Does modality matter? A latent profile and transition analysis of sedentary behaviours among school-aged youth: The UP&DOWN study

ABSTRACT

The aims of this study were to identify profiles of sedentary behaviour (SB) patterns, based on leisure-time self-reported SB modalities (screen, educative, social, and relaxing) and to evaluate changes in these profiles over 2 years among Spanish youth aged 8–18 years. Latent profile analysis (LPA), a data-driven analytic approach, was used to identify groups of boys and girls (n = 1553; 48% girls; mean±SD age: 12.56 ± 2.49 y) with distinct SB profiles using the SB modalities (time/d) as input variables. Latent transition analysis, an extension of LPA that uses longitudinal data, was used to analyse 2-year changes in these profiles. At baseline, four and three SB profiles were found among boys (labelled: screen, educative, social, and relaxing) and girls (labelled: screen/social, educative, and relaxing), respectively. Overall, more girls (range: 48%-67%) had the same profile over time, than boys (40%-52%). Participants with a screen or relaxing SB profile at baseline were more likely to have an educative profile after 2 years. Youth with a social and an educative SB profile at baseline were more likely to transition to profiles characterized by higher screen and social SB, respectively. Using a novel and person-centered approach, this study identified gender-specific SB profiles that were moderately stable over time.     

Quality flaw prediction in Spanish Wikipedia: A case of study with verifiability flaws

In this work, we present the first quality flaw prediction study for articles containing the two most frequent verifiability flaws in Spanish Wikipedia: articles which do not cite any references or sources at all (denominated Unreferenced) and articles that need additional citations for verification (so-called Refimprove). Based on the underlying characteristics of each flaw, different state-of-the-art approaches were evaluated. For articles not citing any references, a well-established rule-based approach was evaluated and interesting findings show that some of them suffer from Refimprove flaw instead. Likewise, for articles that need additional citations for verification, the well-known PU learning and one-class classification approaches were evaluated. Besides, new methods were compared and a new feature was also proposed to model this latter flaw. The results showed that new methods such as under-bagged decision trees with sum or majority voting rules, biased-SVM, and centroid-based balanced SVM, perform best in comparison with the ones previously published.     

The View from Above: Map Reading Skills Project

In South Africa the education system for black children is fraught with problems. These problems are the direct result of apartheid and have been compounded by poverty and illiteracy. In this article the problem of poorly qualified or unqualified teachers is discussed especially with regard to the teaching of map skills to children in their fifth school year. The project team needed to develop affordable materials which could be used in large classes by teachers after a very short period of training. Books and other materials which are available commercially were examined, but for various reasons were found to be unsuitable for local conditions. After determining the extent of the problem, the project team followed a grassroots process of developing a flip chart which teachers learnt to use with confidence and which enabled pupils to master the concepts and skills necessary for understanding a map.     

Reading Progress Monitoring for Secondary‐School Students: Reliability,Validity, and Sensitivity to Growth of Reading‐Aloud and Maze‐Selection Measures

The validity and reliability of curriculum‐based measures in reading as indicators of performance and progress for secondary‐school students were examined. Thirty‐five grade 8 students completed reading aloud and maze‐selection measures weekly for 10 weeks. Criterion measures were the state standards test in reading and the Woodcock–Johnson III Test of Achievement. Different time frames for each measure were compared. Most alternate‐form reliability coefficients were above .80. Criterion‐related validity coefficients ranged from .77 to .89. No differences related to time were found. Only maze selection reflected significant growth, with an average increase of 1.29 correct choices per week. Maze growth was related to the reading performance level and to change on the Woodcock–Johnson III from pre‐ to posttest.     

Multilingual modeling of cross-lingual spelling variants

Technical term translations are important for cross-lingual information retrieval. In many languages, new technical terms have a common origin rendered with different spelling of the underlying sounds, also known as cross-lingual spelling variants (CLSV). To find the best CLSV in a text database index, we contribute a formulation of the problem in a probabilistic framework, and implement this with an instance of the general edit distance using weighted finite-state transducers. Some training data is required when estimating the costs for the general edit distance. We demonstrate that after some basic training our new multilingual model is robust and requires little or no adaptation for covering additional languages, as the model takes advantage of language independent transliteration patterns. We train the model with medical terms in seven languages and test it with terms from varied domains in six languages. Two test languages are not in the training data. Against a large text database index, we achieve 64–78 % precision at the point of 100% recall. This is a relative improvement of 22% on the simple edit distance.