Driving the waste prevention agenda: an evaluation of weighing kerbside household waste arisings methodology, in Dorset, UK

Household waste prevention in England has been recognised in national strategy as a key component for future sustainable practice. To support the policy agenda, the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) in England has funded an extensive programme of fundamental research in the area. Previous attempts to assess the impacts of waste prevention initiatives have faced a number of problems. These have generally centred on difficulty in separating the effects of initiatives from external factors and inadequate sample sizes or methodology. The specific research aim reported on here, in this Defra funded project, was to trial and assess methods for monitoring and evaluating approaches detailed in the National Resource and Waste Forum (NRWF)’s Household Waste Prevention Toolkit. The primary objective of this research was to quantify the direct waste tonnage impacts of implementing a targeted household waste campaign in Dorset. The key performance indicator chosen for this assessment was the weight of waste collected at the kerbside from households. The results are informative and will help future teams design campaigns on the basis of rigorous methodology. It was found that there are a wide range of factors that need to be taken into account and that had hitherto been given little prominence, such as careful matching of pilot and control areas. Analysis of the results leads to the conclusion that waste arisings for residual waste has decreased in the pilot area (≈ 10.5%) more than the controls (e.g. ≈ 5.5%). This method for monitoring can be used, in the hands of an expert project team, to communicate to the public the direct benefits of waste prevention

The VISTA Science Archive

We describe the VISTA Science Archive (VSA) and its first public release of data from five of the six VISTA Public Surveys. The VSA exists to support the VISTA Surveys through their lifecycle: the VISTA Public Survey consortia can use it during their quality control assessment of survey data products before submission to the ESO Science Archive Facility (ESO SAF); it supports their exploitation of survey data prior to its publication through the ESO SAF; and, subsequently, it provides the wider community with survey science exploitation tools that complement the data product repository functionality of the ESO SAF. This paper has been written in conjunction with the first public release of public survey data through the VSA and is designed to help its users understand the data products available and how the functionality of the VSA supports their varied science goals. We describe the design of the database and outline the database-driven curation processes that take data from nightly pipeline-processed and calibrated FITS files to create science-ready survey datasets. Much of this design, and the codebase implementing it, derives from our earlier WFCAM Science Archive (WSA), so this paper concentrates on the VISTA-specific aspects and on improvements made to the system in the light of experience gained in operating the WSA.Comment: 22 pages, 16 figures. Minor edits to fonts and typos after sub-editting. Published in A&

Students’ perceptions of their understanding in Chemistry 1 for Veterinary Science

The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between students’ perceptions of their understanding of chemistry, and their performance as measured by the end of semester examinations. Prior to commencing the study, it was hypothesised that there should be some correlation between students’ perceived understanding and exam performance. Furthermore, experience suggested that high achieving students are generally better able to identify their strengths and weaknesses than are weaker students. It seemed logical, therefore, that the strength of any correlation should vary with exam performance. This study was designed to test this hypothesis, and this paper is the first refereed report of results from this on-going investigation. A search of the literature found no previous studies of direct relevance to this work. However, the literature does offer some background. A number of studies have examined students’ perception of their exam performance after completing an exam (e.g., Beyer, Riesselmann and Warren 2002), and students’ overall expectations of academic performance has also been examined (e.g., de Campos, Grinberg, Garcia, Parise, da Silveira and Dumont 1998). Both are poor predictors of academic performance. Student self-marking has been shown to correlate well with the marks given by their professors for lower-order cognitive skills questions, but not for questions requiring high-order cognitive skills (Zoller, Fastow, Lubezsky and Tsaparlis 1999). Academic self-efficacy (confidence in one’s ability to complete academic tasks) has been shown to be positively correlated with academic performance (Chemers, Hu, and Garcia 2001; Vrugt, Langereis and Hoogstraten 1997). However, the Chemers et al. (2001) study examined generic skills and overall performance in a degree program, and was not linked to a domain. The Vrugt et al. (1997) study examined psychology freshmen, and whilst subject matter understanding was included in their model, they found that ‘self-efficacy and goals accounted for 5% of the variance in exam performance’ (p. 67), and thus their model has a poor predicting power for student achievement. House (2000, 2003) examined self-beliefs (measuring agreement/disagreement with statements such as ‘Science is boring’, ‘I enjoy learning Science’ and ‘Science is important to everyone’s life’) amongst 13-yearolds. These studies found a correlation between self-beliefs and science achievement test scores, but these beliefs were also found to be poor predictors of performance, explaining 6.29% of the variance in test scores in Hong Kong (House 2003, p. 201) and 6.8% in Ireland (House 2000, p. 110)

Exam script analysis—A powerful tool for identifying misconceptions

As part of a wider study of student understanding (Read, George, King and Masters 2004), a detailed analysis of the Semester 1, 2003 CHEM1405 (Chemistry 1 for Veterinary Science) examination was carried out. This analysis used both quantitative (statistical) and qualitative methods. Qualitative analysis focussed on evidence of misconceptions and commonalities in student approaches, both correct and incorrect. While university exams are primarily used for summative assessment purposes, this poster paper is intended to highlight some of the other information available from exam script analysis