John H. Gibbon, Jr., M.D.: surgical innovator, pioneer, and inspiration.

Throughout history there have been many discoveries that have changed the world, including Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, and Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce’s microchip. There are a few analogous contributions that have been made in medicine: Sir Alexander’s discovery of penicillin, Lister’s principles of antiseptic technique, Salk and Sabin’s vaccines for polio, as well as numerous others. These innovative thinkers all had two factors in common. First, they were pioneers who faced problems that had no solutions at the time and who refused to accept the status quo in the face of great scrutiny and resistance. Second, their contributions would forever change the world. In 1930, a profound experience with a patient would forever change Dr. John H. Gibbon, Jr. and stimulate an idea to create a device that at the time sounded audacious and impossible. His device would temporarily take the role of both the heart and lungs to make repairs inside the heart or the great vessels. Twentythree years later, Dr. Gibbon used his machine to perform the first successful bypass-assisted open heart surgery

Addictive links: The motivational value of adaptive link annotation

Adaptive link annotation is a popular adaptive navigation support technology. Empirical studies of adaptive annotation in the educational context have demonstrated that it can help students to acquire knowledge faster, improve learning outcomes, reduce navigational overhead, and encourage non-sequential navigation. In this paper, we present our exploration of a lesser known effect of adaptive annotation, its ability to significantly increase students' motivation to work with non-mandatory educational content. We explored this effect and confirmed its significance in the context of two different adaptive hypermedia systems. The paper presents and discusses the results of our work

Evaluating the Effectiveness of tutorial dialogue instruction in a Explotary learning context

[Proceedings of] ITS 2006, 8th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems, 26-30 June 2006, Jhongli, Taoyuan County, TaiwanIn this paper we evaluate the instructional effectiveness of tutorial dialogue agents in an exploratory learning setting. We hypothesize that the creative nature of an exploratory learning environment creates an opportunity for the benefits of tutorial dialogue to be more clearly evidenced than in previously published studies. In a previous study we showed an advantage for tutorial dialogue support in an exploratory learning environment where that support was administered by human tutors [9]. Here, using a similar experimental setup and materials, we evaluate the effectiveness of tutorial dialogue agents modeled after the human tutors from that study. The results from this study provide evidence of a significant learning benefit of the dialogue agentsThis project is supported by ONR Cognitive and Neural Sciences Division, Grant number N000140410107proceedingPublicad

JKarelRobot: A Case Study in Supporting Levels of Cognitive Development in the Computer Science Curriculum

We introduce a new software tool, JKarelRobot, for supporting an Inside/Out pedagogy in introductory programming courses. Extending the original conception of Karel the Robot , with Bloom\u27s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives as a guiding principle, we have provided a mechanism for designing exercises that are cognitively appropriate to the developmental levels of our students. JKarelRobot is platform independent (written in Java) and language/paradigm independent, supporting Pascal, Java, and Lisp style environments

The impact of parent-created motivational climate on adolescent athletes' perceptions of physical self-concept

This is a preliminary version of this article. The official published version can be obtained from the link below.Grounded in expectancy-value model (Eccles, 1993) and achievement goal theory (Nicholls, 1989), this study examined the perceived parental climate and its impact on athletes' perceptions of competence and ability. Hierarchical regression analyses with a sample of 237 British adolescent athletes revealed that mothers and fathers' task- and ego-involving climate predicted their son's physical self-concept; the father in particular is the strongest influence in shaping a son's physical self-concept positively and negatively. It was also found that the self-concept of the young adolescent athlete is more strongly affected by the perceived parental-created motivational climate (both task and ego) than the older adolescent athlete's self-concept. These findings support the expectancy-value model assumptions related to the role of parents as important socializing agents, the existence of gender-stereotyping, and the heavy reliance younger children place on parents' feedback

The ‘Blueprint’ framework for career management skills: a critical exploration

This article examines the Blueprint framework for career management skills as it has been revealed across sequential implementations in the USA, Canada and Australia. It is argued that despite its lack of an empirical basis, the framework forms a useful and innovative means through which career theory, practice and policy can be connected. The framework comprises both core elements (learning areas, learning model and levels) and contextual elements (resources, community of practice, service delivery approach and policy connection). Each of these elements is explored

Putting theory oriented evaluation into practice

Evaluations of gaming simulations and business games as teaching devices are typically end-state driven. This emphasis fails to detect how the simulation being evaluated does or does not bring about its desired consequences. This paper advances the use of a logic model approach which possesses a holistic perspective that aims at including all elements associated with the situation created by a game. The use of the logic model approach is illustrated as applied to Simgame, a board game created for secondary school level business education in six European Union countries

Assessing the design of accounting modules across UK higher educational institutions

The purpose of this article is to uncover how accounting modules are designed across UK Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs). We carried out a content analysis of Undergraduate Year 1 Accounting Module Handbooks for a sample of 12 UK Universities. The study finds considerable heterogeneity concerning the way accounting modules are designed and delivered across the UK HE sector. Our findings reveal significant variations across the sector in terms of credit hours, module learning outcomes and assessment strategies. This research contributes to accounting/business education literature as no study has previously utilised a content analysis approach to understand how accounting modules are designed and delivered across UK HEIs

Die Gestaltung von Sozialexperimenten: The good, the bad and the ugly

It is widely agreed that randomized controlled trials - social experiments - are the gold standard for evaluating social programs. There are, however, many important issues that cannot be tested using social experiments, and often things go wrong when conducting social experiments. This paper explores these issues and offers suggestions on ways to deal with commonly encountered problems. Social experiments are preferred because random assignment assures that any differences between the treatment and control groups are due to the intervention and not some other factor; also, the results of social experiments are more easily explained and accepted by policy officials. Experimental evaluations often lack external validity and cannot control for entry effects, scale and general equilibrium effects, and aspects of the intervention that were not randomly assigned. Experiments can also lead to biased impact estimates if the control group changes its behavior or if changing the number selected changes the impact. Other problems with conducting social experiments include increased time and cost, and legal and ethical issues related to excluding people from the treatment. Things that sometimes go wrong in social experiments include programs cheating on random assignment, and participants and/or staff not understanding the intervention rules. The random assignment evaluation of the Job Training Partnership Act in the United States is used as a case study to illustrate the issues