Internet performance modeling: the state of the art at the turn of the century

Seemingly overnight, the Internet has gone from an academic experiment to a worldwide information matrix. Along the way, computer scientists have come to realize that understanding the performance of the Internet is a remarkably challenging and subtle problem. This challenge is all the more important because of the increasingly significant role the Internet has come to play in society. To take stock of the field of Internet performance modeling, the authors organized a workshop at Schloß Dagstuhl. This paper summarizes the results of discussions, both plenary and in small groups, that took place during the four-day workshop. It identifies successes, points to areas where more work is needed, and poses “Grand Challenges” for the performance evaluation community with respect to the Internet

Using Push Technology for Maintaining Proficiency and Promoting a Growth Mindset in a STEM Course

Just like physical skills, cognitive skills grow rusty over time unless they are regularly used and practiced. This means that school breaks can have quite negative consequences on student learning. The Keeping in School Shape (KiSS) program is an engaging, innovative and cost-effective intervention that uses push technology to help students maintain proficiency over breaks from school, while also promoting a growth mindset. Theoretically, the KiSS program draws on the well-documented benefits of retrieval practice – the notion that recalling previously material is a very effective way of maintaining cognitive performance. The KiSS program embodies retrieval practice by sending students a multiple-choice mathematics question daily via text messaging or email. A positive mindset regarding the benefits of effort is promoted through feedback messages that encourage program resource use, such as choosing to view a hint and retry a problem instead of giving up. This paper reports on a few aspects of the implementation of the KiSS program at a large university during the summer break for students enrolled in an engineering introductory calculus course sequence