Using Peer Review to Improve English as a Second Language College Students\u27 Writing Scores

This study was conducted to examine the effectiveness of peer-review in college English as Second Language writing classes to improve ESL students’ writing scores. It also investigated a statistically significant difference in college ESL students’ writing scores between those who use the self-check list and peer review worksheet and those who only use the self-check list in writing paragraphs and essays. More specifically, this study was conducted to determine the influence of different areas on students’ English writing scores, i.e., format/content/structure, grammar, vocabulary, and spelling. In addition, this study explored students’ attitudes and opinions on peer-review in writing class. This research was a mixed-methods study with a quasi-experimental design, including qualitative and quantitative components. The quantitative part included participants’ essay writing scores on the baseline writing and post-writing assignments. The quantitative component was an online survey for the treatment group. There were two groups of participants (n=25) in this study. There were 13 students in the comparison group and 12 students in the treatment group. The independent variables in this research design were the peer-review worksheets and the self-checklist interventions. The dependent variables in this study were students’ writing scores on the baseline writing assignment, which used a self-review checklist, and the post writing assignment, which used a peer-review editing worksheet. The results show no statistically significant difference in the baseline writing scores between the treatment and comparison groups. The corresponding significance values for F/C/S scores, grammar scores, spelling scores, vocabulary scores, and the total scores were 0.953, 0.758, 0.955, 0.846, and 0.857, respectively. Those values were much higher than 0.05, demonstrating that the students’ English writing skills were similar between the treatment and comparison groups on all criteria. There was a statistically significant difference in grammar scores, spelling scores, and total scores between the self-review results and peer-review results for the post writing scores within the treatment group. Corresponding significance values were 0.016, \u3c0.001, and \u3c0.001, respectively. For F/C/S scores and vocabulary scores, the corresponding significance values were 0.093 and 0.071, respectively. Therefore, there was no statistically significant difference in F/C/S scores and vocabulary scores between self-review and peer-review results. There was a statistically significant difference in grammar scores, spelling scores, and total scores between the treatment group (with peer-review) and the comparison group (with self-review) for the post writing scores between the two groups. Corresponding significance values were 0.029, 0.002, and 0.002, respectively. For F/C/S scores and vocabulary scores, the corresponding significance values were 0.066 and 0.078, respectively. Therefore, there was no statistically significant difference in F/C/S scores and vocabulary scores between the two groups. There was also a statistically significant difference in absolute score changes between the treatment group and the comparison group for grammar scores, spelling scores, and total scores regarding the score improvement from the baseline writing scores to the post writing scores. Corresponding significance values were 0.049, 0.004, and 0.028, respectively. The corresponding significance values for F/C/S and vocabulary score changes were 0.184 and 0.449, respectively. Therefore, there was no statistically significant difference in F/C/S and vocabulary score changes. Similarly, there was also a statistically significant difference in the percentages of the score improvement between the treatment group and the comparison group for grammar scores, spelling scores, and total scores. Corresponding significance values were 0.045, 0.029, and 0.047, respectively. There was no statistically significant difference in F/C/S and vocabulary score-change percentages between the two groups since the corresponding significance values were 0.289 and 0.434 (which were all higher than 0.05). Feedback from the treatment group student’s survey also revealed that students had a positive attitude toward peer-review. More students found that peer-review can better help them improve their English writing scores. Survey results also indicated that more students would like to recommend using peer-review to other students. This study has implications and provides recommendations for future research and practice in second language acquisition, writing skills, language research, educational technology, and teaching methodology

Strategies for First-Year University ESL Students to Improve Essay Writing Skills

This project provides a writing guidebook for first-year university level English as a Second Language (ESL) students and teachers. Most ESL students have difficulties in academic English writing, especially first-year university ESL students. Due to the differences in linguistic and education backgrounds, first-year university level ESL students desire a writing guidebook that is appropriate for them; ESL teachers should be provided with professional teaching methods and materials in delivering lectures too. By applying Schema Theory and Stephen D. Krashen’s Monitor Model, strategies for students and teachers are professionally designed in this guidebook. In order to help ESL students better their command of basic writing skills, systematic writing topics are applied within the book. Writing exercises, a self-checklist, and a self-reflection form are the supplemental materials that can be useful in improving students’ writing skills. ESL teachers can benefit from this book by learning various teaching strategies. This guidebook should be used in an ESL university ESL classroom to enhance student academic writing performance

