Self-Assessments of Knowledge: Where Do We Go From Here?

[Excerpt] In this paper, we argue that there remain several unanswered questions surrounding self-assessments of knowledge that must be addressed before we can reach a more definitive conclusion on the viability of these measures. The answers to these questions may provide further evidence that self-assessments should not be used as an indicator of learning or they may serve to qualify the conditions under which self-assessments can be used with reasonable confidence. In either case, addressing these issues is critical if work in this area is to influence how researchers and practitioners evaluate trainees’ learning

The Skills Shortage and the Payoff to Vocational Education

[Excerpt] Skill demands also appear to be rising within occupations. Increasing numbers of manufacturing workers are working in production cells in which every member of the team is expected to learn every job. Production workers are being given responsibilities--quality checking, statistical process control (SPC) record keeping, resetting machines shown by SPC to be straying from target dimensions, redesigning the layout of the machines in the production cell--that used to be the sole province of supervisors, specialized technicians and industrial engineers. What implications do these changes in skill demands have for the payoff to high school vocational education? Are workers who develop the technical skills taught in trade and technical programs, in fact, more productive when they get a job in the field? Are the skills taught in these programs still valued by the labor market? Has the payoff to high school vocational training increased along with the payoff to other skills? What changes in the way vocational education is delivered are implied by the tight labor markets for highly skilled workers? This paper attempts to answer these questions by examining four different kinds of evidence on the economic payoffs to occupationally specific training in high school

The Validity of a Brief Vestibular Disorientation Test in Screening Pilot Trainees

Validity of brief vestibular disorientation test in screening pilot trainee

Construction of an instrument for the measurement of educational philosophy

Thesis (M.Ed.)--Boston Universit

A review of studies mapping (or cross walking) from non-preference based measures of health to generic preference-based measures

This paper presents a systematic review of current practice in mapping between nonpreference based measures and generic preference-based measures. It reviews the studies identified by a systematic search of the published literature and the grey literature. This review seeks to address the feasibility and overall validity of this approach, the circumstances when it should be considered and to bring together any lessons for future mapping studies

The Effects of Departmental and Positional Power on Job Evaluation Outcomes: A Dual-Level Analysis of Power and Resource Allocation

We replicate research from two separate power and resource allocation research streams to test whether job evaluation outcomes at a university are simultaneously susceptible to effects of power held at both the group (i.e., academic department) and individual (i.e., a job\u27s hierarchical position) levels. In doing so, we illustrate limitations of the dominant rational model of research in job evaluation and, more generally, how dual levels of analysis can illuminate the relationship between power and resource allocation. We then investigate whether departmental and positional power interact in the allocation of resources at both levels. Results from six years of job evaluation data indicate that job evaluation outcomes are highly susceptible to both departmental and positional power. Moreover, our results suggest that positional power moderated the effect of departmental power on group level job evaluation successes. Drawing on our dual-level analysis, we propose a new model of power, resource allocation, and the perpetuation of power

Comparison of Support Vector Machine and Back Propagation Neural Network in Evaluating the Enterprise Financial Distress

Recently, applying the novel data mining techniques for evaluating enterprise financial distress has received much research alternation. Support Vector Machine (SVM) and back propagation neural (BPN) network has been applied successfully in many areas with excellent generalization results, such as rule extraction, classification and evaluation. In this paper, a model based on SVM with Gaussian RBF kernel is proposed here for enterprise financial distress evaluation. BPN network is considered one of the simplest and are most general methods used for supervised training of multilayered neural network. The comparative results show that through the difference between the performance measures is marginal; SVM gives higher precision and lower error rates.Comment: 13 pages, 1 figur

Educational Reform and Technical Education?

[Excerpt] Even though educational reform marches under a banner of economic renewal, the school subjects that appear to be most directly related to worker productivity-- business education, vocational education, economics, computers--have received little attention from reformers. The five core subjects proposed for periodic assessment are English, mathematics, science, history/civics and geography. Yet, if competitiveness is the objective, it is not clear why geography, a subject that is not taught in most American universities, has higher priority than subjects like computers, economics, management and technology? Some of the reform reports have expressed doubt about the economic benefits of vocational education (Committee on Economic Development 1986). Indeed, new graduation requirements introduced by reformers have contributed to an 8 percent reduction in vocational course taking between 1982and 1987

The effect of functional roles on group efficiency

The usefulness of ‘roles’ as a pedagogical approach to support small group performance can be often read, however, their effect is rarely empirically assessed. Roles promote cohesion and responsibility and decrease so-called ‘process losses’ caused by coordination demands. In addition, roles can increase awareness of intra-group interaction. In this article, the effect of functional roles on group performance, efficiency and collaboration during computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) was investigated with questionnaires and quantitative content analysis of e-mail communication. A comparison of thirty-three questionnaire observations, distributed over ten groups in two research conditions: role (n = 5, N = 14) and non-role (n = 5, N = 19), revealed no main effect for performance (grade). A latent variable was interpreted as ‘perceived group efficiency’ (PGE). Multilevel modelling (MLM) yielded a positive marginal effect of PGE. Groups in the role condition appear to be more aware of their efficiency, compared to groups in the ‘non-role’ condition, regardless whether the group performs well or poor. Content analysis reveals that students in the role condition contribute more ‘task content’ focussed statements. This is, however, not as hypothesised due to the premise that roles decrease coordination and thus increase content focused statements; in fact, roles appear to stimulate coordination and simultaneously the amount of ‘task content’ focussed statements increases