The association between tolerance for ambiguity and fear of negative evaluation: A study of engineering technology capstone courses

For many students in engineering and engineering technology programs in the US, senior capstone design courses require students to form a team, define a problem, and find a feasible technical solution to address this problem. Students must integrate the knowledge and skills acquired during their studies at the college or university level. These truly integrative design activities do not have a single “correct” solution. Instead, there is an array of solutions, many of which could be used to achieve the final result. This ambiguity can cause students to experience anxiety during the projects. This study examined the main topics: • To what extent is a social anxiety (measured as fear of negative evaluation) related to tolerance for ambiguity in senior engineering capstone courses? • How does exposure to ambiguity prior to and during capstone courses affect tolerance for ambiguity? The study looked at the standard educational practices to see if they have unintended consequences, such a social anxiety in dealing with ambiguity. Those consequences are highly undesirable because they reduce students’ learning. It was hypothesized that the lecture-based approaches that are more common in the first three years of study would not prepare students for self-directed capstone courses because the students would rarely have experienced problem-based learning before. The study used a quantitative approach and examined students’ perceptions of their tolerance for ambiguity, and social anxiety before and after their senior capstone design experience. A survey instrument was adapted to measure exposure to ambiguity, which was studied as a potential moderator of the relationship between social anxiety and tolerance for ambiguity. The study indicated that social anxiety, as measured by fear of negative evaluation, does not play a major role in capstone courses. The second finding is that a single course, even if it was administered as a problem-based senior class, failed to increase students’ tolerance for ambiguity. Students with low tolerance have more problems with ambiguity, whereas students with high tolerance can more easily endure changes and find it easier to act in the absence of complete information. The third important finding was that exposure to ambiguity prior to capstone courses does affect tolerance for ambiguity while controlling for instructor and if exposure to ambiguity is included as a moderator. It was not in the scope of this study to explore the effect of instructor more deeply, but this provides a direction for future research, especially in this time of expanding implementation of project- and problem-based learning methods in technical curricula

Visual Occam: High level visualization and design of process networks

With networks, multiprocessors, and multi-threaded systems becoming more common in our world it is increasingly evident that concurrent programming is not something to be ignored or marginalized even though many takes on concurrency (mainly by means of monitors or shared resources) have proven to be difficult to deal with on large scales. Thankfully, a good deal of work has already been done to combat this, through CSP, occam, and other such derivatives, to produce a scalable process oriented paradigm. Still, it is cumbersome to attempt to deal with the intricacies of such communicating networks down to every minutia; if, instead, it was possible to manage communicating elements on a higher level it would be far more practical to design large scale networks of processes! As such, Visual Occam has been designed to automate some of the inner workings of occam to allow any user (novice or otherwise) the ability to create complex networks of communicating processes through easy to understand user interactions and interfaces. Taking a number of cues from digital circuit design software and modern integrated development environments, it is possible to select components (both predefined and arbitrarily complex user created systems) from a library of objects, hook them together in a network, and produce compilable code without having to worry about how or why the chosen components perform their function. Since any of these components may themselves be networks of processes, it becomes trivial to construct large systems that would otherwise be unwieldy to put together by hand. The end result? A high level, easy to understand, visual abstraction of those concurrent networks previously so frustrating to develop

Clinical psychologists on clinical supervision: a Delphi survey

Background and aims In the context of historical tensions from different epistemologies and traditions, and contemporary needs for guidance and clarity, the DCP has noted `an emerging consensus' on the desirability for career long engagement in clinical supervision for clinical psychologists. The study attempts to measure this consensus and investigate current practices and beliefs. Design and participants A three-round Delphi survey was used, initially gathering semi-structured accounts of panelists' views and subsequently inviting more precise responses to a questionnaire derived from those accounts. The participants were 53 clinical psychologists, selected on the basis of their presumed interest or expertise in supervision. Measures Materials were developed for the study: - PPI collected personal and professional information, - DQI collected semi-structured accounts of opinions concerning various aspects of supervision, - DQ2 was a 62-item questionnaire derived from DQI material. Results Most panelists were both giving and receiving supervision. There was broad agreement on most issues, including the desirability of universal engagement in supervision for clinicians, the primacy of the supervisory relationship, the need for preparation for the roles of both supervisor and supervisee, and the necessity to identify supervision as an activity distinct from both management and therapy. In contrast there was little agreement on how supervision is most appropriately related to either management or therapy, nor on the relative importance of personal therapy and supervision in the training of competent therapists. Implications Most panelists were deeply engaged in both the provision and the receipt of supervision, which supports current DCP policies, but the culture is not yet strong enough to guarantee that all clinicians will he offered it routinely. More theoretical research is needed to develop models of supervision which will not assume that psychotherapy is its only legitimate focus, but will pay due heed to the wide range of tasks undertaken by both clinical psychologists and their supervisees

