1,720,954 research outputs found
Essays on technology, networks and choices in education
Full text linkThis dissertation is composed of two related parts. The first part corresponds to chapter 1; the second part is developed in chapters 2 and 3. The common thread is the focus on academic choices, both in students' everyday life and at the moment of an important investment. Both situations have consequences on the human capital accumulation process.
The first chapter explores the relationship between constant smartphone distractions and academic outcomes. In this setting, I concentrate on an every-day choice about efficient time allocation that may have an impact on performance at the university level. To investigate how technological distractions affect concentration and learning, I assign first-year university students to the use of an app that helps them disconnect from distractions on their smartphones. The treatment lasts for several weeks up to the midterm exams. Through the combination of administrative data with survey responses collected before and after the intervention, I first document potential selection mechanisms into the treatment, and I then balance treated and control individuals thanks to propensity score matching. I find that there is a positive effect on the midterm performance of particular kinds of courses, namely the most qualitative ones like Management and Law but not Math or Computer Science. I do not find significant differences in terms of expected percent chance of passing the exams, expected grades, course evaluations, and anxiety levels.
The second part of the dissertation focuses on the high school choice and uses survey data to uncover some important factors in shaping the decision.
Chapter 2 deals with the influence of peers on an academic decision. I use expectations about friends' future high school choices to detect an influence on own choice. I use multiple waves of a survey to collect beliefs about expected high school characteristics and future outcomes and gather information about friends' network structure. I solve for the reflection problem by exploiting the architecture of the reconstructed network. I instrument the expectations about friends' future choices using excluded peers (friends of friends) and I estimate a multinomial logit model of high school track choice. Expectations about friends' future choices matter more for the choice than expectations related to school-specific outcomes, such as the probability of liking the subjects taught at a certain school and the expected effort.
Chapter 3 looks at the decision-making process within the family and aims to uncover the relevant actors and their interactions. In the choice of high school, the family is not a unitary decision maker, but rather it is composed by different agents: the child and the parents. Moreover, models of school choice usually assume complete choice sets. However, informational constraints, heterogeneous preferences within family and the parenting style may lead to heterogeneous choice sets in terms of both size and composition. In this chapter I use survey data to document how family dynamics affect size and composition of choice sets in facing the high school choice. I find substantial evidence of limited agency and limited consideration at the time of choice, but no limited awareness. During the decision-making process agents tend to expand their choice sets over time, with students' sets smaller than their parents' ones. More research is needed to establish a clear link between choice set dynamics and parenting styles
Enhancing Institutional Trust: Evidence from an Experimental Study with Adolescents in Italy
No full textThis study presents a quantitative analysis of a randomized survey experiment with Italian high school students (N = 1,433). It aims to evaluate trust levels in various institutions-healthcare, education, politics, judiciary, and defense-and identify determinants influencing trust in the scientific field, particularly regarding health issues. Using experimental scenarios, potential causal relationships among factors influencing confidence and trust scores are explored. Three distinct experimental scenarios are included in the survey: the first examines the influence of various social media platforms, the second and the third evaluate the impact of doctors, parents, and friends on trust-building among young individuals. Our results indicate a high level of trust in science among adolescents and emphasize high confidence in scientific experts. The study provides policy insights aimed at fostering trust, including recommendations for investments in education, increased involvement of specialists in direct communication, and enhanced transparency measures to mitigate misinformation. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2025
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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