Supporting the Review of Student Proposal Drafts in Information Technologies

ABSTRACT In many cases, academic programs or courses conclude with a thesis or research proposal text, elaborated by students. The review of such texts is a heavy load, especially at initial stages of drafting. This paper proposes a model that allows linguistic and structural review of some essential elements in proposal drafts of undergraduate students. The model aims to support the review from vocabulary to the argumentation in the draft, and is part of an intelligent tutor to monitor student progress. This work presents the initial results in terms of lexical and global coherence analysis of proposal drafts of students. Lexical analysis is done in terms of lexical density, lexical diversity, and sophistication. Global coherence is evaluated using the Latent Semantic Analysis technique. Our results show that the level reached so far by the analyzer is adequate to support the review, taking into account for one section the level of agreement with human reviewers

“Enjoyable”, “okay” or “rather pointless”? An exploration of Chinese and British students' views on innovative and traditional assignment types in UK universities

In the U.K., Chinese students are now “the largest single overseas student group” with more than 60,000 studying here in 2006 (British Council, 2008) yet there has been little study of their views towards British assessment methods, particularly innovative assignment types. The focus of this paper is on the similarities and differences in attitudes towards assessed writing between Chinese and British students in U.K. universities. Data was gathered in 2007-8 and consists of 200 questionnaire responses from Chinese and British students studying a wide range of subjects in over 40 UK universities together with follow-up emails and interviews. Students are asked to describe how they plan and write assignments and how this has altered over the course of their university study. Also explored are the use of aids such as electronic and paper dictionaries, translation software and proofreading by native or non-native speakers. The main focus of the study is British and Chinese students’ views of assignment-writing, particularly in relation to recent, alternative assignment types such as blogs, letters and e-posters. Currently students in U.K. H.E. are expected to produce a wide variety of text types with several writers suggesting that more discipline and text-specific help is needed (e.g. Hewings and Hewings, 2001). Jin and Cortazzi have pointed out the “increasingly diverse” nature of Chinese students in the U.K. (2006) and Gu and Schweisfurth suggest that the notion of ‘the Chinese learner’ invites an unhelpful view of homogeneity (2006). In this paper I consider the difficulties facing U.K. university students in terms of the range of writing requirements which are now expected and how British and Chinese students embrace these challenges

A didactical design perspective on teacher presence in an international online learning community

This paper is based on a study of the student learning experience in a particular module of an international Masters programme that included a large element of online learning. It builds on earlier work which highlighted the importance of design and development of social infrastructure for supporting the development of an online learning community by revisiting the data from the perspective of a didactical design framework. The overall aims of this study are to consider how, as teachers, we designed and developed teacher presence and how this was achieved in practice from the design of teaching-studying-learning processes through development to interaction in the online learning community

Supporting and Enabling Scholarship: Developing and Sharing Expertise in Online Learning and Teaching

In a highly competitive, rapidly changing higher education market, universities need to be able to generate pedagogical expertise quickly and ensure that it is applied to practice. Since teaching approaches are constantly evolving, partly responding to emerging learning technologies, there is a need to foster ways to keep abreast on an ongoing basis. This paper explores how a small-scale project, the Teaching Online Panel (TOP), used scholarship investigations and a bottom-up approach to enhance one particular aspect of academic practice – online learning and teaching. The experiences of TOP are useful for identifying: - how a scholarship approach can help develop academic expertise - its contribution to enhancing understanding of staff’s different roles in the University - ways of developing the necessary supportive network for those undertaking such scholarship - the effectiveness of staff development which is peer-led rather than imposed from above - how practical examples can stimulate practice development - the relevance of literature on communities of practice and landscapes of practice for scholarship - the important role of ‘brokers’ to facilitate the dissemination of scholarship findings - the benefits to the brokers’ own professional roles - the challenges of sustaining such an approach and lessons learnt. This study has relevance for those involved in supporting scholarship or delivering staff development in Higher Education

Evaluating learning and teaching technologies in further education

With the current emphasis on quality assessment and the role of evaluation in quality assessment, it is likely that teachers in post‐compulsory education will increasingly be expected to evaluate their teaching, especially when making changes to their teaching methods. In Further Education (FE), there have been a number of developments to foster the use of Information and Learning Technologies (ILT), following the publication of the Higginson Report in 1996. However, there is some evidence that the adoption of ILT has been patchy

Challenges in evaluating surgical innovation

Research on surgical interventions is associated with several methodological and practical challenges of which few, if any, apply only to surgery. However, surgical evaluation is especially demanding because many of these challenges coincide. In this report, the second of three on surgical innovation and evaluation, we discuss obstacles related to the study design of randomised controlled trials and non-randomised studies assessing surgical interventions. We also describe the issues related to the nature of surgical procedures—for example, their complexity, surgeon-related factors, and the range of outcomes. Although difficult, surgical evaluation is achievable and necessary. Solutions tailored to surgical research and a framework for generating evidence on which to base surgical practice are essential.The Balliol Colloquium has been supported by Ethicon UK with unrestricted educational grants and by the National Institute of Health Research Health Technology Assessment Programme. The Balliol Colloquium was administratively and financially supported by the Nuffield Department of Surgery at the University of Oxford and the Department of Surgery at McGill University. JAC holds a Medical Research Council UK special training fellowship. The University of Aberdeen’s Health Services Research Unit is core funded by the Chief Scientist Offi ce of the Scottish Government Health Directorates. IB is supported by a grant from the Société Française de Rhumatologie and Lavoisier Program (Ministère des Aff aires Etrangères et Européennes). PLE is a DPhil Candidate in Evidence-Based Health Care at Oxford University

Abstract, emotional and concrete concepts and the activation of mouth-hand effectors

According to embodied and grounded theories, concepts are grounded in sensorimotor systems. The majority of evidence supporting these views concerns concepts referring to objects or actions, while evidence on abstract concepts is more scarce. Explaining how abstract concepts such as ‘‘freedom’’ are represented would thus be pivotal for grounded theories. According to some recent proposals, abstract concepts are grounded in both sensorimotor and linguistic experience, thus they activate the mouth motor system more than concrete concepts. Two experiments are reported, aimed at verifying whether abstract, concrete and emotional words activate the mouth and the hand effectors. In both experiments participants performed first a lexical decision, then a recognition task. In Experiment 1 participants responded by pressing a button either with the mouth or with the hand, in Experiment 2 responses were given with the foot, while a button held either in the mouth or in the hand was used to respond to catch-trials. Abstract words were slower to process in both tasks (concreteness effect). Across the tasks and experiments, emotional concepts had instead a fluctuating pattern, different from those of both concrete and abstract concepts, suggesting that they cannot be considered as a subset of abstract concepts. The interaction between type of concept (abstract, concrete and emotional) and effector (mouth, hand) was not significant in the lexical decision task, likely because it emerged only with tasks implying a deeper processing level. It reached significance, instead, in the recognition tasks. In both experiments abstract concepts were facilitated in the mouth condition compared to the hand condition, supporting our main prediction. Emotional concepts instead had a more variable pattern. Overall, our findings indicate that various kinds of concepts differently activate the mouth and hand effectors, but they also suggest that concepts activate effectors in a flexible and task-dependent wa