1,720,956 research outputs found
Iterating Alone over a Method and Tool to Facilitate Equitable Assessment of Group Work
No full textAs an instructor employing group projects, my students and I have been frustrated by my inability to allocate credit for individuals’ contributions to a group’s projects. This design case details my efforts to design a method of equitably grading group work and addressing student concerns with respect to distribution of effort and, in tandem, to develop a tool that implements a substantial portion of that method. The method asks students involved in group projects to report the contributions of group members, including themselves, on a weekly basis. The web-based tool reminds students via email to enter numbers or use sliders to represent effort. Reported values are interdependent, meaning a low contribution from one member must be balanced by high contributions from others. As the sole designer and developer on this project, I found little distinction between design and development activities. The design of the method evolved rapidly as it met with the reality of the tool being developed to support it. While the tool was initially considered for summative assessment purposes, the result focuses on formative assessment capabilities. Conflicting goals resulted in a functional prototype that would serve me for testing acceptance of the method and usefulness of the data, but the tool itself would not evolve further. This prototype uncovered avenues for research and the second iteration begins my exploration of some of these questions while addressing weaknesses. The decisions in the next iteration will focus on implementation of the method and related research resulting in a product that is easier to work with. </jats:p
Instructors’ professional vision for collaborative learning groups
No full text
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate how instructors approach the task of diagnosing collaborative learning group dysfunction when presented with an opportunity and a request to do so.
Design/methodology/approach
This mixed methods study asked instructors experienced in using group work to sequentially respond to weekly instalments of reflective journal entries representing a fictional member of a collaborative learning group working through a group project. A web-based instrument captured quantitative and qualitative data during the first phase where instructors worked on their own and in the second phase where participants used a think-aloud protocol while engaging in the same task. The data were analysed to understand their professional vision (what they notice and how they make sense of it as well as consistency across instructors) for collaborative group projects.
Findings
This study found that instructors were consistent neither in what they noticed nor in how they made sense of what they perceived. This resulted in a tendency not to label dysfunctional groups as such.
Social implications
If the instructors lack professional vision for group projects, the students are unlikely to learn to work in groups and the instructors will find it difficult to seek help and learn from one another.
Originality/value
This is an exploratory study because there was minimal extant research on the topic. Methods included the use of narrative fiction and a remote think-aloud protocol.
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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
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
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