5 research outputs found
Creating and Sustaining Change: Assessment of Student Learning Outcomes
No full textChange is a constant condition within organizations, due to the introduction of new technologies, market place demands, external forces, and pressures to improve organizational effectiveness. However, large-scale organizational change efforts tend to fail more than 70 percent of the time. One of the recent large-scale movements within higher education institutions is towards accountability and assessment on student learning outcomes, which is higher education institutions should assess whether students learn what they should and retain the knowledge once learned. In addition, assessment findings should become a feedback mechanism to improve students’ education experiences. In this paper the author describe a change effort within a research university for compliance with regional accrediting commission requirements and program specific (engineering) accreditation requirements and procedures in defining and implementing assessment of student learning outcomes. The main issue is not just introducing new contents to the member of the faculty, but making sure that the assessment effort is meaningful. Issues arrived and solutions in creating and sustaining the change effort will be discussed
Learning and Teaching as Communicative Actions: A Mixed-Methods Twitter Study
No full textOur paper examines the design of a course that utilized the real-time information network Twitter to spark reflective thinking and communication based on classroom topics. A major goal was to increase discourse amongst students and enhance learning through encouraging student time on task. The innovation followed guidelines set forth in the Learning and Teaching as Communicative Actions theory to augment student learning experience via more active communication and increased content sharing among students, towards a goal of building a social learning community. In this mixed methods study, we found diverse student perceptions of the use of Twitter; both very positive views of the tool as a means of supporting discourse and those views of the tool having little benefit to student’s own learning. The female students in this study, perceived the tool to significantly more support the social learning community in the interactive environment than did male students
Labeling theory in relation to juvenile delinquency a critical analysis, 1983
No full textThe purpose of this discussion is to critically examine the issues and concerns surrounding the labeling perspective in order to determine its theoretical validity in relation to juvenile delinquency. The labeling perspective, a sociological theory of deviance, attempts to explain crime and deviance as being created or caused by society. That is, the labeling theorists believe that a juvenile delinquent is not considered a delinquent based on his actions, but is considered a delin-quent because society and social controllers (the police, juve-nile court, juvenile corrections) view his actions as such. It is this assumption that the process of labeling may actually re�inforce or create deviant behavior that has created controversial issues with respect to the labeling perspective. Whether or not the juvenile justice system does create deviance as a result of labeling will be the central matter of this discussion
Mining housekeeping genes with a Naive Bayes classifier
No full textThe first author was supported by the Student Awards Agency for Scotland. The second author is supported by BBSRC grant BBS RC BB/D006473/1, and under the Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration (IRC), which is sponsored by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council under grant number GR/N15764/01.Background: Traditionally, housekeeping and tissue specific genes have been classified using direct assay of mRNA presence across different tissues, but these experiments are costly and the results not easy to compare and reproduce. Results: In this work, a Naive Bayes classifier based only on physical and functional characteristics of genes already available in databases, like exon length and measures of chromatin compactness, has achieved a 97% success rate in classification of human housekeeping genes ( 93% for mouse and 90% for fruit fly). Conclusion: The newly obtained lists of housekeeping and tissue specific genes adhere to the expected functions and tissue expression patterns for the two classes. Overall, the classifier shows promise, and in the future additional attributes might be included to improve its discriminating power.Peer reviewe
