Student Attitude to Audio Versus Written Feedback

First year Biology at the University of Glasgow consists of two courses, 1A and 1B, with an annual intake of 750-800 students. Both courses consist of lectures, practical lab sessions, tutorials and discussion groups. With such large numbers of students, teaching methods and delivery continually change and develop to ensure best delivery of the course content. As such, assessment and feedback systems also need to remain current and accessible to all. Timely, instructive and developmental feedback on student work is arguably the most powerful single influence on a student’s ability to learn. As part of the transition from school into university, feedback is a recognised method of maximising student potential (Hattie and Timperley, 2007). Research shows that increasing student numbers and associated rise in marking workloads, means that feedback can be slow in returning to the student and lacking quality/detail (Glover and Brown, 2006). From the markers perspective there is some evidence that students fail to engage with, misinterpret or ignore written feedback. We have carried out a pilot study to apply, and attempt to build upon, principles of good feedback practice to the assessment of coursework. To do this, an essay assignment was submitted online by Biology 1A students, marked and written feedback provided to all. A randomly selected group of students (10% of the cohort) also received audio feedback (electronic audio files were imbedded into the student work and returned to them by e-mail) on their submitted work. All students then completed an anonymous ‘Feedback’ questionnaire detailing their experiences with the feedback they received, with additional questions that were answered solely by the ‘audio group’ asking more specific questions about the effectiveness of the audio feedback. To carry out this study, new technologies were utilised and these will be demonstrated at the meeting along with the study conclusions. Hattie, J. and Timperley, H. (2007) The power of feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77, 81–112 Glover, C. and Brown, E. (2006). Written Feedback for Students: too much, too detailed or too incomprehensible to be effective? Bioscience Education, 7

Husserl and Hilbert on Completeness and Husserl\u27s Term Rewrite-based Theory of Multiplicity (Invited Talk)

Hilbert and Husserl presented axiomatic arithmetic theories in different ways and proposed two different notions of \u27completeness\u27 for arithmetic, at the turning of the 20th Century (1900-1901). The former led to the completion axiom, the latter completion of rewriting. We look into the latter in comparison with the former. The key notion to understand the latter is the notion of definite multiplicity or manifold (Mannigfaltigkeit). We show that his notion of multiplicity is understood by means of term rewrite theory in a very coherent manner, and that his notion of \u27definite\u27 multiplicity is understood as the relational web (or tissue) structure, the core part of which is a \u27convergent\u27 term rewrite proof structure. We examine how Husserl introduced his term rewrite theory in 1901 in the context of a controversy with Hilbert on the notion of completeness, and in the context of solving the justification problem of the use of imaginaries in mathematics, which was an important issue in the foundations of mathematics in the period

Exploring reasons why Australian senior secondary students do not enrol in higher-level mathematics courses

In this research paper, I present the reasons why senior secondary students elect not to enrol in a higher mathematics course. All Year 11 and Year 12 mathematics students within Western Australian secondary schools were invited to participate in an online survey comprised chiefly of qualitative items. The key reasons espoused by students include an expressed dissatisfaction with mathematics, the opinion that there are other more viable courses of study to pursue, and that the Australian Tertiary Admissions Ranking (ATAR) can be maximised by taking a lower mathematics course. In addition, student testimony suggests that there are few incentives offered for undertaking a higher mathematics course

5d/4d U-dualities and N=8 black holes

We use the connection between the U-duality groups in d=5 and d=4 to derive properties of the N=8 black hole potential and its critical points (attractors). This approach allows to study and compare the supersymmetry features of different solutions.Comment: 23 pages, LaTeX; some notations cleared up; final version on Phys. Rev.

Implications of Fritzsch-like lepton mass matrices

Using seesaw mechanism and Fritzsch-like texture 6 zero and 5 zero lepton Dirac mass matrices, detailed predictions for cases pertaining to normal/inverted hierarchy as well as degenerate scenario of neutrino masses have been carried out. All the cases considered here pertaining to inverted hierarchy and degenerate scenario of neutrino masses are ruled out by the existing data. For the normal hierarchy cases, the lower limit of m_{\nu 1} and of s_{13} as well as the range of Dirac-like CP violating phase \delta would have implications for the texture 6 zero and texture 5 zero cases considered here.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures. Small changes to the previous version and a new reference adde

The Arithmetic of Fields

This is the report on the Oberwolfach workshop The Arithmetic of Fields, held in February 2006. Field Arithmetic (MSC 12E30) is a branch of mathematics concerned with studying the inner structure (orderings, valuations, arithmetic, diophantine properties) of fields and their algebraic extensions using Galois theory, algebraic geometry and number theory, partially in connection with model theoretical methods from mathematical logic

New results on rewrite-based satisfiability procedures

Program analysis and verification require decision procedures to reason on theories of data structures. Many problems can be reduced to the satisfiability of sets of ground literals in theory T. If a sound and complete inference system for first-order logic is guaranteed to terminate on T-satisfiability problems, any theorem-proving strategy with that system and a fair search plan is a T-satisfiability procedure. We prove termination of a rewrite-based first-order engine on the theories of records, integer offsets, integer offsets modulo and lists. We give a modularity theorem stating sufficient conditions for termination on a combinations of theories, given termination on each. The above theories, as well as others, satisfy these conditions. We introduce several sets of benchmarks on these theories and their combinations, including both parametric synthetic benchmarks to test scalability, and real-world problems to test performances on huge sets of literals. We compare the rewrite-based theorem prover E with the validity checkers CVC and CVC Lite. Contrary to the folklore that a general-purpose prover cannot compete with reasoners with built-in theories, the experiments are overall favorable to the theorem prover, showing that not only the rewriting approach is elegant and conceptually simple, but has important practical implications.Comment: To appear in the ACM Transactions on Computational Logic, 49 page

Ordering constraints on trees

We survey recent results about ordering constraints on trees and discuss their applications. Our main interest lies in the family of recursive path orderings which enjoy the properties of being total, well-founded and compatible with the tree constructors. The paper includes some new results, in particular the undecidability of the theory of lexicographic path orderings in case of a non-unary signature