The role of community feedback in the student example authoring process: An evaluation of AnnotEx

This paper explores a new approach to engage students in authoring educational content. This approach was implemented in AnnotEx (Example Annotator) system, which allows students to annotate computer programming examples with line-by-line explanations and review annotations produced by ther peers. A controlled study of AnnotEx presented in this paper evaluated the impact of the community peer-reviewing process on the quality of produced annotations and student learning. The study confirmed that community feedback increases the volume and the quality of produced annotations and positively affects the work of weaker students. The peer-rating process enabled the community to distinguish good and bad annotations. Peer comments provided efficient guidelines for improving annotations and caused a significant increase in quality. © 2010 Becta

Progressor: Personalized visual access to programming problems

This paper presents Progressor, a visualization of open student models intended to increase the student's motivation to progress on educational content. The system visualizes not only the user's own model, but also the peers' models. It allows sorting the peers' models using a number of criteria, including the overall progress and the progress on a specific topic. Also, in this paper we present results of a classroom study confirming our hypothesis that by showing a student the peers' models and ranking them by progress it is possible to increase the student's motivation to compete and progress in e-learning systems. © 2011 IEEE

Guiding and motivating students through open social student modeling: Lessons learned

Background/Context: A large number of educational resources are now made available on the web to support both regular classroom learning and online learning. The abundance of available content has produced at least two problems: how to help students find the most appropriate resources and how to engage them in using and benefiting from these resources. Personalized and social learning have been suggested as potential ways to address these problems. Our work attempts to integrate these directions of research by combining the ideas of adaptive navigation support and open student modeling with the ideas of social comparison and social visualization. We call our approach Open Social Student Modeling (OSSM). Objective/Research Questions: First, we review a sequence of our earlier projects focused on Open Social Student Modeling for one kind of learning content and formulate several key design principles that contribute to the success of OSSM. Second, we present our exploration of OSSM in a more challenging context of modeling student progress for two kinds of learning content in parallel. We aim to answer the following research questions: How do we design OSSM interfaces to support many kinds of learning content in parallel? Will current identified design principles (key features) confirm the power of the learning community through OSSM with multiple learning-resource collections? Will the OSSM visualization provide successful personalized guidance within a richer collection of educational resources? Research Design: We designed four classroom studies to assess the value of different options for OSSM visualization of one and multiple kinds of learning content in the context of programming-language learning. We examined the comparative success of different design options to distill successful design patterns and other important lessons for the future developers of OSSM for personalized and social e-learning. Findings/Results: The results confirmed the motivational impact of personalized social guidance provided by the OSSM system in the target context. The interface encouraged students to explore more topics and motivated them to work ahead of the course schedule. Both strong and weak students worked with the appropriate levels of questions for their readiness, which yielded consistent performance across different levels of complex problems. Additionally, providing more realistic content collection on the navigation-supported OSSM visualizations resulted in uniform performance for the group. Conclusions/Recommendation: A sequence of studies of several OSSM interfaces confirmed that a combination of adaptive navigational support, open student modeling, and social visualization in the form of the OSSM interface can reinforce the navigational and motivational values of these approaches. In several contexts, the OSSM interface demonstrated its ability to offer effective guidance in helping students to locate the most relevant content at the right time while increasing student motivation to work with diverse learning content

Off the beaten path: The impact of adaptive content sequencing on student navigation in an open social student modeling interface

One of the original goals of intelligent educational systems is to guide every student to the most appropriate educational content. Exploring both knowledge-based and social guidance approaches in past work, we learned that each of these approaches has weak sides. In this paper we follow the idea of combining social guidance with more traditional knowledge-based guidance to support more optimal content navigation. We proposed a greedy sequencing approach that maximizes student’s level of knowledge and tested it in a classroom. Results indicated that this approach positively impacts students’ navigation

Open social student modeling: Visualizing student models with parallel introspectiveviews

