professional cyclists had better pedalling technique than elite and club cyclists, because they opted for enhancing pulling force at the recovery phase to sustain the same power output. This technique depended on cycling experience and level of expertise.