The effects of disclosure format on native advertising recognition and audience perceptions of legacy and online news publishers

This experiment with a representative sample of US adults (N=800) examines the effects of disclosure design characteristics in sponsored news on readers’ ability to recognize such content as paid advertising, and examines whether such recognition differently affects perceptions of legacy and digital-first publishers. Although fewer than 1 in 10 participants were able to recognize native advertising, our study shows that effectively designed disclosure labels facilitate recognition. However, participants who did recognize native advertising had lessened opinions of the publisher and the institution of advertising, overall.American Press Institut

Comprehensibility and the basic structures of dialogue

The study of what makes utterances difficult or easy to understand is one of the central topics of research in comprehension. It is both theoretically attractive and useful in practice. The more we know about difficulties in understanding the more we know about understanding. And the better we grasp typical problems of understanding in certain types of discourse and for certain recipients the better we can overcome these problems and the better we can advise people whose job it is to overcome such problems. It is therefore not surprising that comprehensibility has been the object of much reflection as far back as the days of classical rhetoric and that it is a center of lively interest in several present-day scientific disciplines, ranging from artificial intelligence and educational psychology to linguistics

The effects of label design characteristics on perceptions of genetically modified food

Objective. To explore the effects on perceptions of labelling food for genetically modified content. Background: there is increasing public pressure for the compulsory labelling of genetically modified food content on all food products, and yet little is known about how the design and content of such food labels will influence product perceptions. The current research draws upon warning label research - a field in which the effect of label design manipulations on perceptions of, and responses to, potential or perceived risks is well documented. Method. Two experiments are reported that investigate how label design features influence the perception of genetically modified foods. The effects of label colour (red, blue and green), wording style (definitive vs. probabilistic and explicit vs. non-explicit) and information source (government agency, consumer group and manufacturer) on hazard perceptions and purchase intentions were measured. Results. Hazard perceptions and purchase intentions were both influenced by label design characteristics in predictable ways. Any reference to genetic modification, even if the label is stating that the product is free of genetically modified ingredients, increased hazard perception, and decreased purchase intentions, relative to a no-label condition. Conclusion. Label design effects generalise from warning label research to influence the perception of genetically modified foods in predictable ways. Application. The design of genetically modified food labels. © 2012 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC

Patterns of uptake and repair following recasts and prompts in an EFL context: Does feedback explicitness play a role?

This study sought to examine the effectiveness of two categories of feedback, namely recasts and prompts. Also, the study focused on the relationship between subsets of each feedback type and the extent to which they led to learner uptake and repair in an EFL context. Data were collected through non-participant observations of three intact upper-intermediate EFL classes where 36 hours of interactions among 59 students and three teachers were audiotaped, transcribed, and analyzed in terms of pre-specified coding systems that addressed four different subtypes of prompts – clarification requests, repetitions, elicitations, and metalinguistic clues – and two recast subtypes – explicit and implicit recasts. Data analysis showed that among prompts, clarification requests led to the highest percentage of uptake whereas elicitations were associated with the highest repair percentage. As for recasts, more explicit ones led to higher percentages of uptake and repair. The results of the study may contribute to a more in-depth understanding of the patterns of uptake and repair in an EFL context. The study confirms the role of feedback explicitness in such a context

The Adaptation of East Asian Masters Students to Western Norms of Critical Thinking and Argumentation in the U.K.

The paper explores the adaptation experiences of East Asian masters students in the U.K. in dealing with Western academic norms of critical thinking and debate. Through in-depth interviewing, students’ perceptions of their learning experiences were explored, and stages in this adaptation process were identified, with various entry and exit routes. It was found that the majority of the students opt for a ‘Middle Way’ which synergises their own cultural approach to critical thinking with those aspects of Western style critical thinking and debate that are culturally acceptable to them

Catalytic Change: Lessons Learned from the Racial Justice Grantmaking Assessment

ARC and PRE designed the Racial Justice Grantmaking Assessment to help foundation staff and leaders understand the benefits of being explicit about racial equity, and to determine the degree to which their work is advancing racial justice. This report is based on the pilot process, and is intended to share insights into some of the barriers within the philanthropic sector that stand in the way of achieving racial justice outcomes. It is organized into five segments:This introduction, which provides brief profiles of ARC and PRE, and of the assessment team;A description of the assessment process, including definitions, assumptions, and methodology;An overview of the assessments of the Consumer Health Foundation and the Barr Foundation, including brief profiles of each, summary findings, recommendations, and impacts to date;Lessons learned from the pilot process by the ARC-PRE assessment team; andAppendices with more detailed findings, recommendations, and initial impacts for each foundation

