The Practice of Scaling Down Practical Assessment Components of Agriculture in Junior Secondary Schools Curriculum: A Synthesis of Teachers Perceptions

This ethnographic research study aimed at investigating factors that contributed to the decline in the number of practical assessed projects in junior secondary agricultural education assessment in Botswana. Participant-observation technique was used to gather data in the form of field notes from in-service teachers at BCA and in-school teachers during school visits teaching practice and lessons at BCA respectively. Students’ performance assessment in practical agriculture measures the extent to which students performed their tasks. The study used two groups of teachers; five (5) in-service student teachers pursuing their Bachelor of Science (BSc) degree in Agricultural Education at Botswana College of Agriculture and five (5) in-school teachers of agriculture to investigate the decline in the number of practical projects assessed in schools. The participants were purposely selected for their proximity to the researcher. Field notes prepared during school visits through interviews and surveys using open ended question were used to gather data for this study. Narrative data were gathered and analysed by coding the emerging themes and applying descriptive analysis. The study took on theoretical issues forming the basis for the understanding of the culture of teaching and assessing practical agriculture projects to include (1) teacher motivation (2) validity issues on assessment (3) teaching standards, teacher education, and (4) practices in teaching, and students’ attitudes. The study concluded by discussing implications on education of agriculture science teachers

Projecting absence: a decade of US Arctic intelligence, policy, and perceptions of Russia

Thesis (M.A.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2016The U.S. government engaged in Arctic security and politics at a low level throughout early 2000s, while the Russian government was quite active in it Arctic region during this timeframe. Using text, data and visual analysis tools, this research conducts content analysis, sentiment analysis and mapping on U.S. Arctic intelligence documents released through Wikileaks. It compares patterns found in the content of intelligence documents with content and sentiment patterns found in U.S. Arctic policy to correlate a shared perception of Russian Arctic engagement. Research findings indicate that the dialogue about Russian engagement in the Arctic in the early 2000s in both the intelligence community (IC) and policy-making communities attribute a low level of threat to U.S. national security with regard to Arctic issues. These findings may contribute to the lack of U.S. engagement in the Arctic leading up to the Crimean/Ukraine conflict

The Romani Place in Kosovar Space: Nationalism and Kosovo’s Roma

On February 17, 2008,Kosovo declared its independence. The path to independence and the claim to Kosovo was a long process that developed in three primary phases: A) the fostering of territorial solidarity under direct rule and an emphasis on historical ties to the territory; B) the foundation of the national idea within the realms of proto-nationalism; and C) the emergence of peripheral and mass nationalism. This research seeks to define the development of nationalist ideologies in Kosovo and to explore where Roma fit within those ideologies. An historical and sociological approach to nationalism in Kosovo is critical in understanding the current situation of Roma living in, and deported to, Kosovo, including the recent phenomenon of ethnic scapegoating of the Roma by both Serbs and Albanian

Between Peace and Conflict in the East and the West

This open access book features various studies on democratization, transformation, socio-economic development, and security issues in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) geographical region and beyond. Written by experts and scholars working in the field of human dimension, security, transformation and development in Europe and Asia, particularly in post-soviet and communist countries, it examines the connectivity that the OSCE provides between the East and the West. The 2021 edition of this Compilation Series of the OSCE Academy presents studies on peace and conflict as well as political regime development in various member states of the OSCE as well as their economic, security and human rights performance and the challenges countries and society face currently. The OSCE is working in promoting Human Rights and Democratization under the notion of Human Dimension of ODIHR and is enhancing securitization and development policies in Eurasia, Europe, Central Asia and North America since 1991. 2021 marks the 30th anniversary on the tremendous efforts in promoting democracy, security and development. This compilation reviews some of these efforts in light of this anniversary, the achievements and shortcomings

Elections in digital times: a guide for electoral practitioners

Strengthening democracy and electoral processes in the era of social media and Artificial Intelligence Democracy requires free, periodic, transparent, and inclusive elections. Freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and the right to political participation are also critical to societies ruled by the respect of human rights. In today’s rapidly evolving digital environment, opportunities for communication between citizens, politicians and political parties are unprecedented –– with information related to elections flowing faster and easier than ever, coupled with expanded opportunities for its verification and correction by a growing number of stakeholders. However, with billions of human beings connected, and disinformation and misinformation circulating unhinged around the networks, democratic processes and access to reliable information are at risk. With an estimated 56.8% of the world’s population active on social media and an estimate of 4 billion eligible voters, the ubiquity of social networks and the impact of Artificial Intelligence can intentionally or unintentionally undermine electoral processes, thereby delegitimizing democracies worldwide. In this context, all actors involved in electoral processes have an essential role to play. Electoral management bodies, electoral practitioners, the media, voters, political parties, and civil society organizations must understand the scope and impact of social media and Artificial Intelligence in the electoral cycle. They also need to have access to the tools to identify who instigates and spreads disinformation and misinformation, and the tools and strategies to combat it. This handbook aims to be a toolbox that helps better understand the current scenario and share experiences of good practices in different electoral settings and equip electoral practitioners and other key actors from all over the world to ensure the credibility of the democratic system in times of profound transformations

