117,932 research outputs found
Principles in Patterns (PiP) : Project Evaluation Synthesis
Evaluation activity found the technology-supported approach to curriculum design and approval developed by PiP to demonstrate high levels of user acceptance, promote improvements to the quality of curriculum designs, render more transparent and efficient aspects of the curriculum approval and quality monitoring process, demonstrate process efficacy and resolve a number of chronic information management difficulties which pervaded the previous state. The creation of a central repository of curriculum designs as the basis for their management as "knowledge assets", thus facilitating re-use and sharing of designs and exposure of tacit curriculum design practice, was also found to be highly advantageous. However, further process improvements remain possible and evidence of system resistance was found in some stakeholder groups. Recommendations arising from the findings and conclusions include the need to improve data collection surrounding the curriculum approval process so that the process and human impact of C-CAP can be monitored and observed. Strategies for improving C-CAP acceptance among the "late majority", the need for C-CAP best practice guidance, and suggested protocols on the knowledge management of curriculum designs are proposed. Opportunities for further process improvements in institutional curriculum approval, including a re-engineering of post-faculty approval processes, are also recommended
Teacher education pedagogies and methodological constructs: or about different ways to approach teacher education
This paper plots the methodological constructs identified in different teacher education pedagogies deployed in teacher education settings of Higher Education Institutes in the province of Catamarca. The focus is on showcasing how future teachers are aided -from the methodological constructs of mentors- to make pedagogical decisions and broaden their potential for action during the educational path. The research was conducted from a qualitative approach. Three Higher Education Institutes representing different socio-cultural contexts and educational traditions were selected on the assumption that distinct pedagogies would be found; not only structured on the basis of stereotypical training, but also on the specificity of the disciplinary field. Seventeen semi-structured interviews were carried out and were accompanied by classroom observation of teacher educators in different areas, from distinct disciplinary backgrounds and varied seniority. The qualitative analysis of the data enabled the reconstruction of three typologies that explain the modes in which teacher education is pedagogically configured in the institutes under study as well as the dominant methodological construct that sets up each pedagogical approach. Thus, the pedagogy of ‘modeling’ teaching is based on methodological constructs based on the transmission of disciplinary contents and the instilment of behavior patterns; the ‘traditional’ view is built on methodological constructs elaborated on the basis of disciplinary logic; and the ‘eclectic’ approach is materialized in methodological constructs based on the synthesis of heterogeneous components or constructions grounded on pedagogical abstention.Fil: Diaz, Ana Griselda. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro de Investigaciones y Transferencia de Catamarca. Universidad Nacional de Catamarca. Centro de Investigaciones y Transferencia de Catamarca; ArgentinaFil: Yuni, Jose Alberto. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro de Investigaciones y Transferencia de Catamarca. Universidad Nacional de Catamarca. Centro de Investigaciones y Transferencia de Catamarca; Argentin
What’s going on in my city? Recommender systems and electronic participatory budgeting
In this paper, we present electronic participatory budgeting (ePB) as a novel application domain for recommender systems. On public data from the ePB platforms of three major US cities – Cambridge, Miami and New York City–, we evaluate various methods that exploit heterogeneous sources and models of user preferences to provide personalized recommendations of citizen proposals. We show that depending on characteristics of the cities and their participatory processes, particular methods are more effective than others for each city. This result, together with open issues identified in the paper, call for further research in the area
Teaching critical appraisal to Sport & Exercise Sciences and Biosciences students
Seminars were implemented to develop undergraduates’ critical appraisal skills and their effectiveness was evaluated. Participants were 140 undergraduate students consisting of 103 students from Sport and Exercise Sciences and 37 from Biosciences. Four seminars were employed to develop and reinforce critical thinking and provide an opportunity for practise and group work. Source material included research proposals and published journal articles. Two linked pieces of coursework assessed critical thinking skills. Teaching method effectiveness was examined using the students’ questionnaire responses and comparison of coursework grades across the module. Students reported finding the seminars useful and helpful, and their self-ratings of critical appraisal skills improved from pre- to post-seminar. However, this was not generally reflected in assessment grades across the group. Overall, there was a significant decline in grades from the first to the second piece of coursework. However, although Sport and Exercise Sciences students’ scored significantly lower on the second coursework, Biosciences students scored higher. It is possible that this type of teaching helps to boost performance in students who originally are new to such skills. Future studies would need to examine whether different methods or longer follow-up might also yield improvements in objective measurements of students’ critical appraisal ability
Review of the Learning Alliance for Adaptation in Smallholder Agriculture
The Learning Alliance for Adaptation in Smallholder Agriculture is a knowledge platform which leverages the strengths, opportunities and diverse audiences of the International Fund for Agriculture (IFAD) and the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS). The objective of the Learning Alliance is to produce and disseminate evidence for informed policy and implementation of climate-smart agriculture (CSA) interventions by capturing, analyzing and communicating lessons emerging from the IFAD supported global Adaptation in Smallholder Agriculture Programme (ASAP). The Learning Alliance strives to enable agricultural development policy-makers and practitioners make science-based decisions in the context of climate change. The underlying assumption of the Learning Alliance is that the “provision of demand-driven research outputs to policy-makers and practitioners is a key mechanism for improving the effectiveness of adaptation actions among ultimate beneficiaries, in this case smallholder farmers”.