A study on influential factors of occupant window-opening behavior in an office building in China

Occupants often perform many types of behavior in buildings to adjust the indoor thermal environment. In these types, opening/closing the windows, often regarded as window-opening behavior, is more commonly observed because of its convenience. It not only improves indoor air quality to satisfy occupants' requirement for indoor thermal comfort but also influences building energy consumption. To learn more about potential factors having effects on occupants' window-opening behavior, a field study was carried out in an office building within a university in Beijing. Window state (open/closed) for a total of 5 windows in 5 offices on the second floor in 285 days (9.5 months) were recorded daily. Potential factors, categorized as environmental and non-environmental ones, were subsequently identified with their impact on window-opening behavior through logistic regression and Pearson correlation approaches. The analytical results show that occupants' window-opening behavior is more strongly correlated to environmental factors, such as indoor and outdoor air temperatures, wind speed, relative humidity, outdoor PM2.5 concentrations, solar radiation, sunshine hours, in which air temperatures dominate the influence. While the non-environmental factors, i.e. seasonal change, time of day and personal preference, also affects the patterns of window-opening probability. This paper provides solid field data on occupant window opening behavior in China, with high resolutions and demonstrates the way in analyzing and predicting the probability of window-opening behavior. Its discussion into the potential impact factors shall be useful for further investigation of the relationship between building energy consumption and window-opening behavior

SynthEx: a synthetic-normal-based DNA sequencing tool for copy number alteration detection and tumor heterogeneity profiling

TCGA head and neck squamous cell carcinoma clinical information of tumors used in comparisons (n = 100). (XLSX 55 kb

A network function parallelism-enabled MEC framework for supporting low-latency services

Mobile edge computing (MEC) enables users to offload computing tasks to edge servers for provisioning low-latency and computation-intensive services. To manage heterogeneous resources and improve service flexibility, MEC is entailed by new technologies, \textit{i.e.}, software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV), which allow services running on common commodity hardware instead of proprietary hardware. However, data processing via software on commodity servers may induce high latency due to limited processing capacity, which impedes the quality of service. Meanwhile, MEC is a resource-sharing system and thus fairness should be considered. In this paper, we propose a network function parallelism (NFP)-enabled MEC (NFPMec) framework for supporting low-latency services. To reap the potential benefits of the NFPMec, we formulate the fairness-aware throughput maximization problem (FTMP) with aim of maximizing the fairness-aware system throughput while satisfying the QoS requirements. We propose a relaxation-based generalized benders algorithm (RGBA) to decouple the FTMP into two sub-problems based on the non-linear convex duality theory. After relaxation, the sub-problems are solved by the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) approach. The convergence of the RGBA is theoretically proved. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed NFPMec outperforms SDN-enabled MEC networks in terms of resource utilization, service latency and system throughput

Optically trapped room temperature polariton condensate in an organic semiconductor

M.W., G.A.T., and I.D.W.S. acknowledge financial support from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) programme grant Hybrid Polaritonics (EP/M025330/1), and from the Scottish Funding Council. W.V. and T.L. were supported by the Ministry of Education (Singapore) Tier 2 grant MOE2019-T2-004. H.O. acknowledges EPSRC through a grant (EP/S014403/1). K.O. acknowledges EPSRC for PhD studentship support through a grant (EP/L015110/1).The strong nonlinearities of exciton-polariton condensates in lattices make them suitable candidates for neuromorphic computing and physical simulations of complex problems. So far, all room temperature polariton condensate lattices have been achieved by nanoimprinting microcavities, which by nature lacks the crucial tunability required for realistic reconfigurable simulators. Here, we report the observation of a quantised oscillating nonlinear quantum fluid in 1D and 2D potentials in an organic microcavity at room temperature, achieved by an on-the-fly fully tuneable optical approach. Remarkably, the condensate is delocalised from the excitation region by macroscopic distances, leading both to longer coherence and a threshold one order of magnitude lower than that with a conventional Gaussian excitation profile. We observe different mode selection behaviour compared to inorganic materials, which highlights the anomalous scaling of blueshift with pump intensity and the presence of sizeable energy-relaxation mechanisms. Our work is a major step towards a fully tuneable polariton simulator at room temperature.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe