A review of the effects of computer-based reading programs on middle school students

With increases in the availability of technology in the classroom many educators are looking to computer-based reading programs to help close the gap in student reading achievement. The purpose of this review is to examine research on computer-based reading programs meant to improve reading achievement in middle school students in grades 6-8. Over thirty peer-reviewed journal articles and professional papers within the last 10 years were critically analyzed. The research evidence showed inconsistency about the effects of Accelerated Reader on middle school students, the mixed results of computer-based reading programs on at-risk students, and the positive results of a balanced literacy program on reading achievement. Educators should approach computer-based programs with caution due to the mixed results found in studies reviewed for this literature review. Future research is needed to fully understand the magnitude and causes for the mixed results

The role of gender in students’ ratings of teaching quality in computer science and environmental engineering

Students’ ratings of teaching quality on course units in computer science and environmental engineering at a large Swedish university were obtained using the Course Experience Questionnaire; 8,888 sets of ratings were obtained from men and 4,280 sets were obtained from women over ten academic years. There were differences in the ratings given by students taking the two programs; in particular, teachers tended to receive higher ratings in subjects that were less typical for their gender than in subjects that were more typical for their gender. There were differences in the ratings given to male and female teachers, differences in the ratings given by male and female students, and interactions between these two effects. There was no systematic trend for students to give different ratings to teachers of the same gender as themselves compared with teachers of the other gender. Nevertheless, without exception even the statistically significant effects were small in magnitude and unlikely to be of theoretical or practical importance. It is concluded that the causes of differences in the career progression of male and female teachers in engineering education need to be sought elsewhere.   

Artificial Intellignce: Art or Science?

Computer programs are new kinds of machines with great potential for improving the quality of life. In particular, expert systems could improve the ability of the small, weak and poor members of society to access the information they need to solve their problems. However, like most areas of computing, expert systems design is currently practiced as an art. In order to realise its potential it must also become an engineering science: providing the kinds of assurances of reliability that are normal in other branches of engineering. The way to do this is to put the techniques used to build expert systems and other artificial intelligence programs onto a sound theoretical foundation. The tools of mathematical logic appear to be a good basis for doing this, but we need to be imaginative in their use-not restricting ourselves to the kind of deductive reasoning usually thought of as 'logical', but investigating other aspects of reasoning, including uncertain reasoning, making conjectures and the guidance of inference. Acknow ledgement

Moral Turbulence and the Infusion of Multimodal Character Education Strategies in American Elementary Schools

Pockets of American society are marked by increase in violent crime with concurrent decline in moral character. This phenomenon is infiltrating the nation’s school system as evidenced by growing numbers of aggressive incidents in the classroom. As a result, there is an increasingly accepted need for effective character education programs in the schools as a means to help change the décolleté trajectory of the behavior of the nation’s school children. While more money and growing numbers of legislation have been put forth to support such an endeavor, research is still lacking as to what activities, skills, goals, and approaches would be best incorporated for optimal outcomes. This article makes a case for assessing the effectiveness of a multimodal approach incorporating cognitive, social, and sociocultural learning elements is than a single approach using cognitive elements alone, and considers the complexity of a Christian perspective on character education in schools

Immigrant Youth and Digital Disparty in California

This study addresses three key research questions regarding immigrant youth and the digital divide:What are the patterns of home technology use among native-born and immigrant families and youth?What are the causes and consequences of the digital divide for immigrant families and youth?How does technology at CTCs in California benefit immigrant families and youth

Symbolic Partial-Order Execution for Testing Multi-Threaded Programs

We describe a technique for systematic testing of multi-threaded programs. We combine Quasi-Optimal Partial-Order Reduction, a state-of-the-art technique that tackles path explosion due to interleaving non-determinism, with symbolic execution to handle data non-determinism. Our technique iteratively and exhaustively finds all executions of the program. It represents program executions using partial orders and finds the next execution using an underlying unfolding semantics. We avoid the exploration of redundant program traces using cutoff events. We implemented our technique as an extension of KLEE and evaluated it on a set of large multi-threaded C programs. Our experiments found several previously undiscovered bugs and undefined behaviors in memcached and GNU sort, showing that the new method is capable of finding bugs in industrial-size benchmarks.Comment: Extended version of a paper presented at CAV'2

Using Negotiation to Reduce Redundant Autonomous Mobile Program Movements

Distributed load managers exhibit thrashing where tasks are repeatedly moved between locations due to incomplete global load information. This paper shows that systems of Autonomous Mobile Programs (AMPs) exhibit the same behaviour, identifying two types of redundant movement and terming them greedy effects. AMPs are unusual in that, in place of some external load management system, each AMP periodically recalculates network and program parameters and may independently move to a better execution environment. Load management emerges from the behaviour of collections of AMPs. The paper explores the extent of greedy effects by simulation, and then proposes negotiating AMPs (NAMPs) to ameliorate the problem. We present the design of AMPs with a competitive negotiation scheme (cNAMPs), and compare their performance with AMPs by simulation

Causality, Information and Biological Computation: An algorithmic software approach to life, disease and the immune system

Biology has taken strong steps towards becoming a computer science aiming at reprogramming nature after the realisation that nature herself has reprogrammed organisms by harnessing the power of natural selection and the digital prescriptive nature of replicating DNA. Here we further unpack ideas related to computability, algorithmic information theory and software engineering, in the context of the extent to which biology can be (re)programmed, and with how we may go about doing so in a more systematic way with all the tools and concepts offered by theoretical computer science in a translation exercise from computing to molecular biology and back. These concepts provide a means to a hierarchical organization thereby blurring previously clear-cut lines between concepts like matter and life, or between tumour types that are otherwise taken as different and may not have however a different cause. This does not diminish the properties of life or make its components and functions less interesting. On the contrary, this approach makes for a more encompassing and integrated view of nature, one that subsumes observer and observed within the same system, and can generate new perspectives and tools with which to view complex diseases like cancer, approaching them afresh from a software-engineering viewpoint that casts evolution in the role of programmer, cells as computing machines, DNA and genes as instructions and computer programs, viruses as hacking devices, the immune system as a software debugging tool, and diseases as an information-theoretic battlefield where all these forces deploy. We show how information theory and algorithmic programming may explain fundamental mechanisms of life and death.Comment: 30 pages, 8 figures. Invited chapter contribution to Information and Causality: From Matter to Life. Sara I. Walker, Paul C.W. Davies and George Ellis (eds.), Cambridge University Pres