Investigating examiner interventions in relation to the listening demands they make on candidates in oral interview tests

Examiners intervene in second language oral interviews in order to elicit intended language functions, to probe a candidate’s proficiency level or to keep the interaction going. Interventions of this kind can affect the candidate’s output language and score, since the candidate is obliged to process them as a listener and respond to them as a speaker. This chapter reports on a study that examined forty audio-recorded interviews of the oral test of a major European examination board, with a view to examining examiner interventions (i.e., questions, comments) in relation to the listening demands they make upon candidates. Half of the interviews involved candidates who scored highly on the test while the other half featured low-scoring candidates. This enabled a comparison of the language and behaviour of the same examiner across candidate proficiency levels, to see how they were modified in response to the communicative competence of the candidate. The recordings were transcribed and analyzed with regard to a) types of examiner intervention in terms of linguistic and pragmatic features and b) the extent to which the interventions varied in response to the proficiency level of the candidate. The study provides a new insight into examiner-examinee interactions, by identifying how examiners are differentiating listening demands according to the task types and the perceived proficiency level of the candidate. It offers several implications about the ways in which examiner interventions engage candidates’ listening skills, and the ways in which listening skills can be more validly and reliably measured when using a format based on examiner-candidate interaction

The Middle Way: East Asian masters students’ perceptions of critical argumentation in U.K. universities.

The paper explores the learning experiences of East Asian masters students in dealing with Western academic norms of critical thinking in classroom debate and assignment writing. The research takes a cultural approach, and employs grounded theory and case study methodology, the aims being for students to explain their perceptions of their personal learning journeys. The data suggest that the majority of students interviewed rejected full academic acculturation into Western norms of argumentation. They instead opted for a ‘Middle Way’ that synergizes the traditional cultural academic values held by many East Asian students with those elements of Western academic norms that are perceived to be aligned with these. This is a relatively new area of research which represents a challenge for British lecturers and students

SHAPING A CONSTRUCTIVIST VIEW OF ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN SCIENCE

The so-called rigor–relevance gap appears unbridgeable in the classical view o organization science, which is based on the physical sciences' model. Constructivist scholar have also pointed out a certain inadequacy of this model of science for organization research but they have not offered an explicit, alternative model of science. Responding to this lack, this paper brings together the two separate paradigmati perspectives of constructivist epistemologies and of organizational design science, and show how they could jointly constitute the ingredients of a constructivism-founded scientifi paradigm for organization research. Further, the paper highlights that, in this constructivis view of organizational design science, knowledge can be generated and used in ways that ar mutually enriching for academia and practice.constructivist epistemological paradigms; sciences of the artificial; design sciences;interpretive methods; rigor

RevBayes: Bayesian Phylogenetic Inference Using Graphical Models and an Interactive Model-Specification Language.

Programs for Bayesian inference of phylogeny currently implement a unique and fixed suite of models. Consequently, users of these software packages are simultaneously forced to use a number of programs for a given study, while also lacking the freedom to explore models that have not been implemented by the developers of those programs. We developed a new open-source software package, RevBayes, to address these problems. RevBayes is entirely based on probabilistic graphical models, a powerful generic framework for specifying and analyzing statistical models. Phylogenetic-graphical models can be specified interactively in RevBayes, piece by piece, using a new succinct and intuitive language called Rev. Rev is similar to the R language and the BUGS model-specification language, and should be easy to learn for most users. The strength of RevBayes is the simplicity with which one can design, specify, and implement new and complex models. Fortunately, this tremendous flexibility does not come at the cost of slower computation; as we demonstrate, RevBayes outperforms competing software for several standard analyses. Compared with other programs, RevBayes has fewer black-box elements. Users need to explicitly specify each part of the model and analysis. Although this explicitness may initially be unfamiliar, we are convinced that this transparency will improve understanding of phylogenetic models in our field. Moreover, it will motivate the search for improvements to existing methods by brazenly exposing the model choices that we make to critical scrutiny. RevBayes is freely available at http://www.RevBayes.com [Bayesian inference; Graphical models; MCMC; statistical phylogenetics.]