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.…

Scientific argumentation is one of the core practices for teachers to implement in science classrooms. We developed a computer-based formative assessment to support students' construction and revision of scientific arguments. The assessment is built upon automated scoring of students' arguments and provides feedback to students and teachers.…

This study investigated utilization of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) resources and job effectiveness among library staff in the University of Calabar and Cross River University of Technology, Nigeria. To achieve the purpose of this study, four hypotheses were formulated to guide the study. Ex-post facto research design was adopted…

Who is the most preferred and deemed the most helpful reviewer in improving student writing? This study exercised a blended teaching method which consists of three currently prevailing reviewers: the automated grading system (AGS, a web-based method), the peer review (a process-oriented approach), and the teacher grading technique (the…

The benefits of solving problems have been widely acknowledged by literature. Its implementation in e-learning platforms can make easier its management and the learning process itself. However, its implementation can also become a very time-consuming task, particularly when the number of problems to generate is high. In this tutorial we describe a…

Co-Curate North East is a cross-disciplinary initiative involving Newcastle University and partner organisations, working with schools and community groups in the North East of England. Co-curation builds on the concept of the "ecomuseum" model for heritage based around a virtual territory, social memory and participative input from the…

Computer scoring of student written essays about an inquiry topic can be used to diagnose student progress both to alert teachers to struggling students and to generate automated guidance. We identify promising ways for teachers to add value to automated guidance to improve student learning. Three teachers from two schools and their 386 students…

Automated Logistics Environment (ALE) is a new term used by Navy and aerospace industry executives to describe the aggregate of logistics-related information systems that support modern aircraft weapon systems. The development of logistics information systems is not always well coordinated among programs, often resulting in solutions that cannot…

Many educational institutions use Learning Management Systems to provide e-learning content to their students. This often includes quizzes that can help students to prepare for exams. However, the content is usually web-optimized and not very usable on mobile devices. In this work a native mobile application ("UML Quiz") that imports…