Effectiveness of Two Keyboarding Instructional Approaches on the Keyboarding Speed, Accuracy, and Technique of Elementary Students

Background: Keyboarding skill development is important for elementary students. Limited research exists to inform practice on effective keyboarding instruction methods. Method: Using a quasi-experimental design, we examined the effectiveness of Keyboarding Without Tears® (n = 786) in the experimental schools compared to the control schools who used the district standard instructional approach of free web-based activities (n = 953) on improving keyboarding skills (speed, accuracy, and technique) in elementary students. Results: The results showed significant improvements in keyboarding speed and accuracy in all schools for all grades favoring the experimental schools compared to the control schools. Significant differences in improvements in keyboarding technique were found with large effect sizes favoring the experimental schools for kindergarten to the second grade and small effect sizes favoring the control schools for the third to fifth grade. Conclusion: Professionals involved in assisting with keyboarding skill development in children are recommended to begin training in these skills in early elementary grades, especially to assist in proper keyboarding technique development. While using free web-based activities are beneficial to improving keyboarding speed and accuracy, as well as keyboarding technique, using a developmentally-based curriculum, such as Keyboarding Without Tears®, may further enhance improvements in the keyboarding skills of elementary students

CONSISTENT AGGREGATION IN FOOD DEMAND SYSTEMS

Two aggregation schemes for food demand systems are tested for consistency with the Generalized Composite Commodity Theorem (GCCT). One scheme is based on the standard CES classification of food expenditures. The second scheme is based on the Food Guide Pyramid. Evidence is found that both schemes are consistent with the GCCT.Demand and Price Analysis,

Using formal metamodels to check consistency of functional views in information systems specification

UML notations require adaptation for applications such as Information Systems (IS). Thus we have defined IS-UML. The purpose of this article is twofold. First, we propose an extension to this language to deal with functional aspects of IS. We use two views to specify IS transactions: the first one is defined as a combination of behavioural UML diagrams (collaboration and state diagrams), and the second one is based on the definition of specific classes of an extended class diagram. The final objective of the article is to consider consistency issues between the various diagrams of an IS-UML specification. In common with other UML languages, we use a metamodel to define IS-UML. We use class diagrams to summarize the metamodel structure and a formal language, B, for the full metamodel. This allows us to formally express consistency checks and mapping rules between specific metamodel concepts. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Anomaly-matching and Higgs-less effective theories

We reconsider the low-energy effective theory for Higgs-less electroweak symmetry breaking: we study the anomaly-matching in the situation where all Goldstone fields disappear from the spectrum as a result of the Higgs mechanism. We find that the global SU(2)_L x SU(2)_R x U(1)_{B-L} symmetry of the underlying theory, which is spontaneously broken to SU(2)_{L+R} x U(1)_{B-L} has to be anomaly-free. For the sake of generality, we include the possibility of light spin-1/2 bound states resulting from the dynamics of the strongly-interacting symmetry-breaking sector, in addition to the Goldstone bosons. Such composite fermions may have non-standard couplings at the leading order, and an arbitrary total B-L charge. In order to perform the anomaly-matching in that case, we generalize the construction of the Wess-Zumino effective lagrangian. Composite fermions beyond the three known generations are theoretically allowed, and there are no restrictions from the anomaly-matching on their couplings nor on their U(1)_{B-L} charge. Absence of global anomalies for the composite sector as a whole does not preclude anomalous triple gauge boson couplings arising from composite fermion triangular diagrams. On the other hand, the trace of B-L over elementary fermions must vanish if all Goldstone modes are to disappear from the spectrum.Comment: Keywords: Anomalies in Field and String Theories, Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking, Beyond the Standard Model, Chiral Lagrangians. 33 pages, 7 figure