Student Performance

This study focuses on the use and effects of “Student-active teaching practice” in science in Norwegian schools. In a quantitative study we have collected data on teaching activities, student attitudes and student performance in science. We see that the students clearly prefer teaching activities in which they can take part actively. Separating the classes in four groups according to teaching practice, we find that different practice has significant influence on the students’ attitude to science and to their science teacher. The student’s performance in science does not relate in the same way to teaching practice.

This paper addresses the challenge of designing spoken dialogues that are of educational benefit within the context of an intelligent tutoring system, yet predictable enough to facilitate automatic speech recognition and subsequent processing. We introduce a design principle to meet this goal: construct short dialogues in which the desired student utterances are external evidence of performance or learning in the domain, and in which those target utterances can be expressed as a well-defined set. The key to this principle is to teach the human learner a process that maps inputs to responses. Pilot results in two domains - self-generated questions and morphology exercises - indicate that the approach is promising in terms of its habitability and the predictability of the utterances elicited. We describe the results and sketch a brief taxonomy classifying the elicited utterances according to whether they evidence student performance or learning, whether they are amenable to automatic ...

The paper presents an attempt to evaluate the effectiveness of the implementation of a needs-based approach to ESP course design in the context of Greek tertiary education and to measure the impact of the influence of pre-existing English knowledge in relation to the students' performance in ESP. Experimental research design was employed; the students' scores in the Oxford Placement Test and the pre-and post-tests were analyzed by means of ANOVA and ANCOVA. The post-intervention data revealed that the experimental group outperformed the control group in terms of total test scores even after adjustments were made by removing the learners' previous linguistic competence as measured by the OPT while between-groups comparison indicated statistically significant differences. The results thus, provide support for the efficacy of the adopted needs-based approach to syllabus design.

Abstract The way in which novice programmers learn to write code is of considerable interest to computing education researchers. One research approach to understanding how beginners acquire their programming abilities has been to look at student performance in exams. Lopez et al.(2008) analyzed student responses to an end-of-first-semester exam. They found two types of questions accounted for 46% of the variance on the code writing portion of the same exam. One of those types of question required students to trace ...

This study compared the learning of ionic nomenclature by three different methods; one used the traditional method where students worked problems at the end of a chapter, while the other two methods used similar game formats (Rainbow Wheel and Rainbow Matrix) to learn chemical nomenclature. The statistical analysis of student performance revealed that the game format methods were more effective

Many studies related to the use of interactive whiteboards (IWBs) in educational settings have shown that IWB technology can result in enhanced presentations and in the development of student motivation and student performance. However, the relationship between the use of IWBs and Technological Pedagogical Content and Knowledge (TPACK) by teachers is yet to be fully investigated and understood. The purpose of this study was to integrate IWB technology and peer coaching to develop the TPACK of secondary science teachers in real classrooms. An IWB-based peer coaching model was developed. Participants of this study included four in-service science teachers. The sources of data included written assignments, reflective journals and interviews. The results displayed three major findings. First, science teachers used IWBs as instructional tools to share their subject-matter knowledge and to express students’ understanding. Second, the IWBs helped the science teachers who encountered teaching difficulties in the traditional classroom better implement their representational repertoires and instructional strategies. Finally, the proposed model of integrating IWBs and peer coaching can develop the TPACK of science teachers. The research implications of this study are provided along with suggestions.

This paper uses a novel data set to quantify the difference in performance of public and private school students in an entrance test exam of the major public university in Brazilian Northeast (Universidade Federal de Pernambuco – UFPE). Although there are many public universities in Brazil, from our knowledge, there is no study that uses data on entrance test scores at such universities to evaluate the determinants of students’ performance and the barriers for public school students to get in the good universities. The data set has detailed information on individual and school characteristics, and family background. We found that test scores of public school students are on average about 4.2–17% lower than those taken by private school students, depending on the set of controls. This result is robust when we address problems related to attrition, omitted variables (e.g., cognitive ability), and unobservable selectivity. We also show that once students get into the university, those from public schools perform as well as those from private schools. In addition, the proportion of public school students that gets into the university is roughly the same as the proportion of students doing the entrance exam. However, there is a strong barrier for public school students to get into high competitive majors. The fraction of students from public schools that gets into high competitive majors such as law, medicine, and electronic engineering is almost null. Our findings provide quantitative evidence to the common view that the Brazilian elitist high education system is an important channel for inequality persistence.

