The use of homework grades to compute final course grades in a college preparatory chemistry class

Includes bibliographical references

Building the foundations of professional expertise: creating a dialectic between work and formal learning

Recent critiques of management and teacher education curricula and teaching pay particular attention to the disconnection between the de-contextualised, formal knowledge and analytical techniques conveyed in university programs and the messy, ill-structured nature of practice. At the same time research into professional expertise suggests that its development requires bringing together different forms of knowledge and the integration of formal and non-formal learning with the development of cognitive flexibility. Such complex learning outcomes are unlikely to be achieved through a 'knowledge transmission' approach to curriculum design. In this article we argue that in many ways current higher education practices create barriers to developing ways of knowing which can underpin the formation of expertise. Using examples from two practice-focused distance learning courses, we explore the role of distance learning in enabling a dialogue between academic and workplace learning and the use of 'practice dialogues' among course participants to enable integration of learning experiences. Finally, we argue that we need to find ways in higher education of enabling students to engage in relevant communities of expertise, rather than drawing them principally into a community of academic discourse which is not well aligned with practice

Multi-agent quality of experience control

In the framework of the Future Internet, the aim of the Quality of Experience (QoE) Control functionalities is to track the personalized desired QoE level of the applications. The paper proposes to perform such a task by dynamically selecting the most appropriate Classes of Service (among the ones supported by the network), this selection being driven by a novel heuristic Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) algorithm. The paper shows that such an approach offers the opportunity to cope with some practical implementation problems: in particular, it allows to face the so-called “curse of dimensionality” of MARL algorithms, thus achieving satisfactory performance results even in the presence of several hundreds of Agents

Understanding the Education Trajectories of Young Black Men in New York City: Elementary and Middle-School Years

Making targeted decisions about how, when, and where to intervene to improve educational outcomes for black males requires understanding the complex pathways that shape these outcomes. This study, undertaken for the Black Male Donor Collaborative, uses longitudinal data on a cohort of black males from New York City Schools to gain insights about the different possible student paths, with specific focuses on middle school and math scale scores

Economists, Environmental Policies and Federalism

With global warming, Canadians are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of effective environmental policies. In his paper Anthony Scott, a pioneer in the areas of resource and environmental economics in this country, provides a comprehensive discussion of the role economists can and should play in the development of more effective environmental policies. A key theme of his paper is that environmental policy, particularly in crucial areas like global air pollution, is still in its infancy and effective national institutions to respond to policy challenges are still in the developmental stage. Scott first reviews the history of environmental policy in England, the United States and Canada. He then examines the approaches of economists to environmental issues, including the market failure and ideal output approach, benefit-cost analysis of pollution, and environmental impact assessment, and identifies topics that environmental economists teach and research. The paper then compares what economists do in Canada in the environmental area compared to that in the United States, finding that academic environmental economists in Canada specialize more in theory and show little knowledge or interest in issues directly related to the environmental policy debate in their country of residence.Environment, Climate, Environmental Policy, Canada, United States, United Kingdom, Environmental Economics

Developing the scales on evaluation beliefs of student teachers

The purpose of the study reported in this paper was to investigate the validity and the reliability of a newly developed questionnaire named ‘Teacher Evaluation Beliefs’ (TEB). The framework for developing items was provided by the two models. The first model focuses on Student-Centered and Teacher-Centered beliefs about evaluation while the other centers on five dimensions (what/ who/ when/ why/ how). The validity and reliability of the new instrument was investigated using both exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis study (n=446). Overall results indicate that the two-factor structure is more reasonable than the five-factor one. Further research needs additional items about the latent dimensions “what” ”who” ”when” ”why” “how” for each existing factor based on Student-centered and Teacher-centered approaches

Optimal Weighting for Exam Composition

A problem faced by many instructors is that of designing exams that accurately assess the abilities of the students. Typically these exams are prepared several days in advance, and generic question scores are used based on rough approximation of the question difficulty and length. For example, for a recent class taught by the author, there were 30 multiple choice questions worth 3 points, 15 true/false with explanation questions worth 4 points, and 5 analytical exercises worth 10 points. We describe a novel framework where algorithms from machine learning are used to modify the exam question weights in order to optimize the exam scores, using the overall class grade as a proxy for a student's true ability. We show that significant error reduction can be obtained by our approach over standard weighting schemes, and we make several new observations regarding the properties of the "good" and "bad" exam questions that can have impact on the design of improved future evaluation methods