Facilitating Bloom\u27s Level One through Active Learning and Collaboration

Bloom\u27s taxonomy provides a means of structuring learning activities according to levels of comprehension ranging from factual knowledge to the creation of new knowledge. There are problems with presenting factual knowledge in the traditional lecture mode: student motivation, time-to-present, and course priorities. However, in Bloom\u27s taxonomy, Level 1 (factual) knowledge is the basis for knowledge comprehension at higher levels. Therefore, it is essential that the fact base comprehension be attained so that higher levels of knowledge can be addressed. Active learning and collaborative approaches have been shown to be effective in promoting learning. How can active learning and collaboration be used to overcome the problems associated with promoting Level 1 comprehension? In our introductory Computer Information Science (CIS) course, we attempt to answer this question for the topic history of computing. We have combined a student research and collaborative assignment to acquire Level 1 comprehension with a culminating College Bowl activity to reach the goal of Level 2 comprehension. In this paper we discuss course organization, course goals, the College Bowl format of quizzing, contest results, and overall observation of the process

A Group Problem-Solving Model for the CIS Curriculum

The development of problem solving, abstraction, and design skills through group activities and projects was prescribed in the revised curricula for Computer Science and Information Systems. Myers\u27 Zig Zag problem-solving model is adapted into a group problem-solving model, Group Zig Zag, for use throughout a curriculum. In this paper, we describe our initial efforts at introducing this model into three CIS course sequences

Changing the CIS Academic Culture: Using Senior Design Projects to Unify the Curriculum

Recently we initiated an effort to create a synergistic relationship between the senior design sequence and the sophomore software engineering course that resulted in a cultural change to our CIS academic community. Because of the enthusiastic response from students and faculty, we are extending this initiative to generate early interest among freshman and sophomore majors for electives in artificial intelligence and decision support. With hardware acquisitions obtained through an Instrumentation Laboratory Improvement (ILI) grant from the National Science Foundation, teams in the Senior Projects capstone sequence are preparing projects that will be employed in early courses in the curriculum. The projects will be used to provide students with insight about each of the elective areas of the curriculum through demonstrations and activities. This paper describes the five project initiatives and how the projects will be employed to generate interest in the elective areas

Beyond the Classroom: Mentoring in the CIS Academic Community

Elliot Soloway, noted author and teacher, recently observed in a presentation at ACM\u2797 in San Jose, that human interaction and nurturing are as much a part of the educational process as is the discipline knowledge. He went on to state that no use of technology can replace this human element. Although the classroom is the traditional instructional forum for issues such as professional ethics, responsibility to society, and the need for a life-long learning, a more individualized approach to learning is recognized as providing a higher degree of success. How can educators provide a more individualized approach to learning without sacrificing classroom content? One answer is Mentoring. Several years ago, our university established a mentoring program for certain high-risk students. The School of Computer and Information Science (CIS) embraced the mentoring concept and extended it to involve CIS majors for in-class and out-of-class activities. In this paper we describe the mentoring process as it occurs in our CIS community

The Evolving Role of Faculty: Traditional Scholarship, Instructional Scholarship and Service Scholarship

Faculty workload decisions made by a departmental unit often create a conflict for faculty because promotion/tenure decisions usually focus primarily on individual scholarly achievements. This paper describes an approach to faculty evaluation that considers both departmental and individual needs by expanding the view of scholarship to include Research, Instruction, and Service

An improved method for statistical studies of the internal kinematics of HII regions: the case of M 83

We present the integrated Halpha emission line profile for 157 HII regions in the central 3.4' x 3.4' of the galaxy M 83 (NGC 5236). Using the Fabry-Perot interferometer GHaFaS, on the 4.2 m William Herschel on La Palma, we show the importance of a good characterization of the instrumental response function for the study of line profile shapes. The luminosity-velocity dispersion relation is also studied, and in the log(L)-log(sigma) plane we do not find a linear relation, but an upper envelope with equation log(L)=0.9 *log(sigma)+38.1. For the adopted distance of 4.5 Mpc, the upper envelope appears at the luminosity L=10^38.5 ergs, in full agreement with previous studies of other galaxies, reinforcing the idea of using HII regions as standard candles.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe