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Following Swales’ (1990) influential study on research article (RA) introductions, some attention has increasingly been paid to other rhetorical units of both expert and learners’ writing, including titles. A key and effective discursive means through which titles are constructed and presented is the syntactic configuration. The present study, thus, investigates the syntactic structures employed by authors of conference paper titles (CPTs) in Applied Linguistics. A qualitative content analysis was employed to study a corpus of 592 CPTs from a popular conference for researchers, scholars, and practitioners of Applied Linguistics worldwide, supported by some descriptive statistics. The analysis of data study identified three main title styles: Single Unit Title, Compound Unit Title, and Complex Unit Title. The analysis showed that, out of these three title styles, Compound Unit Titles were preferred by researchers. Further, the colon was the dominantly used punctuation mark in separating the components of Compound Unit titles. The final point was that authors preferred prepositional phrases in the post modification of the noun phrase structure of CPTs. The findings of this study have implications for the scholarship on titlelogy, academic writing pedagogy as well as further research.

Purpose Administration of questionnaires to assess the diffusion of disordered eating behaviours via the web is becoming common today. The aim of this study is to assess whether two different approaches of administering a test to assess traits of eating disorders (EDs), orthorexia nervosa (ON) and muscle dysmorphia (MD) by email recruitment and online completion (web-based survey—WBS) and by in person recruitment and paper-and-pencil completion (paper-based survey—PBS), gives different results. Methods During 2 consecutive academic years, a self-reported questionnaire consisting of questions about personal characteristics and three tests for the evaluation of ON (ORTO-15), MD (MDDI-ITA), and EDs (EAT-26) were administered to two groups of undergraduates, respectively, as a WBS and a PBS. Results The WBS response rate was 6.7% (N = 137), and the PBS response rate was 86.5% (N = 372). The WBS group showed a statistically significant higher prevalence of students with eating disordered behaviours (21.2% vs 5.4%) and registered a higher mean score on the EAT-26 test (13.5 ± 11.1 vs 6.0 ± 8.0); no differences between the two groups emerged for ON and MD prevalence and test scores. Moreover, in the WBS group, the number of students with one or more tests with test scores above the cut-off values was significantly higher (46.0% vs 32.3%). Conclusion The choice of the approach to administer a questionnaire to assess the diffusion of EDs and related issues must take into account all the factors that can result in selection bias and that can affect the reliability of the results. Level of evidence Level V, descriptive cross-sectional survey.

This paper discusses the results of a study conducted on a group of undergraduates at the Arab International University. The study has assessed the students’ research skills via a qualitative analysis of their earlier research papers submissions and a questionnaire that determined the weaknesses and difficulties they face while writing a paper. Results showed that undergraduates find it most difficult to use and understand English references, paraphrase paragraphs and use in-text citations. Based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the results, the researcher devised a new course that aimed to enhance students’ practice of the main research skills. This course was based on developing student’s information literacy and assigning multiple focused tasks to practice the main research skills. The post course evaluation of students’ achievement showed a notable improvement in their research practices that aided the production of above average quality English research papers.

Reading text from a screen has been shown to be less effective compared with reading text from paper. Various signals may provide both background information and navigational cues, and may promote the construction of cognitive maps during on-screen reading, thus improving reading performance. This study randomly divided 75 college students into a paper reading group and an on-screen reading group. Both groups were tested for navigation and reading comprehension in response to three different forms of signaling (plain text, physical signaling, and verbal signaling). The results showed that when plain text was presented, the navigation and comprehension scores of the paper reading group were significantly higher than those of the on-screen reading group. However, no significant difference was found between both groups under signaling conditions. The navigation and comprehension scores of both groups were significantly higher under signaling conditions than under plain text. Moreover, the comprehension score of the on-screen reading group under physical signaling was significantly higher than that under verbal signaling. This research suggested that signals help to construct cognitive maps and effectively improve reading performance. Besides, physical signaling, such as underlining and bold formatting, is more effective for on-screen reading. The present study provides a practical and effective approach for improving on-screen reading based on cognitive map theory.

Following the fast spread of the coronavirus (Covid-19) across Europe and North America in March 2020, many people started stockpiling commodities like toilet paper. Despite the high relevance for public authorities to adequately address stockpiling behavior, empirical studies on the psychological underpinnings of toilet paper stockpiling are still scarce. In this study, we investigated the relation between personality traits, perceived threat of Covid-19, and stockpiling of toilet paper in an online survey (N = 996) across 22 countries. Results suggest that people who felt more threatened by Covid-19 stockpiled more toilet paper. Further, a predisposition towards Emotionality predicted the perceived threat of Covid-19 and affected stockpiling behavior indirectly. Finally, Conscientiousness was related to toilet paper stockpiling, such that individuals higher in Conscientiousness tended to stockpile more toilet paper. These results emphasize the importance of clear communication by public authorities acknowledging anxiety and, at the same time, transmitting a sense of control.

Source-based writing research has received much attention in recent years, which generally shows that both novice and expert EFL (English as a foreign language) writers have difficulties in writing from sources. As many Chinese institutes of higher education attach increasingly more importance to publications in international journals, citation and plagiarism become critical issues for both student and teacher researchers as well as the institutes. Nevertheless, not much research can be found on the issues with Chinese students, especially undergraduate students. The present study thus investigated Chinese undergraduate EFL learners’ perceptions of plagiarism and use of citations in their course papers. A total of 141 students from a highly prestigious university answered an open-ended questionnaire and 97 of them submitted course papers. Major findings were: (1) the students had a (fairly) good knowledge of plagiarism and identified various reasons for plagiarism in academic writing, (2) they used summary the most often when citing from sources, followed by paraphrase and quotation, and (3) they mainly used single-source citations to primarily support their own ideas, position an author’s opinions and/or findings, and acknowledge the author’s ideas. These findings reveal a general overview of students’ perceptions of plagiarism and use of citations in their course papers, thus providing implications for formal classroom instruction of writing from sources.

The purpose of the study was to examine the feasibility and effectiveness of a distant-professional development model that supported the implementation of genre-based strategy instruction for procedural writing on second grade teachers’ fidelity of implementation and students’ writing quality. Participants were 84 s graders and four teachers who were randomly assigned to condition. Teachers completed an online workshop module prior to instruction, a survey on their instruction and confidence to teach writing, received coaching feedback during implementation, and were interviewed at pretest and posttest. Students wrote in response to two procedural topics at pretest and posttest, at maintenance, completed transfer tasks in science and in persuasion, were interviewed at posttest, completed a confidence scale, and standardized measures. Results showed that treatment teachers positively evaluated the PD and its components, taught with high fidelity, and positively commented on the instructional approach. Treatment students wrote papers of better quality at posttest and maintenance tasks, while there were no statistically significant differences at the transfer tasks, on students’ confidence, and on standardized measures. Implications for professional development, practice, and research are further discussed.

Approximately 30% of school-aged individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are nonverbal (that is, they have little or no spontaneous spoken language). Most reading tests require verbalisation, which may under-estimate reading ability in this group. To determine decoding abilities of nonverbal children with ASD (with an age range of 72 to 229 months), a novel digital form of reading assessment, comparable to the widely used New Salford Reading Test, was created. Three groups were tested: verbal ASD (n = 33); nonverbal ASD (n = 24); and verbal non-ASD with a Statement of special educational needs (n = 24). Reading ages were compared for all three groups using the paper-based version of the test, and a digital format that was not reliant on participants' ability to verbalise. The reading scores of nonverbal students with ASD were much lower than the scores of verbal students with ASD when tested with the paper version of the scale, but this difference was eradicated when the digitised version was employed. These results suggest that the use of the nonverbal digital test may offer a good assessment of the reading abilities of nonverbal children with ASD.

