Assessment, Evaluations and Definitions of Research Impact: A Review

This article aims to explore what is understood by the term ‘research impact’ and to provide a comprehensive assimilation of available literature and information, drawing on global experiences to understand the potential for methods and frameworks of impact assessment being implemented for UK impact assessment. We take a more focused look at the impact component of the UK Research Excellence Framework taking place in 2014 and some of the challenges to evaluating impact and the role that systems might play in the future for capturing the links between research and impact and the requirements we have for these systems.Jisc [DIINN10

Learning Economics by Servicing: a Mexican Experience of Service-Learning in Microenterprises

This paper presents an experience of a service learning program in underprivileged Microenterprises. An aspect that turns out to be original as compared to other contributions in literature is the explicit assessment of the impact of the program on the enterprises, since most of the related studies focus on evaluating the students experience and impact on learning derived from participation. The paper suggests that service learning programs with the participation of college students can play an important role both in supporting disadvantaged microenterprises and in providing meaningful learning experiences to students.

Evaluating watershed management projects:

Watershed projects play an increasingly important role in managing soil and water resources throughout the world. Research is needed to ensure that new projects draw upon lessons from their predecessors' experiences. However, the technical and social complexities of watershed projects make evaluation difficult. Quantitative and qualitative evaluation methods, which traditionally have been used separately, both have strengths and weaknesses. Combining them can make evaluation more effective, particularly when constraints to study design exist. This paper presents mixed-methods approaches for evaluating watershed projects. A recent evaluation in India provides illustrations.

The role of emotion in design reflection

Reflection on design processes performed by designers is called design reflection. In our view, this kind of reflection aims at answering essential questions like “Is my design answering the stakeholder concerns?”, “Am I solving the essential problems or am I wasting time on irrelevant aspects?”, “Does the result feel satisfactory or are further iterations necessary?”, “Does my design obey the rules of conceptual integrity and aesthetics?”, and “Is my design process appropriate for the problem?”. Design reflection is important since it can improve the design process and the product being designed (Reymen, 2001). It can also help the designers to learn from their experiences, i.e. their thoughts and feelings, and to improve their professional capabilities. Recent design research recognised the need for stimulating reflection, including the development of supporting methods (Badke-Schaub et al., 1999; Reymen, 2001; Schön, 1983; and Valkenburg, 2000). Reflection is, however, often interpreted as evaluating the design rationally, giving no explicit place for emotions. For answering the questions mentioned above, we state that both feelings and thoughts are important. We advocate a balanced approach in which both rationality and emotions play a role. The underlying idea is that we hope that balanced answers to essential questions lead to balanced design decisions and to a balanced design process. The goal of this paper is to explore the possibilities of letting emotions play a role in design related reflection processes. The exploration is partially based on our experiences with a\ud method that supports reflection on design processes; a description and discussion of the method can be found in (Reymen, 2001). This paper introduces the concepts emotion, reflection, and design reflection and with exploring their relations. Based on these insights, the paper continues with describing a prescriptive model of a reflection process in which emotions of designers and stakeholders play an important role

Together towards improvement : pre-school education

This document has been designed to help all those involved with the provision of pre-school education to improve their current practice through a process of self-evaluation. - The materials provide guidance on: - the points to be considered by a pre-school centre that is planning to use the process of self-evaluation; - the key features of self-evaluation; - identifying the focus for self-evaluation; - indicators of quality; - carrying out the process; and - planning for action

Theories of Revolution: A Latin American Perspective

Socialistic revolutions in the twentieth century have not followed the patterns suggested by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. However, Marxist analysis remains useful in Latin America as a guide for making and evaluating revolution. Because the class structure of Latin America differs from that of the First World, the peasantry and proletariat play a larger role in making revolution. In the experiences of Nicaragua and El Salvador, the ideology of the revolutionary organizations evolved in response to the permissive world context. Future revolutionaries can learn many lessons from the contributions (as well as from the errors) of the FSLN and the FMLN

Understanding the fidelity effect when evaluating games with children

There have been a number of studies that have compared evaluation results from prototypes of different fidelities but very few of these are with children. This paper reports a comparative study of three prototypes ranging from low fidelity to high fidelity within the context of mobile games, using a between subject design with 37 participants aged 7 to 9. The children played a matching game on either an iPad, a paper prototype using screen shots of the actual game or a sketched version. Observational data was captured to establish the usability problems, and two tools from the Fun Toolkit were used to measure user experience. The results showed that there was little difference for user experience between the three prototypes and very few usability problems were unique to a specific prototype. The contribution of this paper is that children using low-fidelity prototypes can effectively evaluate games of this genre and style

Evaluating Singleplayer and Multiplayer in Human Computation Games

Human computation games (HCGs) can provide novel solutions to intractable computational problems, help enable scientific breakthroughs, and provide datasets for artificial intelligence. However, our knowledge about how to design and deploy HCGs that appeal to players and solve problems effectively is incomplete. We present an investigatory HCG based on Super Mario Bros. We used this game in a human subjects study to investigate how different social conditions---singleplayer and multiplayer---and scoring mechanics---collaborative and competitive---affect players' subjective experiences, accuracy at the task, and the completion rate. In doing so, we demonstrate a novel design approach for HCGs, and discuss the benefits and tradeoffs of these mechanics in HCG design.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, 2 table

A Palette of Deepened Emotions: Exploring Emotional Challenge in Virtual Reality Games

Recent work introduced the notion of ‘emotional challenge’promising for understanding more unique and diverse player experiences (PX). Although emotional challenge has immediately attracted HCI researchers’ attention, the concept has not been experimentally explored, especially in virtual reality (VR), one of the latest gaming environments. We conducted two experiments to investigate how emotional challenge affects PX when separately from or jointly with conventional challenge in VR and PC conditions. We found that relatively exclusive emotional challenge induced a wider range of different emotions in both conditions, while the adding of emotional challenge broadened emotional responses only in VR. In both experiments, VR significantly enhanced the measured PX of emotional responses, appreciation, immersion and presence. Our findings indicate that VR may be an ideal medium to present emotional challenge and also extend the understanding of emotional (and conventional) challenge in video games