Using graded questions to increase timely reading of assigned material

We assigned students in a personality psychology class graded long-answer questions in an attempt to increase their likelihood of reading assigned class material in a timely manner. We evaluated the effectiveness of this technique by examining exam scores and student evaluations. Students performed significantly better on the exam questions that were related to the topics covered by the long-answer questions than they did on exam questions related to other topics. Students also reported having read significantly more of the assigned material when there was a long-answer question as-signed, and they evaluated the method positively and recommended its use in future classes. In an attempt to increase students' comprehension of material presented during lectures, course instructors often as-sign readings to their students before each class. Unfortunately, many students do not read the assigned mate-rial prior to class; in fact, compliance with reading assigned material has decreased in recent years (Burchfield & Sappington, 2000). Students tend to postpone preparation until a few days immediately preceding the tests (Thorne, 2000). Failing to complete readings before class is a strong predictor of nonparticipation (Karp & Yoels, 1976) and negatively affects students' learning and achievement (Bur-roughs, Kearney, & Plax, 1989). Despite the potential and known benefits of reading the assigned material before class, such as enhancing the comprehension of lecture material (Solomon, 1979), motivating students to read may not be an easy task, especially when students are not given an incentive to do so. Carkenord (1994) stated "practical experience … indicates that most students don't read textbooks or journal articles as a result of their intrinsic interest and desire to learn" (p. 164). Accordingly, Burchfield and Sappington (2000) recommended the use of strategies to monitor timely reading compliance and claimed that not doing so would send a message to students that this aspect of learning is optional and of little concern to the instructor. One strategy to monitor and encourage read-ing compliance is the use of quizzes (e.g., Marchant, 2002; Ruscio, 2001); however, quizzes can create undue anxiety in some students. In this study, we tested an alternative strategy to increase the likelihood that students would read the as-signed material prior to class: graded long-answer questions based on the assigned reading material. In particular, we tested whether graded assignments based on assigned readings would increase students' timely reading of the materia

Doing visual criminology: Learning from documentary, journalism and sociology

We begin the chapter with this question: how does the work of practicing criminologists relate to that of forensic criminologists? To answer this, we must understand first what forensic crim-inology is, and how it – as a practical sub-branch of criminology – diverges from the more theo-retical community. To understand why those studying crime and criminals need to be aware of what their forensic counterparts are doing, we also need to highlight the areas where forensic criminology is applied. This will introduce our argument for how forensic criminology uses well known criminological research concepts and methods in a forensic capacity, to educate and answer questions for stakeholders working in the criminal justice system. We will explain, us-ing examples, the methods used by forensic criminologists to apply theoretical knowledge to the study of individuals, including differentiating between inductive and deductive logic. We will describe how forensic criminologists use structured professional judgement as a research method to make conclusions which are of practical use to investigators, advocates, and the court. Finally, we will compare and contrast how research in forensic criminology relates to more traditional endeavours, highlighting the different role that theory plays in the development of research questions across the two branches of the discipline

Perancangan dan Pembuatan Ujian SIM digital Portable

In today's personal trasnaportasi tool is something very impor-tant. Because with this tool will facilitate the transportation of human and shorten the journey time. To drive a personal transport equipment such as gasoline-fueled vehicles must have a driver's license. Where to get a SIM that person must take exams but at the implementation of the SIM test occurs much cheating that occurs as mencotek, hire jockeys exam. From problems above hence made this tool that serves to pre-vent the cheating that happened and facilitate the examinees in answer-ing exam questions SIM. This tool is a 240x64 pixel sized graphic LCD, keypad, and an SD card which united in a system where the SD card is a storage problem and save the value of the test results. Each question is displayed on the LCD graphic comes from the SD card. For an SD Card reading LCD display to the graphics used SPI communication, which in this communication as a master minimum ATMega128 system in the delivery of data and the SD Card as a slave. Keypad to enter the tool as the answer to every question was answered and also to forward a reply. To avoid the fraud that occurred during the test SIM then the tool is made in the system of random questions, random questions will change the order in question so that the participants a different sequence to another exam. Keywords: ATMega128, Random question, MMC / SD card, 240x64 graphic LCD, 4x4 keypa

What Does Globalization Have to Do with the Erosion of Welfare States? Sorting Out the Issues. CES Germany & Europe Working Papers, No. 07.5, 1996

Is it really true that the economic processes described as globalization are eroding West European and North Ameri­ can welfare states (WS) ? This paper is a first step in a project aimed at answering the question. Focusing on conflict­ ing arguments about the economic mechanisms which generate pressures on WS, it groups them into three answers to the title question: globalization has everything, nothing, or something to do with it. Tentatively concluding that the third answer, that domestic and international economic mechanisms do interact in specific ways to strain WS, it sets the stage for the second stage of the project. That is to analyze the political mechanisms shaping the policy re­ sponses to those strains and perhaps themselves contributing to those strains. To expore the issues to be addressed in this second step. a brief preliminary exploration of recent social policy patterns suggests that domestic political fac­ tors go a long way toward explaining them without much recourse to globalization, especially in the U.S. but also, if to a lesser extent, in Western Europe

Simple and Effective Multi-Paragraph Reading Comprehension

We consider the problem of adapting neural paragraph-level question answering models to the case where entire documents are given as input. Our proposed solution trains models to produce well calibrated confidence scores for their results on individual paragraphs. We sample multiple paragraphs from the documents during training, and use a shared-normalization training objective that encourages the model to produce globally correct output. We combine this method with a state-of-the-art pipeline for training models on document QA data. Experiments demonstrate strong performance on several document QA datasets. Overall, we are able to achieve a score of 71.3 F1 on the web portion of TriviaQA, a large improvement from the 56.7 F1 of the previous best system.Comment: 11 pages, updated a referenc

Analyzing the Behavior of Visual Question Answering Models

Recently, a number of deep-learning based models have been proposed for the task of Visual Question Answering (VQA). The performance of most models is clustered around 60-70%. In this paper we propose systematic methods to analyze the behavior of these models as a first step towards recognizing their strengths and weaknesses, and identifying the most fruitful directions for progress. We analyze two models, one each from two major classes of VQA models -- with-attention and without-attention and show the similarities and differences in the behavior of these models. We also analyze the winning entry of the VQA Challenge 2016. Our behavior analysis reveals that despite recent progress, today's VQA models are "myopic" (tend to fail on sufficiently novel instances), often "jump to conclusions" (converge on a predicted answer after 'listening' to just half the question), and are "stubborn" (do not change their answers across images).Comment: 13 pages, 20 figures; To appear in EMNLP 201