1,720,957 research outputs found
Undergraduate students' development of lifelong learning attributes in Tanzania
Get PDFThis thesis examines the extent to which undergraduate students‟ personal and institutional experiences influence their capacity to change and develop as lifelong learners in Tanzania. My interest in the topic grew out of my recognition of the need to maintain a critical eye on the purpose of higher education in Tanzania and to establish whether or not the recent education reforms introduced in higher education had had a robust impact on lifelong learning. The core question in this study was to determine whether or not university education in Tanzania develops students as lifelong learners and what the underlying factors influencing such development might be. The students‟ lifelong learning attributes in this thesis were operationalised using four major constructs, namely, „learning to learn‟ skills, „personal agency‟, „information skills‟ and „entrepreneurial skills‟.
This study adopted a case study longitudinal research design that involved two waves of data collection with the use of a mixed methods approach for triangulation purposes. It involved following a sample first-year cohort of students at one of the public universities in Tanzania (n=839, i.e. 621 males and 218 females) through Year 2. A small number of participants (n=59) [i.e. students (n=23), lecturers (n=26), librarians (n=4), policy elites (n=3) and school deans & college principals (n= 4)] took part in semi-structured interviews. The sample of students and lecturers was drawn from four distinct academic disciplines, namely, Accounting, Engineering, Science and Sociology.
The results with respect to the longitudinal study showed that there were significant changes in the ILS sub-scales of „stepwise processing‟ strategies and „certificate-directed‟ and the ‘self-test‟ learning orientations. Significant changes were also noted in the ISS sub-scales of ‘ethical use of information‟, „accessing information‟ and „evaluating information‟. These changes, however, seemed to occur relatively slowly. No improvements were found with regard to „entrepreneurial skills‟. The slow rate and the absence of changes, however, seemed to be partly the results of the unclear, limited and somewhat slow implementation of policies related to the integration of higher education with lifelong learning.
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The findings also indicated that there were effects from personal and contextual factors on „processing‟ and „regulation‟ learning strategies for some of the constructs. The correlation results indicated that the students‟ personal beliefs were associated with their choice of processing and regulation strategies, suggesting that learning orientations were important predictors of students‟ processing and regulation learning strategies. In addition, the results showed that the contextual variables, such as lecturers, the teaching objectives and assessment procedures, as well as the social environments, such as friends, constituted significant predictors for student development of lifelong learning attributes.
These findings suggest that the undergraduate students‟ development of lifelong learning attributes is influenced by a variety of individual and contextual variables. In the light of the findings from the present study, a number of recommendations are made both for future studies and for policy
Mapping lifelong learning attributes in the context of higher education institutions
No full textOver the past four decades lifelong learning has been an important concept in educational policy, so much so that it has become one of the essential guiding principles in almost all of the educational reforms. Accompanying its popularity amongst policy makers, however, has been a perennial debate among academics concerning the viability of the concept as a researchable construct. Such debates have also focused on addressing the conceptual issues surrounding lifelong learning. In particular, there have been only limited numbers of studies aimed at understanding what really constitute the attributes of lifelong learners in the context of higher education. Despite much rhetoric about the significance of lifelong learning as a policy goal, there is a dearth of studies focusing on exploring the possible ways in which educational institutions can really achieve this goal of policy. This article aims at contributing to these debates, in an attempt to address issues associated with the challenges of developing a conceptual framework for understanding the indicators that provide quantifiable measures of lifelong learning. In particular, the article focuses on examining the individual, social and economic dimensions of lifelong learning that are fostered in higher education institutions. The article seeks to provide an understanding of possible ways in which higher learning institutions can concretise lifelong learning and move from rhetorical commitments to action
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
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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