Assessing School Readiness: Validity and Bias in Preschool and Kindergarten Teachers' Ratings

As a part of efforts to evaluate and monitor the increasing public investment in early childhood education, teachers are being asked to assess children's school readiness. In this study, preschool teachers and kindergarten teachers rated children's skills in three areas (kindergarten readiness, academic skills, and communication skills), and these ratings were compared with direct assessments of the children's skills. Ratings by both groups of teachers tended to be more highly related to basic skills, such as counting and number naming, than to abilities such as solving applied problems and using expressive and receptive vocabulary. Preschool teachers' ratings had a lower association with children's observed skills and abilities than kindergarten teachers' ratings. Ratings of children attending Head Start were systematically inflated, but this relationship was mediated to a significant extent by the teachers' levels of education. More educated teachers rated children in a manner consistent with the children's directly assessed skills. Implications of these findings for informing future efforts to assess school readiness by using teacher ratings are discussed.     

Education in Foreign Languages at Vilnius Technical University

The paper deals with studies of engineering programmes in foreign languages at Vilnius Technical University (VTU), Lithuania. In order to organize studies in foreign languages, an International Studies Centre was established in 1992. The following aims were pursued: integrating into the systems of university education of European countries and promoting international exchange of students and staff. BSc studies (architecture, civil engineering, mechanical engineering and electronic engineering programmes) are organized in English, French and German. Over 150 undergraduate students from Lithuania and foreign countries are studying at the centre. About 150 students are enrolled for the next academic year.     

Health resources on the Internet: a basic list

With the plethora of health sites on the Internet, it is sometimes hard to know where to start. This is a basic list of health sites that either cover a subject area comprehensively, or are good general sites to lead to more specific information. Most of these sites include both full-text information as well as links to many other sites on the World-Wide Web. Included are medical, nursing, dental, alternative health, consumer health, organization, and government sites.     

Automated Classification to Improve the Efficiency of Weeding Library Collections

Previous studies have shown that weeding a library collection benefits patrons and increases circulation rates. However, the time required to review the collection and make weeding decisions presents a formidable obstacle. This study empirically evaluated methods for automatically classifying weeding candidates. A data set containing 80,346 items from a large-scale weeding project running from 2011 to 2014 at Wesleyan University was used to train six machine learning classifiers to predict a weeding decision of either ‘Keep’ or ‘Weed’ for each candidate. The study found statistically significant agreement (p?=?0.001) between classifier predictions and librarian judgments for all classifier types. The naive Bayes and linear support vector machine classifiers had the highest recall (fraction of items weeded by librarians that were identified by the algorithm), while the k-nearest-neighbor classifier had the highest precision (fraction of recommended candidates that librarians had chosen to weed). The variables found to be most relevant were: librarian and faculty votes for retention, item age, and the presence of copies in other libraries.