The review aims to identify areas for improvement to achieve the planned outcomes of the Learning Alliance more effectively. It provides recommendations to inform a further phase, based on the experience of those closely involved in the knowledge production and implementation of the Alliance
Incremental Learning of Object Detectors without Catastrophic Forgetting
Despite their success for object detection, convolutional neural networks are
ill-equipped for incremental learning, i.e., adapting the original model
trained on a set of classes to additionally detect objects of new classes, in
the absence of the initial training data. They suffer from "catastrophic
forgetting" - an abrupt degradation of performance on the original set of
classes, when the training objective is adapted to the new classes. We present
a method to address this issue, and learn object detectors incrementally, when
neither the original training data nor annotations for the original classes in
the new training set are available. The core of our proposed solution is a loss
function to balance the interplay between predictions on the new classes and a
new distillation loss which minimizes the discrepancy between responses for old
classes from the original and the updated networks. This incremental learning
can be performed multiple times, for a new set of classes in each step, with a
moderate drop in performance compared to the baseline network trained on the
ensemble of data. We present object detection results on the PASCAL VOC 2007
and COCO datasets, along with a detailed empirical analysis of the approach.Comment: To appear in ICCV 201
Firelight Foundation: An interim evaluation report of the Early Learning Innovation Fund
The Hewlett Foundation in 2014 selected Management Systems International (MSI) to implement a midterm evaluation of the Early Learning Innovation Fund. This evaluation explores the concept and design of the Fund; progress in achieving the Hewlett Foundation's four intermediary outcomes; and Firelight's implementation of the innovation fund with a focus on its approach to capacity building and expanding innovative programs. This evaluation also reviews the quality of the sub-grantees' monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems and explores the potential of conducting an impact evaluation of sub-grantee activities
Research and Development Workstation Environment: the new class of Current Research Information Systems
Against the backdrop of the development of modern technologies in the field
of scientific research the new class of Current Research Information Systems
(CRIS) and related intelligent information technologies has arisen. It was
called - Research and Development Workstation Environment (RDWE) - the
comprehensive problem-oriented information systems for scientific research and
development lifecycle support. The given paper describes design and development
fundamentals of the RDWE class systems. The RDWE class system's generalized
information model is represented in the article as a three-tuple composite web
service that include: a set of atomic web services, each of them can be
designed and developed as a microservice or a desktop application, that allows
them to be used as an independent software separately; a set of functions, the
functional filling-up of the Research and Development Workstation Environment;
a subset of atomic web services that are required to implement function of
composite web service. In accordance with the fundamental information model of
the RDWE class the system for supporting research in the field of ontology
engineering - the automated building of applied ontology in an arbitrary domain
area, scientific and technical creativity - the automated preparation of
application documents for patenting inventions in Ukraine was developed. It was
called - Personal Research Information System. A distinctive feature of such
systems is the possibility of their problematic orientation to various types of
scientific activities by combining on a variety of functional services and
adding new ones within the cloud integrated environment. The main results of
our work are focused on enhancing the effectiveness of the scientist's research
and development lifecycle in the arbitrary domain area.Comment: In English, 13 pages, 1 figure, 1 table, added references in Russian.
Published. Prepared for special issue (UkrPROG 2018 conference) of the
scientific journal "Problems of programming" (Founder: National Academy of
Sciences of Ukraine, Institute of Software Systems of NAS Ukraine
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