A concern that has been raised with the transition from pen and paper examinations to electronic examinations is whether this will make cheating easier. This article investigates how teachers and students perceive the differences in ease of cheating during three types of written examination: paper exams, bring your own device e-exams and e-exams using university-owned devices. It also investigates perceptions about the effectiveness of some typical countermeasures towards cheating across these examination types. A mixed-method approach was used, combining questionnaires and interviews with students and teachers in the authors’ own university. A total of 212 students and 162 teachers participated in the questionnaire survey, and then, a more limited number were interviewed to get a deeper understanding of the results. Six-different cheating practices were considered – impersonation, forbidden aids, peeking, peer collaboration, outside assistance and student–staff collusion and seven different countermeasures were considered – proctors, biometry, mingling, shuffling, random drawing, sequencing and broadcasting. Both students and teachers perceived cheating as easier with e-exams, and especially with bring your own device. They also thought some countermeasures would be easier to implement with e-exams.

During World War II, publishing was an important element of the war effort for both the Allies and the Axis powers. Wartime propaganda and cultural diplomacy relied primarily on books, magazines and the daily press. The exiled governments in London, including the Polish government, undertook a major effort to translate, publish and promote numerous books and pamphlets that would appeal to British readers and thereby help to sway public opinion. This paper focuses on translation as an important aspect of wartime publishing that has not yet received much scholarly attention. It offers a contribution to research into the role and place of translations in wartime publishing by discussing the Polish government-in-exile's translation and publishing campaign. Drawing on various archival sources, it demonstrates that publishing translations was an important part of wartime cultural diplomacy and led to the development of extensive state-private networks that brought together exiled governments and British publishers. By analysing this material in a broad cultural context, the paper highlights the historical, ideological and political relevance of translation studies research to wartime publishing and censorship.

The South African Department of Health (DoH) released its White Paper for National Health Insurance (NHI) in December 2015 for public comment. The South African Society of Psychiatrists (SASOP) submitted a detailed response following discussion amongst both public and private sector members. This has been published as a pdf in the August 2016 edition of South African Psychiatry, available at www.southafricanpsychiatry.co.za. For the most part, our response was concerned with the proposed organisation of health services as they relate to mental health care. However, we also made comment on good governance within the health service and on human rights issues. In this respect, we responded as advocates for our patients, for the public good and for our profession. Essentially, we submitted a response as participants in the proposed transformation of the health system appropriate to our social contract with society.

The apparent understandings of knowledge for child protection social work practice which inform the New Zealand White Paper for Vulnerable Children are contrasted with the views expressed in the Munro Review of Child Protection in England. It is argued that the rational-technical view of child protection practice knowledge critiqued in the Munro Review is the driving influence in the White Paper. It is further suggested that the White Paper is underpinned by neoliberal conceptions of individuated responsibility which conflict with the socially situated and relational understandings which are native to the theory and practice of social work. Consequently, the socio-technical social work practice knowledge form recognised and promoted in the Munro Review is marginalised in the White Paper. It is also argued that the failings of the child protection system in Aotearoa New Zealand are more appropriately associated with political and managerial misapprehension of knowledge for competent practice than with the shortcomings of social work as a vehicle for effective child protection. It is suggested that it is high time for the social work voice to be rediscovered and reasserted if effective, relationally engaged, practice with high needs children and their families is to be developed and promoted in politically challenging times.

Despite the central importance of research papers to scientific progress, they can be difficult to read. Comprehension is often stymied when the information needed to understand a passage resides somewhere else: in another section, or in another paper. In this work, we envision how interfaces can bring definitions of technical terms and symbols to readers when and where they need them most. We introduce ScholarPhi, an augmented reading interface with four novel features: (1) tooltips that surface position-sensitive definitions from elsewhere in a paper, (2) a filter over the paper that "declutters" it to reveal how the term or symbol is used across the paper, (3) automatic equation diagrams that expose multiple definitions in parallel, and (4) an automatically generated glossary of important terms and symbols. A usability study showed that the tool helps researchers of all experience levels read papers. Furthermore, researchers were eager to have ScholarPhi's definitions available to support their everyday reading., 18 pages, 17 figures, 2 tables. To appear at the 2021 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. For associated video, see https://youtu.be/yYcQf-Yq8B0. v2 changes: expanded discussion of design process and implementation; improved figure design. v3 changes: fixed typo in cell of Table 2; updated HEDDEx and Schwarz-Hearst accuracy in Section 5.3

