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This study proposes a framework for making a paradigm shift from traditional (teacher-centred) to technology-enhanced (student-centred) assessment, using an example of an intelligent tutor. Informed by Situated Learning Theory that addresses students' needs and concerns in timely learning experiences, the proposed 'dissecting assessment' framework has two primary variables: "Students' Expectations and Assessment Deliverable" with positive and negative secondary variables such as "inbuilt fear to handle failures and exposures and comparison phobia." Employing a case study approach, a purposeful sample of 14 U.S. College students were supported by an intelligent tutoring system in monitoring their learning with prompt corrective feedback in their physics course. This formative assessment prepares students for succeeding on their summative assessments, which is the final outcome of learning with feedback. The analysis of the proposed dissecting assessment framework led to the conclusion that concentrating efforts on the positives in the framework, such as "unbiased evaluation, would eventually reduce the negatives, such as comparison phobia."

The world is shrinking now more than ever due to new scientific and technological breakthroughs that expand the boundaries of human knowledge, resulting in improvements in transportation, communication, space exploration and educational technologies. Today's students will compete in a technological, diverse, multi-cultural world and must be prepared to thrive in this futuristic environment. Therefore, it is vital that today's pedagogy produce lifelong learners, who can succeed in a global pulpit. To ensure our educational technology progresses at the rate demanded by today's ubiquitous digital learners, we review emerging technologies and traditional teaching methods and propose desirable changes. Future companies will need employees with specific Internet of Things connected additive manufacturing skills across the value stream, including computer-aided design, machine operation, raw material development, robotics and supply chain management; but these are only island of excellence in industry 4.0 and not the consummate requirement of the manufacturing process.

Science and engineering departments face high student attrition due to perceived difficulty of courses in these disciplines. To subdue student attrition, students need to be guided by individual tutors to help them learn, practice and test their understanding of concepts. However, due to the exorbitant cost and time involved, this is not practical. In this article, we argue that computer-based tutors authored by teachers can serve as a useful tool to assist student learning in challenging scientific concepts. About 8,000 fine-grained interactions with our tutor by 72 students in two countries--USA and Philippines--were analysed in the framework of learning curve theory to estimate prior knowledge, learning rate and residual error rate to gauge tutor efficiency. Computer-based tutors accelerate learning and such tutors are viable, effective, and facile options to improve student learning.

Research has shown that the use of practical examples in undergraduate education promotes the retention of historically underrepresented students in STEM majors and lowers achievement gaps within courses. Since many students of color and women aspire toward careers in healthcare and the pharmaceutical industry, efforts to incorporate medicinal chemistry into the organic chemistry and advanced chemistry lab curriculum could potentially help enhance diversity and retention. There is currently a dearth of laboratory experiments that are medically relevant and technically accessible for incorporation into the undergraduate organic chemistry lab curriculum. The theoretical framework for optimization of drug leads and design of chemical libraries used in the exploration of structure-activity relationships is typically introduced in senior-level courses without hands-on laboratory training. In response to this, we have designed a laboratory experiment that translates the typical medicinal chemistry synthesis of a chemical analogue library into a method that can readily be deployed within an undergraduate laboratory setting through the synthesis of the clinically important antihypertensive drug prazosin and its analogues. By the use of commercially available starting materials, a small library of prazosin analogues can be synthesized utilizing nucleophilic aromatic substitution and amide-bond-forming condensation reactions. The experiment introduces a variety of concepts, including (1) retrosynthetic analysis in the design of chemical libraries, (2) methods in extraction and purification, and (3) instrumental analyses via [superscript 1]H and [superscript 13]CNMR spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, and melting point determination.

Educating our future citizens in science and engineering is vitally important to ensure future advancement. Presently, in the light of environmental sustainability, it is critical that students learn concepts relating to energy, its consumption and future demands. In this article, we harness the state of the educational technology, namely Intelligent Tutoring System to teach concepts relating to energy and power. We describe the design and implementation of our computer-based tutor to bridge this knowledge and skills gap. We built a responsive tutoring system with Carnegie Mellon University's Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools that challenges the students with quantitative problems based on energy, provides immediate feedback to student answers and provides need-based, timely help that supports student learning. We explain our research-based design that provides a friendly and welcoming user interface, displays astute and anticipatory software behaviour, and scaffolds student learning through appropriate clues and hints.

The purpose of this study was to investigate an interdisciplinary international service learning program and its impact on student sense of cultural awareness and competence using the Campinha-Bacote's (2002) framework of cultural competency model. Seven undergraduate and one graduate student from Human Development and Nutrition Science disciplines participated in the program. Reflections from a synthesis paper post-travel were analyzed using an inductive approach. Six themes emerged from the reflective journals and were applied to Campinha-Bacote's cultural competency constructs. Participating and learning together while reflecting helped deepen and progress this process for ISL students. Overall, the experience proved to be an effective educational tool for sensitizing students towards cultural competency within interdisciplinary programs.

Students learn scientific concepts and mathematical calculations relating to scientific principles by repetition and reinforcement. Teachers and instructors cannot practically spend the long time required during tutorials to patiently teach students the calculations. Usually, teachers assign homework to provide practice to students, hoping that spending time on the task and providing appropriate feedback will make students stronger in the concepts. However, these assignments do not provide insights into how the students approached a problem, or which part of the problem stymied them. To provide fine-grained details about how students interacted with physics problems, a tutor was designed with state of the art software tools provided by Carnegie Mellon University's CTAT (Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools). In this article, the results of deploying the computer based tutor and the lessons learned from about 2000 fine-grained instances of student interactions with the tutoring software are presented.

