Making Cooperative Learning Visible Without the Group Grade

Jenny Kindred wrestles in this chapter with a dilemma many of us have faced: how to grade group assignments. I suspect many people reading this have a memory of getting a lower grade than we deserved in a group project because a fellow group member didn’t pull his or her weight. My experience with this has always made me shy away from giving group grades. And yet, others convincingly argue that group grades are required in order to build a cohesive group rather than a collection of individuals who happen to be working on the same project. Since group work is increasingly used in higher education, more and more of us are struggling to figure out how to grade these kinds of assignments. Jenny’s problem is exacerbated here since the group assignments in question arise in a Small Group Communication class, where the class spends time studying how groups succeed and fail. Jenny chose to use individual-only grades in her class, reflecting the concern about potentially downgrading students due to factors outside their control (such as the work of their classmates). But, rather than just making this decision, Jenny has engaged in rigorous analysis of this decision, and then uses a wide variety of evidence (including journals and videotapes of group meetings) to assess the quality of the group work she saw. I particularly like the conclusion of the chapter, in which Jenny attempts to “complete the circle” as she discusses how what she has learned from this investigation will change the way she teachers the course in the future

Nonprofit Partners’ Perceptions of Organizational and Community Impact Based on a Long-Term Academic Service-Learning Partnership

This research summarizes organizational and community impacts reported by nonprofit community partners participating in an academic service-learning program with communication capstone students at Eastern Michigan University. Community partners discussed internal and external communication-focused capstone projects, perceived short-term and long-term impacts, as well as organizational versus community impact. Analysis of the data revealed that internally focused projects delivered more long-term impact at the organizational level, while several of the externally focused projects delivered short-term impact at both the organizational and community level. A small number of projects delivered little to no impact. In addition, three specific long-term organizational impacts were discovered: new organizational learning, enhanced personal and professional development, and increased student engagement. While student learning outcomes related to service-learning have been well documented, this research adds to the growing body of literature on the organizational and community outcomes associated with academic service-learning courses. This research also illustrates the need for communication-focused projects within the nonprofit sector. Advanced undergraduate students in communication and other allied disciplines are ready and able to fill such needs in meaningful ways through these partnerships

On bias in social reviews of university courses

University course ranking forums are a popular means of disseminating information about satisfaction with the quality of course content and instruction, especially with undergraduate students. A variety of policy decisions by university administrators, instructional designers and teaching staff affect how students perceive the efficacy of pedagogies employed in a given course, in class and online. While there is a large body of research on qualitative driving factors behind the use of academic rating sites, there is little investigation of the (potential) implicit student bias on said forums towards desirable course outcomes at the institution level. To that end, we examine the connection between course outcomes (student-reported GPA) and the overall ranking of the primary course instructor, as well as rating disparity by nature of course outcomes, for several hundred courses taught at Virginia Tech based on data collected from a popular academic rating forum. We also replicate our analysis for several public universities across the US. Our experiments indicate that there is a discernible albeit complex bias towards course outcomes in the professor ratings registered by students.Comment: WebSci'19 Companion Proceeding

IM hereReflections on virtual office hours

AOL Instant messenger (IM) was used over four semesters as an additional way for students to contact us during office hours. Since college students primarily use IM as a way to interact socially with their friends and family, we were curious if students would use IM to contact us, who would use it, how often they would use it, and what the content of the IM interactions would be. After two years of collecting all IM exchanges with students, we found that students did use IM to contact us on a regular basis. Both male and female students in roughly equal numbers used IM. In addition, a majority of the exchanges were task related; that is, questions and comments relating to a particular course or assignment. Results, personal reflections, and suggestions for future research are discussed

Theory Generation for Security Protocols

We introduce theory generation, a new general-purpose technique for performing automated verification. Theory generation draws inspiration from, and complements, both automated theorem proving and symbolic model checking, the two approaches that currently dominate mechanical reasoning. At the core of this approach is the notion of producing a finite representation of a theory---all the facts derivable from a set of assumptions. We present an algorithm for producing compact theory representations for an expressive class of simple logics. Security-sensitive protocols are widely used today, and the growing popularity of electronic commerce is leading to increasing reliance on them. Though simple in structure, these protocols are notoriously difficult to design properly. Since specifications of these protocols typically involve only a small number of principals, keys, nonces, and messages, and since many properties of interest can be expressed in "little logics" such as the Burro..

Closing the Idealization Gap With Theory Generation (Extended Abstract)

Cryptographic protocol design demands careful verification during all phases of development. Belief logics, in the tradition of the Burrows, Abadi, and Needham (BAN) logic of authentication [BAN90], provide a simple, intuitive model, and allow natural expressions of a protocol and its goals. Since manual deduction is error-prone, protocol designers need automated tools to make effective use of these logics. Such tools often require excessive human intervention or supply inadequate feedback during the verification process

Fast, Automatic Checking of Security Protocols

Protocols in electronic commerce and other security-sensitive applications require careful reasoning to demonstrate their robustness against attacks. Several logics have been developed for doing this reasoning formally,but protocol designers usually do the proofs by hand, a process which is time-consuming and error-prone. We present a new approach, theory checking, to analyzing and verifying properties of security protocols. In this approach we generate the entire finite theory, Th, of a logic for reasoning about a security protocol; determining whether it satisfies a property, OE, is thus a simple membership test: OE 2 Th. Our approach relies on (1) modeling a finite instance of a protocol in the way that the security community naturally, though informally, presents a security protocol, and (2) placing restrictions on a logic's rules of inference to guarantee that our algorithm terminates, generating a finite theory. A novel benefit to our approach is that because of these restriction..

Promoting health in a virtual world: Impressions of health communication messages delivered in Second Life

The purpose of this exploratory study was to examine the use of the online virtual world Second Life (SL) for the delivery of health communication messages designed to encourage individuals to make healthy lifestyle choices regarding physical activity and nutrition. Research questions addressed participants’ impressions of the usefulness and relevance of health information received via an online virtual world and participants’ overall impressions of an online health education intervention program. Forty individuals participated in a health education intervention and completed a post-test survey. Four focus groups were also held, one in real life and three in Second Life and included a total of 28 participants. Overall, participants rated the health intervention positively, found the information useful in helping them think about changing their health behaviors, and reported finding the information easy to understand and personally relevant. Participants were also consistent in reporting they found the use of Second Life to be a unique and novel approach for the delivery of health information