The Latino Healthcare Professionals Project (LHPP) is a privately-funded initiative to provide healthcare management training to first-generation educated Latino bilingual and bicultural upper division university stu- dents planning careers in healthcare. This unique curriculum, scholar- ship, and mentorship program is based in the Healthcare Administration (HCA) Program at California State University Long Beach (CSULB). Initially funded by The Sisters of

– The use and implementation of virtual learning environments (VLEs) in higher education instruction has been in place since the advent of computer networking and popularized by the accessibility of the Internet. Because of the fast-paced advances in hardware and software technologies that stimulate the human senses, the number and the quality of researches on the use of three-dimensional (3D) environments to augment the experiences of learners have increased in recent years. Since VLEs can be customized for the learners' needs, they have been used to provide a virtual immersion that is otherwise difficult, if not impossible, to experience in real-world (e.g., teaching the effect of varying planetary gravities on objects). This paper presents the experiences in building and implementing a 3D avatar-based virtual world (3D-AVW) as a VLE (3D-AVLE) for the Technological University of the Philippines-Taguig (TUP-T), a higher education institution (HEI) in the Philippines. Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) systems were used, such as the OpenSimulator and various 3D renderers, to create a replica of the TUP-T campus in a simulated 3D world. The 3D-AVLE runs in a single server that is connected to the learners' computers via a simply-wired local area network (LAN). The use of various networking optimization techniques was experimented on to provide the learners and the instructors alike a seamless experience and lag-less immersion within the 3D-AVLE. With the current LAN setup in TUP-T, the optimal number of concurrent users that can be accommodated without sacrificing connectivity and the quality of virtual experience was found to be at 30 users, exactly the mean class size in TUP-T. The 3D-AVLE allows for recording of the learners' experiences which provides the learners a facility to review the lessons at a later time. Classes in fundamental topics in engineering sciences were conducted using the usual teaching aid technologies such as the presentation software, and by dragging-and-dropping the presentation files to the 3D-AVLE, resulting to increased learning curve by both the instructors and the learners.

This study focused on determining the significant influence of study habits and mathematics
anxiety to the mathematics achievement of the senior high school students. Universal sampling
was employed to 403 students enrolled to grade 12 senior high school at the Davao Oriental
State College of Science and Technology taking accountancy, business and management (ABM)
strand, humanities and social sciences (HUMSS) strand, science, technology, engineering and
mathematics (STEM) strand, and technical-vocational-livelihood (TVL) strand. Results showed
that the students’ study habit and mathematics anxiety do not significantly differ across their
field of specialization. It further revealed that mathematics achievement of the senior high school
students was significantly correlated to and influenced by the level of their study habits, and
mathematics anxiety. It was then recommended that activity designs in the classrooms should be
made in such that way that it fosters positive ambiance to lessen the anxiety of the students
towards the subject and boost their study habits.

Key Words: Mathematics Achievement, Mathematics Anxiety, Senior High School, Study Habits

The continuation of a previous research work is now presented. In that work, statistical regression and fuzzy logic have been applied for predicting different variables such enrollment in on-line higher education institutions and courses, in order to measure the technique effectiveness and to increase the expertise.  At that time, we have met several difficulties related with data.  For instance, we have been found just few records to train and prove techniques and the data came with lots of noise.
We introduce a series of steps followed in order to expose the process and to achieve the main research objective: to apply prediction techniques to educational data. We have applied a fuzzy logic model for predict performance of on-line students from grades obtained during the half of the scholar cycle.
In chronological order, the steps followed include: a literature review focusing on the performance and desertion topics, the experimental design of a fuzzy logic and the results obtained.  We have found that fuzzy logic by itself doesn't get a good accuracy level, compared with statistical regression model. For future work, we are working in the combination of fuzzy logic techniques and genetic algorithms for improve the membership functions.

Problem-based learning (PBL) is an instructional approach in which students in small groups engage in an authentic, ill-structured problem, and must (1) define, generate and pursue learning issues to understand the problem, (2) develop a possible solution, (3) provide evidence to support their solution, and (4) present their solution and the evidence that supports it (Barrows, How to design a problem-based curriculum for the preclinical years. Springer Publishing, New York, 1985). However, research has shown that novice problem-solvers and learners without deep content knowledge have difficulty developing strong evidence-based arguments (Krajcik et al., J Learn Sci 7:313–350, 1998a; Reiser, J Lear Sci 13(3):273–304, 2004). In this paper, we discuss the components of (e.g., claims and evidence) and processes of making (e.g., define problem and make claim) evidence-based arguments. Furthermore, we review various scaffolding models designed to help students perform various tasks associated with creating evidence-based arguments (e.g., link claims to evidence) and present guidelines for the development of computer-based scaffolds to help middle school students build evidence-based arguments.