Technological tools have permeated higher education programs. However, their mere introduction does not guarantee instructional quality. This article presents the results of an innovation project aimed at fostering autonomous learning among students at a Pre-School and Primary Teacher degree. For one semester all freshmen students used a system…

The Oman government developed a vision to transform the nation into a sustainable knowledge society by supporting information and communication technologies to improve government services (ITA, n.d.). According to a United Nations (2012) report, Oman ranks 64th worldwide in e-government readiness, the lowest compared to other countries in the…

Despite prevalent use and practical application, the current and standard assessment of oral reading fluency (ORF) presents considerable limitations which reduces its validity in estimating growth and monitoring student progress, including: (a) high cost of implementation; (b) tenuous passage equivalence; and (c) bias, large standard error, and…

Over the last years great efforts have been made within the University environment to implement e-learning technologies in the standard educational practice. These learning technologies distribute online educational multimedia contents through technological platforms. Even though specific e-learning tools for technical disciplines were already…

Libraries and archives digitize their special collections in an effort to increase access to rare and unique items. To ensure that resulting digital collections meet user needs, institutions have made assessment, consultation, and user participation integral to digitization initiatives and the selection process. Institutions must also build…

In his article "The McDonaldization of Academic Libraries?" Brian Quinn explores to what extent and to what effect academic libraries have become "McDonaldized," according to the concept developed by sociologist George Ritzer. Quinn identifies a number of ways in which the four dimensions of…

This article describes two separate, related studies that provide insight into the effectiveness of "e-rater" score calibration methods based on different distributional targets. In the first study, we developed and evaluated a new type of "e-rater" scoring model that was cost-effective and applicable under conditions of absent human rating and…

Effective mining of data from online submission systems offers the potential to improve educational outcomes by identifying student habits and behaviours and their relationship with levels of achievement. In particular, it may assist in identifying students at risk of performing poorly, allowing for early intervention. In this paper we investigate…

In this special issue on high-stakes English language testing in China, the two articles on computer-based testing (Jin & Yan; He & Min) highlight a number of consistent, ongoing challenges and concerns in the development and implementation of the nationwide IB-CET (Internet Based College English Test) and institutional computer-adaptive…

Foreign language (FL) aptitude generally refers to a specific talent for learning a foreign or second language (L2). After experiencing a long period of marginalized interest, FL aptitude research in recent years has witnessed renewed enthusiasm across the disciplines of educational psychology, second language acquisition (SLA) and cognitive…

The Common Core assessments emphasize short essay constructed-response items over multiple-choice items because they are more precise measures of understanding. However, such items are too costly and time consuming to be used in national assessments unless a way to score them automatically can be found. Current automatic essay-scoring techniques…

The dissertation research explores an approach to automatic concept-based query expansion to improve search engine performance. It uses a network-based approach for identifying the concept represented by the user's query and is founded on the idea that a collection-specific association thesaurus can be used to create a reasonable representation of…

Children represent the future of mankind and their safety, well-being, and permanency are goals of the Department of Health and Human Services. The Department of Health and Human Services is the primary funding source for child welfare and protection in the United States; their requirements, rules, and laws must be upheld and understood by every…

Large-scale enterprise applications are deployed as distributed applications. These applications consist of many inter-connected components with heterogeneous roles and complex dependencies. Each component typically consumes 5-15% of the server capacity. Deploying each component as a separate virtual machine (VM) allows us to consolidate the…

This article aims to shed light on our understanding of how teacher reflection could be fostered through online teacher professional development. In this respect, the presented article starts from three theoretical foundations, namely the characterisation of online teacher professional development, logic modelling and fostering teacher reflection.…