1,720,956 research outputs found
Validating a test of academic literacy at a South African university of technology
Get PDFThe advent of a democratic dispensation in South Africa in 1994 officially made it possible for historically disadvantaged groups, Black students in particular, to gain access to higher education at historically White universities. These universities, however, use English for teaching and learning, a second language to the majority of these students. Moreover, such students are products of Bantu Education, a tool used by the apartheid government to ensure that they leave secondary school with poor English skills. Both these factors constitute an obstacle to the students’ capacity to handle the demands of university education in English. South African universities have responded to this challenge by introducing academic language programmes to help the students bridge the language gap between high school and university education. Most of these programmes mainly focus on the teaching of reading, writing and thinking in English, a combination of skills known as academic literacy in the South African higher education context. This study explores the validity of a test of academic literacy used for summative assessment at a university of technology. Evidence suggests that the test possessed an acceptable degree of validity
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe 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
Get PDF“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
Get PDFWe 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
The National Benchmark Test of quantitative literacy: Does it complement the Grade 12 Mathematical Literacy examination?
No full textGenres of Lexical and Syntactical Devices in the Steps within Moves of Research Abstracts of Undergraduate University Students in Ghana
Get PDFThe research employs corpus linguistics to examine lexico-grammatical characteristics in research abstracts authored by undergraduate nursing, medicine, and allied health students at the University of Health and Allied Sciences in Ho, Ghana. A corpus of 150 research abstracts was extracted, of which 96 excerpts were examined for the occurrence of lexico-grammatical features — tense patterns, hedges, boosters, nominalization, technical nouns, and passive voice. The analysis focused on qualitatively determining the frequency of lexico-grammatical features in the research abstracts and quantitatively presenting them as a percentage in a table. The study found the dominant use of the present tense (68%), hedges (75%), and boosters (65%) in the introduction steps, the simple past tense (55%) and the passive voice (100%) in the method steps, the present perfect tense in the statement step (60%), nominalization in the conclusion (42%), method (33%) and introduction (25%) steps, while technical nouns were replete in the conclusion (47%), introduction (30%), and method (23%) steps. The study concludes that steps in the rhetorical moves of research abstracts written by UHAS students were replete with three tense patterns — the simple present, simple past, and present perfect tenses, and other lexico-grammatical devices—hedges, boosters, nominalization, technical nouns, and the passive voice. This paper recommends that English for Academic Purposes course teachers in Ghanaian and global universities teach students the necessary skills to effectively write tense patterns and other lexico-grammar devices in research abstracts
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe 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
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