Misunderstandings of atmospheric carbon budgets: Advances toward remediation of a common student misconception

With recent U.S. government efforts to develop policy procedures for addressing climate change, it is imperative that the public understand basic aspects of climate change in order for them to understand such policy. However, widespread misconceptions of basic atmospheric principles exist. In this study we document levels of misunderstanding that U.S. undergraduate students have with respect to atmospheric carbon budgets and factors that may account for variability in their understanding. Students enrolled in an introductory geology course (n = 947) completed a survey on atmospheric carbon budgets in two sequential semesters. Results indicated that most students did not have a basic understanding of mass-balance problems, and that their misunderstanding varied according to gender and their interest in science. Further, students tended to exhibit very poor graphical interpretation skills when examining mass-balance graphs. This thesis also describes a case study designed to remediate atmospheric carbon budget misunderstandings and misconceptions. This study is based off of one year\u27s data collected from a survey completed by introductory physical geology students (n = 465) including a control group (n = 399) and an experimental group (n = 66). The students in the experimental group worked on a remediation assignment targeting identified misconceptions during a laboratory session. After students completed the remediation assignment, which was designed to challenge the students\u27 specific areas of misunderstanding, significant learning gains and misconception reductions were observed

The ADEPT Project: A Decade of Research and Development for Robust and Flexible Process Support - Challenges and Achievements

This paper gives insights into the ADEPT project. Its target was to develop a next generation process management technology, which is by orders of magnitudes more powerful and flexible than contemporary process management systems. The ADEPT technology should provide advanced features and properties within one system, which seem to exclude each other, but which are required for the support of a broad spectrum of processes: ease-of-use for end users and system developers, high flexibility through the support of non-trivial ad-hoc deviations at the process instance level, quick implementation of process changes through process schema evolution, and correctness guarantees enabling robust execution of implemented processes. This paper describes the background and the real-world cases which motivated our research. It further explains the technological challenges we faced, describes the solutions we elaborated, and discusses the current status of the ADEPT project

Towards a New Dimension in Clinical Information Processing (Keynote)

Process-oriented information systems can be very valuable for the clinical personnel since they may actively support the processes in a hospital. By offering tasks right in time and when all information is available to perform them, and by obeying deadlines and other time constraints, it reduces the administrative overhead. Today’s WF technology is still too limited in order to be broadly applicable in this scenario. However, research in WF technology is making quick progress. In the foreseeable future one can expect very powerful WfMS to appear at the market place, offering a powerful platform for implementing process-oriented information systems, also in the clinical domain. This paper sketches the ADEPT WfMS prototype, which is among the functionally most powerful WfMS and proves that one can really build systems of this kind which offer all this functionality within one system

Realizing Adaptive Process-aware Information Systems with ADEPT2

In dynamic environments it must be possible to quickly implement new business processes, to enable ad-hoc deviations from the defined business processes on-demand (e.g., by dynamically adding, deleting or moving process activities), and to support dynamic process evolution (i.e., to propagate process schema changes to already running process instances). These fundamental requirements must be met without affecting process consistency and robustness of the process-aware information system. In this paper we describe how these challenges have been addressed in the ADEPT2 process management system. Our overall vision is to provide a next generation technology for the support of dynamic processes, which enables full process lifecycle management and which can be applied to a variety of application domains

Evaluation of Correctness Criteria for Dynamic Workflow Changes

The capability to dynamically adapt in-progress workflows (WF) is an essential requirement for any workflow management system (WfMS). This fact has been recognized by the WF community for a long time and different approaches in the area of adaptive workflows have been developed so far. They either enable WF type changes and their propagation to in-progress WF instances or (ad-hoc) changes of single WF instances. Thus, at first glance, many of the major problems related to dynamic WF changes seem to be solved. However, this picture changes when digging deeper into the approaches and considering implementation and usability issues as well. This paper presents important criteria for the correct adaptation of runningw orkflows and analyzes how actual approaches satisfy them. At this, we demonstrate the strengths of the different approaches and provide additional solutions to overcome current limitations. These solutions comprise comprehensive correctness criteria as well as migration rules for change realization