U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform

The U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform was created by Congress to assess U.S. immigration policy and make recommendations regarding its implementation and effects. Mandated in the Immigration Act of 1990 to submit an interim report in 1994 and a final report in 1997, the Commission has undertaken public hearings, fact-finding missions, and expert consultations to identify the major immigration-related issues facing the United States today.LBJ School of Public Affair

Důležitá slova. Podklady ke kolokačnímu švédsko-českému slovníku základních sloves

Basic verbs, i.e. very common verbs that typically denote physical movements, locations, states or actions, undergo various semantic shifts and acquire different secondary uses. In extreme cases, the distribution of secondary uses grows so general that they are regarded as auxiliary verbs (go and to be going to), phase verbs (turn, grow), etc. ese uses are usually well-documented by grammars and language textbooks, and so are idiomatic expressions (phraseologisms) in dictionaries. ere is, however, a grey area in between, which is extremely difficult to learn for non-native speakers. is consists of secondary uses with limited collocability, in particular light verb constructions, and secondary meanings that only get activated under particular morphosyntactic conditions. e basic-verb secondary uses and constructions are usually semantically transparent, such that they do not pose understanding problems, but they are generally unpredictable and language-specific, such that they easily become an issue in non-native text production. In this thesis, Swedish basic verbs are approached from the contrastive point of view of an advanced Czech learner of Swedish. A selection of Swedish constructions with basic verbs is explored. e observations result in a proposal for the structure of a machine-readable Swedish-Czech...Základní slovesa (basic verbs), tj. frekventovaná významová slovesa, jež zpravidla popisují fyzický pohyb, umístění, stav, nebo děj, procházejí řadou sémantických posunů, díky kterým se používají k vyjádření druhotných, přenesených významů. V krajních případech se dané sloveso stává pomocným, způsobovým, nebo fázovým slovesem a přestávají pro ně platit kolokační omezení, jež se vztahují na sloveso užité v jeho primárním (tj. doslovném) významu. Tato užití sloves bývají většinou dobře dokumentována v gramatikách i učebnicích, stejně jako kvalitní slovníky podávají podrobnou informaci o užití těchto sloves v ustálených frazeologických spojeních. Mezi plně gramatikalizovaným užitím na jedné straně a idiomatickým, frazeologickým užitím na druhé straně však existuje celá škála užití základních sloves v přenesených významech, jejíž zvládnutí je pro nerodilého mluvčího značně obtížné: užití v přeneseném významu, jež mají omezenou kolokabilitu. To jsou především verbonominální konstrukce někdy nazývané analytické predikáty (light verb constructions), ale také užití, která za určitých omezených morfosyntaktických podmínek (např. pouze v negaci) aktivují abstraktní sémantické rysy u jiných predikátů, např. zesilují význam, nebo implikují, že daný děj již trvá dlouho, a podobně. Tato druhotná užití významových sloves...Institute of Germanic StudiesÚstav germánských studiíFilozofická fakultaFaculty of Art

Acquiescence bias: exploring the applicability of ipsative scoring and acquiescence modeling

Acquiescence bias, defined as the tendency to agree with an item irrespective of the content is an important methodological issue in cross-cultural psychological research. The present study compared two methods to control for acquiescence bias, namely ipsatizing and modeling an acquiescence factor using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Simulated data sets are being used to compare raw data estimation methods, ipsative estimation methods and the acquiescence modeling method on how well they can reproduce the true theoretical correlations between underlying factors of an uncorrelated bidimensional model. Three conditions were manipulated: factor strength, acquiescence strength and factor intercorrelation. Depending on the specific model conditions, correlations and CFA using raw data and ipsative estimation methods show big under- or overestimations. The acquiescence modeling method reproduces the true theoretical correlations very well, irrespective of the specific conditions. Estimating relationships between constructs by means of acquiescence modeling in CFA is much more widely applicable than previously thought and is advised, even when unbalanced item sets are used to measure constructs

Fifth Annual Workshop on Space Operations Applications and Research (SOAR 1991), volume 2

Papers given at the Space Operations and Applications Symposium, host by the NASA Johnson Space Center on July 9-11, 1991 are given. The technical areas covered included intelligent systems, automation and robotics, human factors and life sciences, and environmental interactions

Word Knowledge and Word Usage

Word storage and processing define a multi-factorial domain of scientific inquiry whose thorough investigation goes well beyond the boundaries of traditional disciplinary taxonomies, to require synergic integration of a wide range of methods, techniques and empirical and experimental findings. The present book intends to approach a few central issues concerning the organization, structure and functioning of the Mental Lexicon, by asking domain experts to look at common, central topics from complementary standpoints, and discuss the advantages of developing converging perspectives. The book will explore the connections between computational and algorithmic models of the mental lexicon, word frequency distributions and information theoretical measures of word families, statistical correlations across psycho-linguistic and cognitive evidence, principles of machine learning and integrative brain models of word storage and processing. Main goal of the book will be to map out the landscape of future research in this area, to foster the development of interdisciplinary curricula and help single-domain specialists understand and address issues and questions as they are raised in other disciplines