Product evaluation on the Chinese language program for international students in a Chinese university

HanyuShuipingKaoshi (HSK) is an international standardized test, which means Chinese Proficiency Test in English. A minimum of HSK level 4 is needed for an international student to apply for an academic programme taught in Chinese language in the universities of China. Guided by product evaluation of Context, Input, Process, Product (CIPP) model, the test scores of HSK level 4 of the international students in a Chinese university are analyzed using effect size. Feedbacks from the international students who failed in the test of HSK level 4 are collected based on a questionnaire formulated by the researchers. The strengths, weaknesses, causes of failure and improving direction of the one academic year’s Chinese language program in this Chinese university are identified through the evaluation. The research aims to provide references for the improvement of Chinese language teaching in this Chinese university and universities with the same context. The research enriches the literature concerning the evaluation on Chinese language teaching and learning for international students in China

A systematic density-based clustering method using anchor points

National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapore under its AI Singapore Programme; Singapore Ministry of Health under its National Innovation Challenge on Active and Confident Agein

Explaining Inferences in Bayesian Networks

While Bayesian network (BN) can achieve accurate predictions even with erroneous or incomplete evidence, explaining the inferences remains a challenge. Existing approaches fall short because they do not exploit variable interactions and cannot account for com-pensations during inferences. This paper proposes the Explaining BN Inferences (EBI) procedure for explaining how variables interact to reach conclusions. EBI explains the value of a target node in terms of the influential nodes in the target’s Markov blanket under specific contexts, where the Markov nodes include the target’s parents, children, and the children’s other parents. Working back from the target node, EBI shows the deriva-tion of each intermediate variable, and finally explains how missing and erroneous evidence values are compensated. We validated EBI on a variety of problem domains, including mushroom classification, water purification and web page recommendation. The experi-ments show that EBI generates high quality, concise and comprehensible explanations for BN inferences, in particular the underlying compensation mechanism that enables BN to outperform alternative prediction systems, such as decision tree. 1

Learning Causal Models for Noisy Biological Data Mining: An Application to Ovarian Cancer Detection

Singapore Management University Office of Researc

A Framework for Diagnosing Dyscalculia

This paper outlines the development of mathematical items which evolves from making sense of mathematics through perception, operation, and reason. There are three main constructs in this framework, and it involves seven tests namely simple reaction time, short term memory, number sense, matching Items, dot enumeration, number comparison and arithmetic. This study is concerned with how a group of students struggle with basic numerical skills which may be caused by dyscalculia. One of the most important contributions of this study, in addition to its wider theoretical and practical applications, is that it has come out with a set of standardized instruments which is called the Malaysian Dyscalculia Instrument (MDI) for primary school students. This tool could be further used widely in the fields of psychology and education, especially special education and particularly research studies related to education