Learning occurs in many forms, and learning through mobile devices is becoming increasingly common in higher education. Potentially, there are many ways students may implement mobile learning to enhance learning, and this may be influenced by students' confidence and preferences. To identify mobile learning behaviours, biomedical students (n=189) were asked in meta-learning assessment tasks to report on self-initiated ways they used mobile devices for learning. Thematic analysis of responses showed students were confident using mobile devices for learning, but students of all confidence levels had similar usage levels. Students most commonly reported using laptops for note-taking, watching lecture recordings, and planning, and using phones for looking up concepts and using applications. This contributed to their self-regulation primarily by aiding students' keeping of records and information seeking behaviors. Students also implemented many new ways of using devices during semester, demonstrating adaptability. Surprisingly, they rarely reported seeking social assistance via mobile devices.

Literacy is a process which dispels and promotes rational thinking and moulds human beings into becoming responsible citizens. The absence of literacy directly and indirectly retards the development of individuals, society, community and the country. For the success of any program, people should be motivated by providing necessary congenial environments, socio-economic conditions and committed efforts on the part of implementing bodies. In spite of the number of efforts made by central and state governments in India, still illiterates remain. This paper identifies factors responsible for people remaining illiterate and suggests strategies to adopt for achieving better results in the district which has the lowest literacy rate in the state and country. (Contains 1 table.)

With states and districts across the country implementing the Common Core State Standards, teachers have more opportunities than ever to collaborate around the shared goals of strengthening curriculum design, classroom practices, and student learning. Building from this premise, the Common Assignment Study (CAS) has brought together teams of teachers from Colorado and Kentucky to design and teach two common assignments each year. The experiences of these teachers show how practitioners in different contexts can successfully collaborate to help students meet college- and career-ready standards. Published first online in April 2016 at http://www.kappancommoncore.org/teachers-collaborate-across-state-lines-to-design-high-quality-units/ Kappan Common Core web site.

The speech produced by human vocal tract is a complex acoustic signal, with diverse applications in phonetics, speech synthesis, automatic speech recognition, speaker identification, communication aids, speech pathology, speech perception, machine translation, hearing research, rehabilitation and assessment of communication disorders and many more. Analysis of the acoustic characteristics of speech sounds of is needed to understand their production and perception which will further be useful in perceptual studies, speech processing strategies, diagnosis and rehabilitation of various communication disorders. In large repeated measure experiments such speech analysis data, issues regarding design effect, sphericity, standard error and missing data generally do not get adequate attention in the statistical analysis which will effect on the study outcome. Multi-level modeling (MLM) has emerged in the past decades as a highly flexible and useful tool for statistical analysis and inference. In hierarchical studies, repeated measures data, the problems that are generally encountered by usual analysis are well addressed by MLM. The main aim and objectives of this paper is to explain the use of multi-level modeling (MLM) in actual research in speech analysis and to compare MLM against its more conventional counterpart for hypothesis testing, ANOVA/multiple regression. Most of the statistical methods are inferred on fictitious data. On the actual raw data, both multiple regression analysis (naive analysis) and MLM models were applied to find relationship of age, gender and region on format frequencies and results of these analyses were compared. There is a marginal difference in estimates from the multilevel model and multiple regression analysis. The standard error of each parameter estimates from multilevel model are larger than that from naive analysis. Most importantly, we could obtain information about the variation or contribution of each level on the outcome measure. Especially in speech analysis when we fail to control individual and contextual influences while studying the target sound, statistical methods such as MLM would take care of the errors in estimation and test our hypothesis better. It is advised to use multilevel modeling for hierarchial design or designs with nested data. MLM will take care of design effect, sphericity assumption and quantify the actual effect of covariates on outcome measure. It can also be used for assessing the relationship of covariates with binary or categorical response variable. (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.)

This article features Mapleton Public School District, located in Adams County, Colorado. In policy and practice, the school system in Mapleton has committed to a positive, long-term institutional legacy by developing future leaders. In fall 2007, Mapleton's board of education unanimously passed a simple, single sentence aimed at maintaining district leadership continuity. The Mapleton school board's pithy policy on executive succession reflected both its confidence in the reforms being spearheaded by Superintendent Charlotte Ciancio and her administrative team and a desire for leadership continuity in the event of future changes. While the board's primary goal was to protect and buffer the district's accomplishments from the superintendent's eventual departure, Mapleton's central administrative team nested the charge in a larger strategy for leadership development and sustainability at all levels of the system. By focusing on recruiting the right people, developing leadership skills aligned to the system and growing their internal leadership pool, district leaders are helping to ensure Mapleton's positive trajectory becomes a long-term institutional legacy rather than an ephemeral effort.

This paper estimates the returns to education for adult male workers in regular and casual wage employment using Indian national survey data at three points in time spanning almost two decades. Both standard and augmented Mincerian wage equations are estimated using a set of human capital measures and other controls after addressing the issue of potential selection bias. This paper finds that the returns to education are significantly different for the two types of workers--while casual workers face at best flat returns to education, the returns to education for regular workers are positive and U-shaped with respect to education levels. There is also some evidence of a widening wage gap between regular workers with graduate and primary education that could possibly be a consequence of trade liberalization and other reforms pursued during the 1990s. (Contains 15 notes and 4 tables.)

Interviewed teachers from 17 California charter schools to examine their attitudes toward charter school reform. Results indicated that their professional lives were profoundly influenced by both local and larger contexts for teaching. Locally, they liked teaching at small schools with like-minded professionals. However, their relationships to larger teaching contexts and issues (e.g., licensing systems and unions) often endured. (SM)