The objective of this research is to analyze how YouTube has been studied in the field of Internet and politics. The focus is received on two axes: i) as specificities of temporal and regional distribution and ii) as objects of study and as theoretical approaches most used in 90 articles and articles located in the field and published in Brazil, between 2005 and 2019, indexed to Google Scholar. The methodology consists in the combination of Bibliometry and Content Analysis. The data pointed that the production on YouTube at I&P grew from 2011 and that the southeast, south and northeast regions are the production centers on the analyzed theme. Also, election campaigns are found as the main object. Finally, political strategy / identity and citizenship and sociability are the two most widely used theoretical approaches in the analyzed universe.

There is a perennial philosophical dream of a certain natural order for the natural kinds. The name of this dream is ‘the hierarchy requirement’ (or ‘assumption’ or ‘thesis’). According to this postulate, proper natural kinds form a taxonomy which is both unique (i.e., there is only one taxonomy of such natural kinds) and traditional (i.e., said taxonomy consists of nested relations between specific and then more general kinds, each kind occupying one and only one particular place within that framework of relations). Here I demonstrate that complex scientific objects exist: objects which generate different systems of scientific classification, produce myriad legitimate alternatives amongst the nonetheless still natural kinds, and make the hierarchical dream impossible to realize, except at absurdly great cost. Philosophical hopes for a certain order in nature cannot be fulfilled. Natural kinds crosscut one another, ubiquitously so, and this crosscutting spells the end of the hierarchical dream.

Each year, many important articles are published that make valuable contributions to the field of psychotherapy. It is helpful to remain informed about recent developments in the field, and respect the useful refinements that are being proposed in various journal articles. Unfortunately, with so many journals in the field, it can be challenging to find the best articles, and some important papers may be overlooked. In recent years, the situation has become even worse with the expansion of many new and often predatory journals, publishing inferior papers. The Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy awards program has two main goals. First, the review of the recent literature helps to highlight the useful papers published during the previous year. Second, the awards program helps to praise the best and inspire the rest, aiming to motivate the field to publish high quality papers. The awards selection process involved a review of numerous academic articles published during 2018 in 60 different professional journals. Then, a panel of judges reviewed 52 finalists for ten possible awards. Adequate agreement was found to provide awards for nine different categories of research studies or review articles. Each winning paper is reviewed, and most authors provide a behind-the-scenes look at the work involved in their valuable contribution to the field of psychotherapy.

Recent theory and empirical studies of avian biparental systems suggest that animals resolve conflict over parental care via a process of behavioral negotiation or “rules for responding.” Less is known, however, about whether negotiation over helping effort occurs in cooperatively breeding animal societies or whether behavioral negotiation requires a relatively large brain. In this study, we tested whether negotiation over help occurs in a social insect, the paper wasp Polistes dominulus, by recording individual responses to both observed and experimentally induced foraging returns by other group members. In our experiments, we manipulated food delivery to the nest in 2 ways: 1) by catching departing foragers and giving them larval food to take back to the nest and 2) by giving larval food directly to wasps on the nest, which they then fed to larvae, so increasing food delivery independently of helper effort. We found no evidence from Experiment 1 that helpers adjusted their own foraging effort according to the foraging effort of other group members. However, when food was provided directly to the nest, wasps did respond by reducing their own foraging effort. One interpretation of this result is that paper wasp helpers adjust their helping effort according to the level of offspring need rather than the work rate of other helpers. Negotiation based on indicators of demand rather than work rate is a likely mechanism to resolve conflict over investment in teams where helpers cannot observe each other’s work rate directly, as is commonly the case in insect and vertebrate societies.

