Empirical Evaluation of a Differentiated Assessment of Data Structures: The Role of Prerequisite Skills

There can be many reasons why students fail to answer correctly to summative tests in advanced computer science courses: often the cause is a lack of prerequisites or misconceptions about topics presented in previous courses. One of the ITiCSE 2020 working groups investigated the possibility of designing assessments suitable for differentiating between fragilities in prerequisites (in particular, knowledge and skills related to introductory programming courses) and advanced topics. This paper reports on an empirical evaluation of an instrument focusing on data structures, among those proposed by the ITiCSE working group. The evaluation aimed at understanding what fragile knowledge and skills the instrument is actually able to detect and to what extent it is able to differentiate them. Our results support that the instrument is able to distinguish between some specific fragilities (e.g., value vs. reference semantics), but not all of those claimed in the original report. In addition, our findings highlight the role of relevant skills at a level between prerequisite and advanced skills, such as program comprehension and reasoning about constraints. We also suggest ways to improve the questions in the instrument, both by improving the distractors of the multiple choice questions, and by slightly changing the content or phrasing of the questions. We argue that these improvements will increase the effectiveness of the instrument in assessing prerequisites as a whole, but also to pinpoint specific fragilities

Populist communication in the new media environment: a cross-regional comparative perspective

The changing terms of mediation place new demands, opportunities and risks on the performance of the political persona. Visibility has become a double-edged sword, leaving representatives vulnerable to exposure while new tools provide opportunities for emerging entrepreneurial actors. This double risk to elites’ mediated personas—exposure and challenge from entrepreneurs—renders their armour of authenticity dangerously fragile, which nourishes a public sense of being inefficaciously represented. It is this climate in which populism currently flourishes around the globe. Three primary criteria of mediated self-representation by politicians—visibility, authenticity and efficacy—form the focus of this paper: how do populists negotiate such demands in different democratic contexts, and wherein lies the symbiosis between populism and the new media environment suggested by the literature? To answer this, the paper compares two populist cases responding to different democratic contexts: UKIP, a right-wing party from an established democracy (UK), and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), a left-wing party from a transitional democracy (South Africa). The objects of study are disruptive performances by these parties, which are considered emblematic manifestations of populist ideology as they establish a Manichaean relationship between the elite and populist actors who embody the people. The paper introduces disruption as a multi-faceted and significant analytical concept to explain the populist behaviour and strategies that underlie populist parties’ responses to the demands for visibility, authenticity and efficacy that the new media environment places upon political representatives. Using mixed methods with an interpretive focus, the paper paints a rich picture of the contexts, meanings and means of construction of populist performances

Trends in modeling Biomedical Complex Systems

In this paper we provide an introduction to the techniques for multi-scale complex biological systems, from the single bio-molecule to the cell, combining theoretical modeling, experiments, informatics tools and technologies suitable for biological and biomedical research, which are becoming increasingly multidisciplinary, multidimensional and information-driven. The most important concepts on mathematical modeling methodologies and statistical inference, bioinformatics and standards tools to investigate complex biomedical systems are discussed and the prominent literature useful to both the practitioner and the theoretician are presented

Mediation of Political Realities : Media as Crucial Sources of Information

As stated in the Introduction, the twofold purpose of this book is first to bring together state-of-the-art chapters on the mediatization of politics, thereby assessing what we know and providing a framework for further research; and second to move research on the mediatization of politics forward towards a more fully developed theory. For this reason, we invited leading scholars in this field to comment in their chapters on basic and more advanced questions and to develop various topics and perspectives. The scope in content and the depth of analysis of their contributions underscore the many different ways in which mediatization research can augment the literature of political communication and how stimulating the impulses are that it evokes