Making masks for Maui: Keeping the macro task in mind

New Zealand primary school children in technology lessons often design and create an artifact in response to a scenario that relates to their interests and experiences. Usually the task is undertaken over several days. In this paper we draw on data generated within the INSiTE study, a three-year study exploring the nature of effective student-teacher interactions around science and technology ideas. The teacher in this paper planned for her children to create a mask for their forthcoming school production: 'How Maui found the secret of fire'. As the children worked on the macro task, that of designing and making a mask, meso and micro tasks emerged. The teacher assisted the children to identity and resolve these, hearing in mind that the ultimate aim was their successful participation in the school production. When teachers assist children to maintain a focus on the overall or macro task goals their artifact fulfils the specifications of the scenario and children's technology understandings and skills are fostered

Criterion-referenced measurement: Its main applications, problems and findings

The need for criterion-referenced measurements has mainly arisen from the introduction of instructional programs organized according to modern principles from educational technology. Some of these programs are discussed, and it is indicated for what purposes criterion-referenced measurements are used. Three main problems of criterion-referenced measurement are distinguished: The problem of criterion-referenced scoring and score interpretation, the problem of criterion-referenced item and test analysis, and the problem of mastery testing. For each of these problems a variety of solutions of the paper to provide an overview of these and to introduce the reader to the original literature

Towards the architecture of an instructional multimedia database

The applicability of multimedia databases in education may be extended if they can serve multiple target groups, leading to affordable costs per unit for the user. In this contribution, an approach is described to build generic multimedia databases to serve that purpose. This approach is elaborated within the ODB Project ('Instructional Design of an Optical DataBase'); the term optical refers to the use of optical storage media to hold the audiovisual components. The project aims at developing a database in which a hypermedia encyclopedia is combined with instructional multimedia applications for different target groups at different educational levels. The architecture of the Optical Database will allow for switching between application types while working (for instance from tutorial instruction via the encyclopedia to a simulation and back). For instruction, the content of the database is thereby organized around so-called standard instruction routes: one route per target group. In the project, the teacher is regarded as the manager of instruction.\ud \ud From that perspective, the database is primarily organized as a teaching facility. Central to the research is the condition that the architecture of the Optical Database has to enable teachers to select and tailor instruction routes to their needs in a way that is perceived as logical and easy to use

Mathematics Education at U.S. Public Two-Year Colleges

In this chapter I synthesize past and current research conducted at U.S. public two-year colleges and propose future directions for research in this context. The chapter is organized into four sections. In the first section I present a summary of the evolution of public two-year colleges, also known as community colleges, to provide a context for the work described here. The section includes a brief overview of the main characteristics of this particularly American postsecondary institution. The next two sections review mathematics education research conducted at two-year colleges between 1975 and 2004 and more recent work done since 2005. The final section is devoted to future directions for research in this context.National Science Foundation through grants DRL-0745474 and DRL REESE #0910240.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/117629/1/Mesa MathEd2YRColl_PreProduction.pd

Improving the Distribution of Densities in Southern California

Many of the biggest transportation challenges in Southern California arise not due to its overall density but due to the lack of concentration of densities. While recent years have witnessed increasing efforts to expand public transit services and encourage compact development in transit areas, there is a dearth of research providing support for improving the distribution of densities in the region. This project adopts a simultaneous equation modeling (SEM) approach to reveal the complexity of parcel-level (residential) land use intensification dynamics in a five-county Southern California metropolitan region with emphasis on the importance of reciprocal interactions between current and planned land use changes and the critical role of public transit accessibility. Results suggest that residential densification and upzoning processes reinforce each other. Urban residential upzoning can promote the probability of parcel-level residential densification significantly, even though it does not always lead to an immediate market response in every location. More importantly, the residential density increases are found to induce further plan/zoning modifications in nearby areas, indicating the presence of feedback loops in this dynamic relationship. There is also evidence of the positive influence of public transit accessibility. Single-family residential land parcels with greater access to high-quality transit services show a higher level of densification and upzoning probabilities, when all other conditions are held constant. Such positive effects are detected not only in existing high-quality transit areas but also in locations where public transit services will be available in the future

Parameterized Construction of Program Representations for Sparse Dataflow Analyses

Data-flow analyses usually associate information with control flow regions. Informally, if these regions are too small, like a point between two consecutive statements, we call the analysis dense. On the other hand, if these regions include many such points, then we call it sparse. This paper presents a systematic method to build program representations that support sparse analyses. To pave the way to this framework we clarify the bibliography about well-known intermediate program representations. We show that our approach, up to parameter choice, subsumes many of these representations, such as the SSA, SSI and e-SSA forms. In particular, our algorithms are faster, simpler and more frugal than the previous techniques used to construct SSI - Static Single Information - form programs. We produce intermediate representations isomorphic to Choi et al.'s Sparse Evaluation Graphs (SEG) for the family of data-flow problems that can be partitioned per variables. However, contrary to SEGs, we can handle - sparsely - problems that are not in this family

Exploiting implicit parallelism in SPARC instruction execution

One way to increase the performance of a processing unit is to exploit implicit parallelism. Exploiting this parallelism requires a processor to dynamically select instructions in a serial instruction stream which can be executed in parallel. As operations are computed concurrently, an execution speedup will occur. This thesis studies how effectively implicit parallelism could be exploited in the Scalable Pro cessor Architecture (SPARC)[9], a reduced instruction set architecture developed by Sun Microsystems. First an analysis of SPARC instruction traces will determine the optimal speedup that would be realized by a processor with infinite resources. Next, an analytical model of a parallelizing processor will be developed and used to predict the effects of limited resources on optimal speedup. Lastly, a SPARC simulator will be employed to determine the actual speedup of resource limited configurations, and the results will be correlated with the analytical model

Culturally Sensitive IS Teaching: Lessons Learned to Manage Motivation Issues

This paper seeks to raise awareness of culturally sensitive teaching that is largely overlooked in the IS teaching community. In a global, networked environment commonly faced by the contemporary business or academic world, it is imperative to prepare future IT professionals with adequate cultural understanding of such a multicultural environment in which their future work practice will engage. Derived from a teaching case situated in the context of HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) in the US, this paper narrates and reflects cultural issues and challenges that are increasingly prevalent in today‟s education systems. More specifically, the study analyzes motivational issues that are commonly observed in a homogeneous student group and provides practice lessons to help educators who might face similar issues in their teaching context to manage those issues. Insights gained from the study help reflect the significance of developing culturally sensitive pedagogy that might require future IS educators‟ and researchers‟ attention