In this article, I examine a cluster of music theory essays by Oliveria Louisa Prescott (1842–1917), which were published between 1886 and 1891 inThe Girl’s Own Paper(TGOP), the most popular periodical for young women in Victorian England. Although little known today, Prescott sustained a vibrant musical career in London as a composer and teacher, and her articles on music theory regularly appeared in major periodicals such asThe Musical WorldandTGOP.Prescott’s work forTGOPpresents a rare opportunity to explore music theory that was not just written by a woman, but also intended for a genteel female audience in the Victorian era. Her articles include explanations of fundamental theoretical subjects (cadences, basic harmonic progressions) as well as short analyses of solo piano works by Beethoven and Mendelssohn. But these articles are also noteworthy for their discussions of more advanced theoretical topics (such as chromatic harmony), concepts that might seem surprising for a popular periodical for young ladies. Mainstream journalism is often devalued as a “less serious” form of intellectual discourse, but Prescott’s work complicates stereotypes of ignorant amateur female musicians and the so-called “private” sphere, and it demonstrates how print journalism could serve as a vital public platform for the circulation of music theory among young British women in the Victorian era.

International audience; Chameleon is a software that combines computer vision feature-matching algorithms with an open database format to allow the incorporation of dynamic HTML5 interactive content over any type of document (e.g. PDF files, Power-Point documents, etc.) without modifying existing applications or the source document. It thus allows the provision and viewing of an enhanced version of a research paper with embedded interactive demonstrations or videos. It can also be used to perform live demonstrations of interaction techniques while giving a presentation without having to switch tools.

The most recent conceptualizations of empathy recognize affective empathy as distinct from cognitive empathy. Consequently, instruments that assess these 2 types of empathy have been developed. Among them, the Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy (QCAE) is a particularly promising, relatively new, self-report measure consisting of 31 items. To examine the cross-cultural adaptability of the QCAE, we investigated the psychometric properties of an Italian version in 2 samples and with 2 different formats of administration. Study 1 (n = 407) used archival data collected via paper and pencil; Study 2 (n = 285) used newly collected data, obtained with an online format. In these studies, in addition to the QCAE, 6 other instruments measuring empathy-related constructs (i.e., interpersonal competence, well-being, personality traits, emotion regulation, alexithymia, and emotion recognition) were administered, too. Data analysis focused on factor structure, internal consistency, and convergent validity. The findings of both studies provide support for the cross-cultural applicability of the QCAE, and reveal interesting associations between empathy and the other constructs under examination.

We present an approach for performing the tallying work in the coercion-resistant JCJ voting protocol, introduced by Juels, Catalano, and Jakobsson, in linear time using fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). The suggested enhancement also paves the path towards making JCJ quantum-resistant, while leaving the underlying structure of JCJ intact. The pairwise comparison-based approach of JCJ using plaintext equivalence tests leads to a quadratic blow-up in the number of votes, which makes the tallying process rather impractical in realistic settings with a large number of voters. We show how the removal of invalid votes can be done in linear time via a solution based on recent advances in various FHE primitives such as hashing, zero-knowledge proofs of correct decryption, verifiable shuffles and threshold FHE. We conclude by discussing some of the advantages and challenges resulting from our proposal, followed by an outline of future work and possible lines of attack.

Drawing on the Academic Literacies perspectives of Lea and Street and key genre theorists, this mixed-methods case study explored multilingual student experiences of academic literacy practices in one postgraduate social-science school in an English-medium university in Kazakhstan. Two questions guided the research: (1) To what extent and in what ways do students develop genre knowledge in their school EMI contexts?; (2) Which pedagogical approaches and strategies do students identify as beneficial in supporting genre knowledge development? The study found students developed genre awareness for research-related literacy practices, involving field-, tenor- and mode-related genre knowledge. The study also found student capacity to apply genre knowledge successfully across a range of text genres. Another finding was that challenge and success in genre knowledge development was a function of the extent of explicit feedback from instructors and peers and explicit assignment expectations. Each of our findings are consistent with the critique and recommendations of Lea and Street (1998; 2006) on the importance of a situated approach to developing student academic literacy practice that accounts for the larger institutional contexts and epistemological traditions in which those practices have meaning. These findings have important value for discussions and debates on student academic literacy learning and practice in higher education in Kazakhstan, across Central Asia and in other countries where policies for internationalization and research universities are rapidly transforming higher education literacy practice in the current era of globalization.

