1,721,134 research outputs found
Effectiveness of the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy: final report
Full text linkThis review examined the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), its effectiveness, its unintended consequences, and potential improvements.
Referral
On 15 May 2013 the Senate referred to the Senate Standing References Committee on Education, Employment and Workplace Relations the matter of the effectiveness of the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) for inquiry and report by 27 June 2013. The committee called for submissions and published a total of 93 submissions. The committee conducted a public hearing in Melbourne on 21 June 2013.
The committee determined that the evidence provided in submissions, combined with evidence provided by witnesses during the committee\u27s hearing demonstrated that the committee required more time to adequately discharge its reference and present a properly considered report. The committee\u27s interim report provided a snapshot of the key issues, however did not reach any conclusions or make any recommendations.
Terms of reference
The terms of reference determined by the Senate required the Senate Education, Employment and Workplace Relations Committee to inquire and report into:
The effectiveness of the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), with specific reference to:
(a) whether the evidence suggests that NAPLAN is achieving its stated objectives;
(b) unintended consequences of NAPLAN\u27s introduction;
(c) NAPLAN\u27s impact on teaching and student learning practices;
(d) the impact on teaching and student learning practices of publishing NAPLAN test results on the My School website;
(e) potential improvements to the program, to improve student learning and assessment;
(f) international best practice for standardised testing, and international case studies about the introduction of standardised testing; and
(g) other relevant matters.
Structure of the report
This report is divided into five chapters. Chapter one sets out the administrative arrangements for the inquiry as well as an update of the recommendations from the committee\u27s 2010 inquiry into The administration and reporting of NAPLAN testing.
Chapter two considers NAPLAN\u27s objectives and whether or not they have been achieved. It also provides a background to NAPLAN testing in Australia and why NAPLAN was introduced.
Chapter three considers the impacts of NAPLAN on students, teachers and schools. It then discusses the MySchool website and what effect the publication of NAPLAN results has on the process.
Chapter four considers potential improvements to the NAPLAN testing program that may contribute to improved student learning and assessment.
Chapter five examines international best practice for standardised testing
Formal acknowledgement of citizen scientists’ contributions via dynamic data citations
No full textData citation provides a valuable method for rewarding citizen scientists by formally acknowledging the contributions that they make to valuable scientific datasets. The difficulty is that citizen science databases that comprise volunteer-generated observations are highly dynamic and contain data contributed by a very large number of volunteers. Moreover, the scientists re-using the citizen science data often only want to cite a small sub-set of the entire database, as it existed at a specific date and time. The majority of data citation approaches assume that the dataset is static, owned by a single agent and the entire dataset is being cited (not just a subset). This paper describes, implements and evaluates an innovative approach to dynamic data citation that potentially overcomes many of the challenges associated with citing sub-sets of constantly changing citizen science datasets and thus enables formal recognition of the volunteers who contributed the data
A collaborative scholarly annotation system for dynamic web documents - A literary case study
No full textThis paper describes ongoing work within the Aus-e-Lit project at the University of Queensland to provide collaborative annotation tools for Australian Literary Scholars. It describes our implementation of an annotation framework to facilitate collaboration and sharing of annotations within research sub-communities. Using the annotation system, scholars can collaboratively select web resources and attach different types of annotations (comments, notes, queries, tags and metadata), which can be harvested to enrich the AustLit collection. We describe how rich semantic descriptions can be added to the constantly changing AustLit collection through a set of interoperable annotation tools based on the Open Annotations Collaboration (OAC) model. RDFa enables scholars to semantically annotate dynamic web pages and contribute typed metadata about the IFLA FRBR entities represented within the AustLit collection. We also describe how the OAC model can be used in combination with OAI-ORE to produce scholarly digital editions, and compare this approach with existing scholarly annotation approaches. © 2010 Springer-Verlag
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
PODD: An ontology-driven data repository for collaborative phenomics research
No full textPhenomics, the systematic study of phenotypes, is an emerging field of research in biology. It complements genomics, the study of genotypes, and is becoming an increasingly critical tool to understand phenomena such as plant morphology and human diseases. Phenomics studies make use of both high- and low-throughput imaging and measurement devices to capture data, which are subsequently used for analysis. As a result, high volumes of data are generated on a regular basis, making storage, management, annotation and distribution a challenging task. Sufficient contextual information, the metadata, must also be maintained to facilitate the dissemination of these data. The challenge is further complicated by the need to support emerging technologies and processes in phenomics research. This paper describes our effort in designing and developing an ontology-driven, open, extensible data repository to support collaborative phenomics research in Australia
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
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