Computer-Aided Assessments (CAAs) have been used increasingly at Brunel University for over 10 years to test students' mathematical abilities. Recently, we have focussed on providing very rich feedback to the students; given the work involved in designing and coding such feedback, it is important to study the impact of the interaction between…

Despite its importance in mathematical problem solving, verification receives rather little attention by the students in classrooms, especially at the primary school level. Under the hypotheses that (a) non-standard tasks create a feeling of uncertainty that stimulates the students to proceed to verification processes and (b) computational…

The aim of this paper is to investigate and describe the content in school rules by developing a category system of school rules, and thus making the logic behind different types of rules in school explicit. Data were derived from an ethnographic study conducted in two primary schools in Sweden. In order to analyse the data, grounded theory…

Using the concepts of classification and framing and other relevant writings by Basil Bernstein, an attempt will be made to construct a theorised account of changes in the socio-political context of education in Britain; of the mode of governance in education and of the constructs and practice of educational leadership from the 1950s to the…

Concept mapping (a combined qualitative/quantitative approach) was used to clarify and understand 72 Canadian professionals' experience of what they found to be traumatizing about their work with sexual violence survivors in community settings. A sample of 30 professionals providing community-based treatment to survivors of sexual violence sorted…

In this commentary, the author asks the analogous question, "where's the psychology?" Not because the authors of the focus article "Unique Characteristics of Diagnostic Classification Models: A Comprehensive Review of the Current State-of-the-Art" have not provided a solid review of the technical aspects of Diagnostic…

This article argues that the classification of adult fiction according to "genre" in public libraries causes more confusion than clarification. Whilst the system purports to model itself on bookstore design, the reality is that the actual arrangement is quite different. In the bookstore model, genre is a marketing category and not a…

Taxonomy, the identification, naming, and classification of living things, is an indispensable unit in any biology curriculum and indeed, an integral part of biological science. Taxonomy catalogues life's diversity and is an essential tool for communication. Textbook discussions of taxonomy range anywhere from three to eight domains of kingdoms.…

With the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association. "Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders DSM-IV Fourth Edition-Text Revision". Author, Washington, DC. 2000) ahead, decisions will be made about the future of taxonomic conceptualizations. This study examined the…

This article illustrates the complex relationship between culture and illness in the context of changes in autism awareness and prevalence. The first half of the article argues that increased awareness is the result of global flows of information and that increased prevalence is the result of significant achievements in mental health and…

This article demonstrates the potential of using hierarchical Bayesian methods to relate models and data in the cognitive sciences. This is done using a worked example that considers an existing model of category representation, the Varying Abstraction Model (VAM), which attempts to infer the representations people use from their behavior in…

In recent years, rapid advancement has taken place in computing technology that allows institutional researchers to efficiently and effectively address data of increasing volume and structural complexity (Luan, 2002). In this chapter, the authors propose a new data analytical technique, Bayesian belief networks (BBN), to add to the toolbox for…

Sixty deaf and hearing students were asked to search for goods in a Hypertext Supermarket with either graphical or textual links of high typicality, frequency, and familiarity. Additionally, they performed a picture and word categorization task and two working memory span tasks (spatial and verbal). Results showed that deaf students were faster in…

MARC II database statistics and trends from the years 1973-74 to 1980-81 are presented for the benefit of processors of the MARC file who may use the data for planning file structures, selecting subsets of MARC for local processing, estimating processing time based on record sizes, and estimating future file sizes based on growth rates. It is…

This study investigates the degree of relationship between scientific and technical subject headings and their corresponding class notations in the Dewey Decimal (DDC) and Library of Congress Classification (LCC) systems. The degree of association between a subject heading and its corresponding class of notation or notations is measured by…