This paper explores a social extension of open student modeling that we call open social student modeling. We present a specific implementation of this approach that uses parallel IntrospectiveViews to visualize models representing student progress with QuizJET parameterized self-assessment questions for Java programming. The interface allows visualizing not only the student's own model, but also displaying parallel views on the models of their peers and the cumulative model of the entire class or group. The system was evaluated in a semester-long classroom study. While the use of the system was non-mandatory, the parallel IntrospectiveViews interface caused an increase in all of the usage parameters in comparison to a regular portal-based access, which allowed the student to achieve a higher success rate in answering the questions. The collected data offer some evidence that a combination of traditional personalized guidance with social guidance was more effective than personalized guidance alone. © 2011 Springer-Verlag

The impact of social performance visualization on students

Over the last 10 years two major research directions explored the benefits of visualizing student learning progress. One stream of research on learning performance visualization attempts to build a visual presentation of students' learning progress, targeting the needs of instructors and academic advisors. The other stream of research on Open Student Modeling (OSM) attempts to visualize the state of individual student's knowledge and present the visualization directly to the student. The results of the studies in that area show that, presenting students with basic representation of their knowledge will result in facilitating their metacognitive activities and promoting self-reflection and awareness. This paper tries to study the impact of a more sophisticated form of performance visualization on students. We believe that our visualization tool can positively influence students by granting them the opportunity to get a view of their performance in the content of the class progress. Moreover, we tried to boost their motivation by building a positive sense of competition using a representation of average class performance. In this paper we present study comparing two groups of students, one using the visualization and another without visualization. The results of the study shows that: 1) the students are likely to use the social visualization tool during the whole semester to monitor their progress in comparison with their peers; 2) the visualization tool encourages students to use the learning materials in a more continuous manner during the whole semester and 3) students will achieve a higher success rate in answering self-assessment quizzes. © 2012 IEEE

Illness causal beliefs in Turkish immigrants

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>People hold a wide variety of beliefs concerning the causes of illness. Such beliefs vary across cultures and, among immigrants, may be influenced by many factors, including level of acculturation, gender, level of education, and experience of illness and treatment. This study examines illness causal beliefs in Turkish-immigrants in Australia.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Causal beliefs about somatic and mental illness were examined in a sample of 444 members of the Turkish population of Melbourne. The socio-demographic characteristics of the sample were broadly similar to those of the Melbourne Turkish community. Five issues were examined: the structure of causal beliefs; the relative frequency of natural, supernatural and metaphysical beliefs; ascription of somatic, mental, or both somatic and mental conditions to the various causes; the correlations of belief types with socio-demographic, modernizing and acculturation variables; and the relationship between causal beliefs and current illness.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Principal components analysis revealed two broad factors, accounting for 58 percent of the variation in scores on illness belief scales, distinctly interpretable as natural and supernatural beliefs. Second, beliefs in natural causes were more frequent than beliefs in supernatural causes. Third, some causal beliefs were commonly linked to both somatic and mental conditions while others were regarded as more specific to either somatic or mental disorders. Last, there was a range of correlations between endorsement of belief types and factors defining heterogeneity within the community, including with demographic factors, indicators of modernizing and acculturative processes, and the current presence of illness.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Results supported the classification of causal beliefs proposed by Murdock, Wilson & Frederick, with a division into natural and supernatural causes. While belief in natural causes is more common, belief in supernatural causes persists despite modernizing and acculturative influences. Different types of causal beliefs are held in relation to somatic or mental illness, and a variety of apparently logically incompatible beliefs may be concurrently held. Illness causal beliefs are dynamic and are related to demographic, modernizing, and acculturative factors, and to the current presence of illness. Any assumption of uniformity of illness causal beliefs within a community, even one that is relatively culturally homogeneous, is likely to be misleading. A better understanding of the diversity, and determinants, of illness causal beliefs can be of value in improving our understanding of illness experience, the clinical process, and in developing more effective health services and population health strategies.</p

Fatal Prion Disease in a Mouse Model of Genetic E200K Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease

Genetic prion diseases are late onset fatal neurodegenerative disorders linked to pathogenic mutations in the prion protein-encoding gene, PRNP. The most prevalent of these is the substitution of Glutamate for Lysine at codon 200 (E200K), causing genetic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (gCJD) in several clusters, including Jews of Libyan origin. Investigating the pathogenesis of genetic CJD, as well as developing prophylactic treatments for young asymptomatic carriers of this and other PrP mutations, may well depend upon the availability of appropriate animal models in which long term treatments can be evaluated for efficacy and toxicity. Here we present the first effective mouse model for E200KCJD, which expresses chimeric mouse/human (TgMHu2M) E199KPrP on both a null and a wt PrP background, as is the case for heterozygous patients and carriers. Mice from both lines suffered from distinct neurological symptoms as early as 5–6 month of age and deteriorated to death several months thereafter. Histopathological examination of the brain and spinal cord revealed early gliosis and age-related intraneuronal deposition of disease-associated PrP similarly to human E200K gCJD. Concomitantly we detected aggregated, proteinase K resistant, truncated and oxidized PrP forms on immunoblots. Inoculation of brain extracts from TgMHu2ME199K mice readily induced, the first time for any mutant prion transgenic model, a distinct fatal prion disease in wt mice. We believe that these mice may serve as an ideal platform for the investigation of the pathogenesis of genetic prion disease and thus for the monitoring of anti-prion treatments

Retroperitoneal Castleman's tumor and paraneoplastic pemphigus: report of a case and review of the literature

BACKGROUND: Castleman's disease is a rare lymphoproliferative syndrome. Its etiology and pathogenesis are unclear. The disease can be occasionally associated with a paraneoplastic pemphigus (PNP), an autoimmune mucocutaneous disorder commonly seen in neoplasms of lymphocytic origin. CASE PRESENTATION: We present a case of a 63-year old male patient who was referred for surgical treatment of a lately diagnosed retroperitoneal pelvic mass. The patient had been already treated for two years due to progressive diffuse cutaneous lesions histologically consistent with lichen ruber verucosus and pemphigus vulgaris. Intraoperatively a highly vascularized solid mass occupying the small pelvis was resected after meticulous vascular ligation and hemostasis. After surgery and following immunosuppressive treatment a clear remission of the skin lesions was observed. CONCLUSION: Castleman's tumor should be always suspected when a retroperitoneal mass is combined with PNP. In a review of the literature we found 37 additional cases. Complete surgical resection of the tumor can be curative in most of the cases

Cytotoxic Phenylpropanoids and a New Triterpene, Turformosinic Acid, from Turpinia formosana Nakai

One new phenylpropanoid, turformosin A (1), and one new triterpene, turformosinic acid (2), together with 16 known compounds, were isolated from the stems of Turpinia formosana Nakai. All structures were elucidated on the basis of spectroscopic analysis, including 1D- and 2D-NMR techniques and MS analysis. Selected isolated compounds were evaluated for in vitro cytotoxicity against four human cancer cell lines and antioxidant scavenging effects on DPPH. (-)-(7'S,8'S)-threo-carolignan X (3) exhibited cytotoxicity against Hep2, WiDr, Daoy, and MCF-7 cell lines with ED(50) values of 3.60, 4.45, 6.07, and 13.7 μg/mL, respectively. Turformosin A (1), (-)-(7'S,8'S)- threo-carolignan X (3), methoxyhydroquinone-4-β-D-glucopyranoside (5), and methoxy-hydroquinone-1-β-D-glucopyranoside (6), exhibited similar anti-oxidative activity. Hep2 cells treated with 10 μg/mL of 3 showed elevation of sub-G1 population (from 20% at 8 h to 60% at 48 h), and activation of caspase-9/caspase-3/PARP cascade. Compound 3 induced intrinsic apoptotic pathway in Hep2 cells with dose and time dependence (10 μg/mL for 8 h)