Perceptions of Climate Change and Vulnerability in Upper Svaneti, South Caucasus, Georgia

Incorporating localized perceptions of climatic impacts to livelihoods and traditions is critical to shaping effective adaptive climate change and disaster risk reduction strategies in the Greater Caucasus Mountains of Georgia. This study uses a phenomenological research framework to investigate the lived experience of climate and the associated impacts of its change in Upper Svaneti. In addition, a vulnerability assessment examines the social and environmental aspects of disasters, including localized perceptions. Results are drawn from eight months of field research conducted from 2012-2013. Multiple in-depth qualitative methods were implemented to generate rich descriptive data, giving way to the roles that environmental changes, disasters, and glacial recession play across six villages. Semi-structured interviews, key informant interviews, informal conversations, observations, participation, and six vulnerability assessments were undertaken. A thematic analysis of respondents’ narratives yielded themes of helplessness, fear, and perceived benefits. The resulting vulnerability assessment explores the social, economic, and political aspects that are constraining local capacities to prevent, mitigate, and recover from natural disasters

Interaction analytics for automatic assessment of communication quality in primary care

Effective doctor-patient communication is a crucial element of health care, influencing patients’ personal and medical outcomes following the interview. The set of skills used in interpersonal interaction is complex, involving verbal and non-verbal behaviour. Precise attributes of good non-verbal behaviour are difficult to characterise, but models and studies offer insight on relevant factors. In this PhD, I studied how the attributes of non-verbal behaviour can be automatically extracted and assessed, focusing on turn-taking patterns of and the prosody of patient-clinician dialogues. I described clinician-patient communication and the tools and methods used to train and assess communication during the consultation. I then proceeded to a review of the literature on the existing efforts to automate assessment, depicting an emerging domain focused on the semantic content of the exchange and a lack of investigation on interaction dynamics, notably on the structure of turns and prosody. To undertake the study of these aspects, I initially planned the collection of data. I underlined the need for a system that follows the requirements of sensitive data collection regarding data quality and security. I went on to design a secure system which records participants’ speech as well as the body posture of the clinician. I provided an open-source implementation and I supported its use by the scientific community. I investigated the automatic extraction and analysis of some non-verbal components of the clinician-patient communication on an existing corpus of GP consultations. I outlined different patterns in the clinician-patient interaction and I further developed explanations of known consulting behaviours, such as the general imbalance of the doctor-patient interaction and differences in the control of the conversation. I compared behaviours present in face to face, telephone, and video consultations, finding overall similarities alongside noticeable differences in patterns of overlapping speech and switching behaviour. I further studied non-verbal signals by analysing speech prosodic features, investigating differences in participants’ behaviour and relations between the assessment of the clinician-patient communication and prosodic features. While limited in their interpretative power on the explored dataset, these signals nonetheless provide additional metrics to identify and characterise variations in the non-verbal behaviour of the participants. Analysing clinician-patient communication is difficult even for human experts. Automating that process in this work has been particularly challenging. I demonstrated the capacity of automated processing of non-verbal behaviours to analyse clinician-patient communication. I outlined the ability to explore new aspects, interaction dynamics, and objectively describe how patients and clinicians interact. I further explained known aspects such as clinician dominance in more detail. I also provided a methodology to characterise participants’ turns taking behaviour and speech prosody for the objective appraisal of the quality of non-verbal communication. This methodology is aimed at further use in research and education

A comparison of the linguistic encoding of artificial-intelligence-generated academic essays and academic essays written by MSc ALSLA 2022-23 students

Background The aim of this study was to establish whether artificial-intelligence (AI) generated essays can be differentiated reliably from human written essays in terms of linguistic features and n-gram word sequences. It also aimed to assess the quality of AI-generated essays compared to essays written by humans, and whether expert raters can differentiate between both types. Through generative AI, people can input parameters into online software to generate different types of discourse within minutes. Though these discourses include songs, graphic art, and computer codes, one of the main concerns for educational boards globally is the use of generative AI for academic essays. Using generative AI to create essays and submitting it as one’s own undermines the fundamentals of assessment, authorship, and academic integrity. Hence, it is important to conduct research on such discourse to analyze the style in which AI can write, and how similar or distinct it is from students’ work. Methods A corpus of essays responding to a typical graduate-level essay prompt (seven written by MSc students and seven generated by AI) was analyzed for textual and authorial features that might help differentiate between the two. Specifically, (1) the Jaccard’s Index (a measure of linguistic similarity and difference) was calculated for each set of essays; (2) n-grams analysis was performed to determine the frequency and purpose of reoccurring long word sequences; (3) adaptive comparative judgment of the essays by university lecturers was undertaken to assess the relative quality of the essays; and (4) a ‘Turing test’ by university lecturers was performed to assess whether they can identify which essays were AI generated and which were human written when they have been told that the corpus contains the two. Results All essays varied in terms of linguistic features, references, length, errors, subheadings, and stylistic markers. AI-generated essays contain more 5-gram word sequences than essays written by students, despite being shorter. Lecturers tend to rate student essays as better and of more depth than AI essays; and in most cases, lecturers can differentiate between AI-generated and human written texts when they know that a corpus contains both types