Shared reading interactions with electronic books (ebooks) versus paper books were compared, using a randomized controlled crossover design. The ebooks were designed to encourage an interactive reading style by the adult reader and to highlight text-meaning correspondences for the child participants. Twenty-eight children from kindergarten classes situated in a low income community participated in the study, sharing books with an adult reader. Each child shared the same paper book three times in a single week and an ebook three times in a second week, with story and book presented in counterbalanced order. At the end of each week the childs learning with respect to story comprehension and emergent literacy was assessed by research personnel. All outcomes were significantly related to the childs letter knowledge. However, emergent literacy knowledge was greatest in the ebook condition compared to the print book condition, especially for those children with poor letter knowledge. Therefore, ebooks designed to facilitate supportive adult reading strategies may improve emergent literacy skills, especially in children with deficient skills at school entry.

The use of touch screen storybooks for children allows reading to be transformed into an interactive multimedia experience, in which text is augmented by animations, sound effects, and games. The present study is a follow-up to an earlier study [1] which found that touch screen storybooks negatively affected child readers’ comprehension but resulted in more emotional engagement. Ross et al.’s earlier study used visual observations to determine the level of emotional engagement. The current study extends those findings to examine the acoustic and prosodic indices of speech whilst children are reading. It was hypothesized that if touch screens were more emotionally engaging, this may express itself in greater pitch variability in the read speech. Also, if reading were more task-focused, then this might express in more careful (and hence more disfluent) paper-based material. Very preliminary analysis on a small selection of speech samples from 5 participants aged 6–7 years in the Ross et al. [1] study show greater pitch range variability with paper-based storybooks as compared to touch-screen interactive versions. On the other hand, there appeared to be less variation in speech and articulation rate in the paper-based books compared to touch screen books. This was also coupled by a tendency for greater overall phonation rate and an increased speech and articulation rate in the paper-based condition, which may reflect a more fluid style for paper-based book reading. Discussion of these preliminary findings focuses on the future lines of enquiry and reflections on children’s reading style using different mediums.

[ES]: Este trabajo analiza todas las revistas de psicología que se hallan incluidas en las diversas categorías de las bases de datos JCR (SCI y SSCI) y SJR durante el periodo 2014-2016 para tratar de identificar las revistas que se encuentran mejor posicionadas en esta disciplina, sus especialidades y los países con mayor número de publicaciones indexados en dichas bases de datos. [Método]: Se analizó la distribución de revistas por países, cuartil y categoría para determinar la posición de las revistas en cada país e identificar los que tuviesen mayor cantidad de revistas de excelencia en psicología en la escena internacional. [Resultados]: Estados Unidos y Reino Unido tienen el mayor número de revistas incluidas en las bases de datos, así como Holanda, Alemania, Francia y España. Sólo 11 países poseen revistas en el cuartil 1 en la base de datos JCR, y 14 en SRJ. [Conclusiones]: Como resultado de la aplicación de los nuevos criterios evaluadores en la investigación psicológica en España, este trabajo aborda las dificultades y consecuencias que algunas de estas medidas pueden tener para la supervivencia de las revistas de psicología que no se encuentran posicionadas en cuartil 1 o 2 en las bases de datos usadas para la evaluación de los profesionales investigadores en esta disciplina, [EN]: This paper analyses all psychology journals included in the dif-ferent categories of the JCR (SCI and SSCI) and SJR databases during the period 2014-2016 in order to identify the journals that are better positioned in the discipline, and the specialities and countries with the highest number of publications indexed in such databases. [Method]: The distribution of psychology journals by country, quartile, and subject category was studied in order to determine the total number and position of journals in each country, and to identify the countries with more journals of ‘excellence’ in psychology in the international scene. [Results]: The United States and the United Kingdom had the highest number of journals included in the databases, as well as the Netherlands, Germany, France and Spain. Only 11 countries have psychology journals in quartile 1 in JCR, and 14 in SJR databases. [Conclusions]: As a result of the application of new evaluation criteria in psychology research in Spain, the paper addresses the difficulties and consequences that some of these measures may have for the survival of psychology journals that do not have a position in quartile 1 or 2 in the databases used for the evaluation of professionals’ research in this discipline.

