An evaluation of pedagogically informed parameterised questions for self assessment

Self-assessment is a crucial component of learning. Learners can learn by asking themselves questions and attempting to answer them. However, creating effective questions is time-consuming because it may require considerable resources and the skill of critical thinking. Questions need careful construction to accurately represent the intended learning outcome and the subject matter involved. There are very few systems currently available which generate questions automatically, and these are confined to specific domains. This paper presents a system for automatically generating questions from a competency framework, based on a sound pedagogical and technological approach. This makes it possible to guide learners in developing questions for themselves, and to provide authoring templates which speed the creation of new questions for self-assessment. This novel design and implementation involves an ontological database that represents the intended learning outcome to be assessed across a number of dimensions, including level of cognitive ability and subject matter. The system generates a list of all the questions that are possible from a given learning outcome, which may then be used to test for understanding, and so could determine the degree to which learners actually acquire the desired knowledge. The way in which the system has been designed and evaluated is discussed, along with its educational benefits

Autism research : An objective quantitative review of progress and focus between 1994 and 2015

The nosology and epidemiology of Autism has undergone transformation following consolidation of once disparate disorders under the umbrella diagnostic, autism spectrum disorders. Despite this re-conceptualization, research initiatives, including the NIMH's Research Domain Criteria and Precision Medicine, highlight the need to bridge psychiatric and psychological classification methodologies with biomedical techniques. Combining traditional bibliometric co-word techniques, with tenets of graph theory and network analysis, this article provides an objective thematic review of research between 1994 and 2015 to consider evolution and focus. Results illustrate growth in Autism research since 2006, with nascent focus on physiology. However, modularity and citation analytics demonstrate dominance of subjective psychological or psychiatric constructs, which may impede progress in the identification and stratification of biomarkers as endorsed by new research initiatives.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Knowledge-based support in Non-Destructive Testing for health monitoring of aircraft structures

Maintenance manuals include general methods and procedures for industrial maintenance and they contain information about principles of maintenance methods. Particularly, Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) methods are important for the detection of aeronautical defects and they can be used for various kinds of material and in different environments. Conventional non-destructive evaluation inspections are done at periodic maintenance checks. Usually, the list of tools used in a maintenance program is simply located in the introduction of manuals, without any precision as regards to their characteristics, except for a short description of the manufacturer and tasks in which they are employed. Improving the identification concepts of the maintenance tools is needed to manage the set of equipments and establish a system of equivalence: it is necessary to have a consistent maintenance conceptualization, flexible enough to fit all current equipment, but also all those likely to be added/used in the future. Our contribution is related to the formal specification of the system of functional equivalences that can facilitate the maintenance activities with means to determine whether a tool can be substituted for another by observing their key parameters in the identified characteristics. Reasoning mechanisms of conceptual graphs constitute the baseline elements to measure the fit or unfit between an equipment model and a maintenance activity model. Graph operations are used for processing answers to a query and this graph-based approach to the search method is in-line with the logical view of information retrieval. The methodology described supports knowledge formalization and capitalization of experienced NDT practitioners. As a result, it enables the selection of a NDT technique and outlines its capabilities with acceptable alternatives

A Programming Environment Evaluation Methodology for Object-Oriented Systems

The object-oriented design strategy as both a problem decomposition and system development paradigm has made impressive inroads into the various areas of the computing sciences. Substantial development productivity improvements have been demonstrated in areas ranging from artificial intelligence to user interface design. However, there has been very little progress in the formal characterization of these productivity improvements and in the identification of the underlying cognitive mechanisms. The development and validation of models and metrics of this sort require large amounts of systematically-gathered structural and productivity data. There has, however, been a notable lack of systematically-gathered information on these development environments. A large part of this problem is attributable to the lack of a systematic programming environment evaluation methodology that is appropriate to the evaluation of object-oriented systems

Natural language processing

Beginning with the basic issues of NLP, this chapter aims to chart the major research activities in this area since the last ARIST Chapter in 1996 (Haas, 1996), including: (i) natural language text processing systems - text summarization, information extraction, information retrieval, etc., including domain-specific applications; (ii) natural language interfaces; (iii) NLP in the context of www and digital libraries ; and (iv) evaluation of NLP systems

Enhancing Small Group Teaching in Plant Sciences: A Research and Development Project in Higher Education

The Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge uses a range of learning and teaching environments including lectures, practical laboratories and small group tutorials'. Under the auspices of the Cambridge-MIT Institute's Pedagogy Programme, a two-year research and development project concerned with the development of small-group teaching is being undertaken. The research element of this project endeavours to illuminate current practice and identify areas in which evidence-based development might take place. The development element will include professional development activities and the production of curriculum resources including appropriate online material. This is a multi-method study including a series of student questionnaires; focus groups of students; semi-structured interviews with staff members; and the collection of video of small group teaching. In this paper we report selected findings from the 'student data' of the first year of this project.The questionnaire, conducted with two cohorts of students (2nd and 3rd year Undergraduates), used a double-scale questionnaire in which students were asked to report both on the prevalence of a range of teaching and learning practices and on how valuable these were in supporting their learning. This type of questionnaire instrument is particularly appropriate because the data it generates is suggestive of areas for changes in practice. The gaps between 'practices' and 'values' (across both cohorts) suggested that students valued activities which improved their understanding of how elements of the course were interrelated; which related course content to 'authentic' examples; and those in which teachers made explicit the characteristics of 'high quality' student work. Small group teaching, in the view of most students, was best used to extend and explore concepts introduced in lectures rather than simply reinforcing them or assessing student understanding.Data gathered through focus group activities illuminated the questionnaire data, providing detailed accounts of how students managed their own learning, and the roles played in this by lectures, small group teaching and other resources. Students identified the processes of planning and writing essays as key learning activities during which they integrated diverse course content and reflected on problematic knowledge. Questionnaire and focus group data suggested that students had less clear views regarding the value of collaborative learning, peer-assessment or activities such as making presentations to other students. When students talked in positive terms about these activities, they often referred to the learning benefits of preparation for the tasks rather than of the collaborative activities themselves. These views may provide indications of potential barriers to changes in learning and teaching environments, and suggest that any such changes may have to be carefully justified to students in terms of benefits to their own learning. Many of our findings are broadly in accord with other work on teaching and learning in Higher Education settings (such as the 'Oxford Learning Context Project' and the 'Enhancing Teaching-Learning Environments in Undergraduate Courses' Project) in that 'deep learning' and 'authenticity' in learning activities are valued by students, and that the introduction of specific formative practices (such as sharing notions of 'quality') would be welcomed. At the same time, amongst the students in our sample, a view of learning as an individual process of 'learning-as-acquisition' predominates over a view that it is a social process of 'learning-as-participation', and this will inform the planning of the 'development' aspect of the project. We conclude with a discussion of how the approach we have used might be more widely applied both within and beyond the Cambridge-MIT partnership. We also identify potential affordances of, and barriers to, the development of research-informed teaching in Higher Education