The Effectiveness of Feedback using Video Recording as A Potential Teaching Method in Communication and Counselling Among Pharmacy Students

AbstractFourth year pharmacy UKM students will be selected and randomised into three groups, verbal feedback (verbal group), video feedback (video group) or no feedback (control group) for the counselling session. All students will receive a standardised case scenario for the counselling purposes and facilitators (pharmacy lecturers) will assess the students’ communication and counselling skills based on a validated standardised assessment form. Similar exercise will be repeated after 1 month and comparative analysis will be conducted to identify differences between the techniques in relation to students’ communication and counselling skills

ESL students’ oral performance in English language school-based assessment: results of an empirical study

Abstract Background The English language school-based assessment (SBA) component of the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education (HKDSE) Examination is innovative in that the assessment tasks involve assessing English oral language skills in a high-stakes context but they are designed and implemented in the ESL classroom by school teachers in light of a regular reading and viewing program or the elective modules integrated into the school curriculum. While this certainly is a positive move towards better congruence between the teaching, learning, and assessment activities, there has been concern whether the teachers are capable of applying the assessment criteria and standards consistently in spite of going through a variety of standardization meetings and sharing discussions initiated and mandated by the Hong Kong Examination and Assessment Authority (HKEAA). In other words, there has been concern about the extent to which results provided from teachers in different schools are comparable. Also, how may task difficulty be reflected in students’ assessment results across the two SBA task types? It was to provide some research evidence on matters relating to these issues associated with teacher assessment results that the study described here was carried out. Methods The study, with the help of Rasch analysis, aims to examine the psychometric qualities of this English language school-based assessment, how students’ assessment results may vary across different schools, and how task difficulty may vary across the two different task types. Results The findings indicated the following: (1) among the three schools involved in this study, two band 2 schools demonstrated similar abilities across all task domains as there were no significant differences in students’ SBA results in all assessment domains between these two band 2 schools. Significant differences were found in some assessment domains between the two band 2 schools and the band 3 school; (2) an obviously more fine-grained pattern of difference in difficulty levels of different assessment domains was observed in students’ assessment results across the two task types in this study than in previous studies. Conclusions Implications of the results for teacher assessor training and test task development are discussed

Rethinking Educational Assessment from the Perspective of Design Thinking

Because human processes are subtle, complex, and contextualized, computational representations of those processes face highly significant unmet design challenges. Design Thinking (DT) offers a potential new paradigm of creativity and innovation in education capable of effecting meaningful culture change. DT is nonlinear but encompasses elements of empathy, problem definition, ideation, prototyping, and tests that may freely move as needed from and to each other. DT's empathic focus on end users' needs suggests educational measurement's information infrastructures will have to coherently integrate assessment and instruction across multiple levels of complexity in communication. Applying DT reveals the need to attend to previously undeveloped technical issues in communication. Especially important are developmental, horizontal, and vertical forms of coherence, and denotative, metalinguistic, and metacommunicative levels of complexity. New solutions emerge when classrooms are reconceived as meta-design ecosystem niches of creativity and innovation structured from the bottom up by flows of self-organizing information. Recently identified correspondences between educational measurement and metrology support efforts aimed at developing multilevel common languages for the communication of learning outcomes. Prototype reports illustrate how emergent measured constructs can be brought into language in ways that integrate developmental, horizontal, and vertical coherence across levels of complexity. Coherent information infrastructures of these kinds are capable of adapting to new circumstances as populations of persons and items change, doing so without compromising the continuity of comparisons or the uniqueness of locally situated knowledge and practices

Method to reduce compressive stress in the silicon substrate during silicidation

US6284610Granted Paten

Uniform void-free epitaxial CoSi 2 formation on STI bounded narrow Si(lOO) lines by template layer stress reduction

10.1149/1.1798191Electrochemical and Solid-State Letters711H49-H51ESLE

Robust electromigration reliability through engineering optimization

With complex process integration approach and severe fabrication limitations caused by introduction of new materials and diminishing process margins, there are mounting concerns with the increased failure rate at the early life cycle (e.g.<1 year operation) of product application known as infant mortality failures. A paradigm change in reliability qualification methodology aim at understanding the impact of variation on reliability is required to ensure reliability robustness. Using Electromigration (EM) as an example, this paper described a methodology where the impact of process variation on reliability is studied. A model that predicts the impact of process variation on EM sigma is also proposed which enables variation and its impact on reliability to be quantified. Using this methodology, the critical process parameters impacting reliability could be identified and controlled to ensure reliability robustness.Accepted versio

Thermal studies on stress-induced void-like defects in epitaxial-CoSi 2 formation

Materials Research Society Symposium - Proceedings564109-116MRSP