Predictive modelling of evidence informed teaching

In this paper, we analyse the questionnaire survey data collected from 79 English primary schools about the situation of evidence informed teaching, where the evidences could come from research journals or conferences such as EDM. Specifically, we build a predictive model to see what external factors could help to close the gap between teachers' belief and behaviour in evidence informed teaching, which is the first of its kind to our knowledge. The major challenge, from the data mining perspective, is that the Likert scale responses are neither categorical nor metric, but actually ordinal, which requires special consideration when we apply statistical analysis or machine learning algorithms. Adapting Gradient Boosted Trees (GBT), we achieve a decent prediction accuracy (MAE=0.36) and gain new insights into possible interventions for promoting evidence informed teaching

SOMALI ELL STUDENTS’ COMPOSITIONS: EXPLORATIONS INTO DEVELOPMENTAL SYNTAX

Regardless of whether a student is a native English speaker or an English Language Learner (ELL), high school graduates are expected to be able to write in a clear, proficient manner. However, the productive skill of writing can be particularly challenging for second language (L2) learners. The purpose of this paper is to examine issues relevant to L2 writing as diagnosed from the sample text, “Essay #9: Unreported world – Somalia,” which was written by a college-bound Somali student. Aspects of the paper focus on orthographic errors, syntactic issues, and pedagogical implications. The analysis reveals that both insufficient L2 grammatical knowledge and transfer of grammatical patterns from the learner’s first language (L1) contribute to errors when writing in English. The analyses provided here are intended to inform pedagogical practices for teaching writing skills to ELLs. The patterns of errors encountered in this composition raise important issues in developmental syntax

A comparison of the in vitro and in planta responses of Phytophthora cinnamomi isolates to phosphite

Research in plant pathology often relies on testing interactions between a fungicide and a pathogen in vitro and extrapolating from these results what may happen in planta. Likewise, results from glasshouse experiments are used to estimate what will happen if the fungicide is applied in the field. However, it is difficult to obtain conditions in vitro and in the glasshouse which reflect the conditions where the fungicide may eventually be used, in the field. The aim of this paper is to compare results of the effect of phosphite on P. cinnamomi isolates in vitro and in planta

Some reflections on IPv6 adoption in Australia

IPv6 is an inevitable upgrade to Internet Protocol (IP), the underlying protocol uponwhich the Internet is based, and solves many problems with the existing technologyincluding limited address space, performance and security. Although IPv6 has beensupported by products from major vendors for many years, adoption has beenpractically non-existent. Meanwhile, the Internet continues to grow and the size ofthe problem increases.This unsatisfactory situation is a consequence of network externalities in whichrational individuals have no motivation to be the “first-mover†. We argue thatgovernment action is required to promote diffusion of IPv6, but note that this isdifficult and may be unlikely in the absence of a business case. Making the case forIPv6 should not be problematic given the range of “hidden†costs of retaining thestatus quo; however, there has been no systematic effort to assess such costs. We thusrecommend a number of directions for future research to address this deficienc