Sarcasm is often expressed through several verbal and non-verbal cues, e.g., a change of tone, overemphasis in a word, a drawn-out syllable, or a straight looking face. Most of the recent work in sarcasm detection has been carried out on textual data. In this paper, we argue that incorporating multimodal cues can improve the automatic classification of sarcasm. As a first step towards enabling the development of multimodal approaches for sarcasm detection, we propose a new sarcasm dataset, Multimodal Sarcasm Detection Dataset (MUStARD), compiled from popular TV shows. MUStARD consists of audiovisual utterances annotated with sarcasm labels. Each utterance is accompanied by its context of historical utterances in the dialogue, which provides additional information on the scenario where the utterance occurs. Our initial results show that the use of multimodal information can reduce the relative error rate of sarcasm detection by up to 12.9% in F-score when compared to the use of individual modalities. The full dataset is publicly available for use at https://github.com/soujanyaporia/MUStARD, Comment: Accepted at ACL 2019

Recent meta-analyses (Delgado et al., 2018; Kong et al., 2018; Clinton, 2019) show that reading comprehension on paper is better than on screen among (young) adults. Children's screen reading comprehension, however, is underexplored. This article presents an experiment measuring the effect of reading medium on younger (10-year old) readers' comprehension, carried out in Norway in 2015. In a within-subjects design, students (n = 1139) took two comparable versions of a reading comprehension test – one on paper, and another digitally, with test version and order of medium counterbalanced. Probabilistic test theory models (two-parameter logistic (2 PL) and partial credit models) were employed for both versions of the test, allowing direct comparisons of student achievement across media. Results showed that the students in average achieved lower scores on the digital test than on the paper version. Almost a third of the students performed better on the paper test than they did on the computer test, and the negative effect of screen reading was most pronounced among high-performing girls. Scrolling and/or misplaced digital reading habits may be salient factors behind this difference, which sheds further light on children's reading performance and how this may be affected by screen technologies. Implications of these findings for education and for reading assessment are discussed.

Since 2012, the Semantic Web journal has been accepting papers in a novel Linked Dataset description track. Here we motivate the track and provide some analysis of the papers accepted thus far. We look at the ratio of accepted papers in this time-frame that fall under this track, the relative impact of these papers in terms of citations, and we perform a technical analysis of the datasets they describe to see what sorts of resources they provide and to see if the datasets have remained available since publication. Based on a variety of such analyses, we present some lessons learnt and discuss some potential changes we could apply to the track in order to improve the overall quality of papers accepted.

It is possible to relay signals between a contactless EMV card and a shop’s EMV reader and so make a fraudulent payment without the card-owner’s knowledge. Existing countermeasures rely on proximity checking: the reader will measure round trip times in message-exchanges, and will reject replies that take longer than expected (which suggests they have been relayed). However, it is the reader that would receive the illicit payment from any relayed transaction, so a rogue reader has little incentive to enforce the required checks. Furthermore, cases of malware targeting point-of-sales systems are common. We propose three novel proximity-checking protocols that use a trusted platform module (TPM) to ensure that the reader performs the time-measurements correctly. After running one of our proposed protocols, the bank can be sure that the card and reader were in close proximity, even if the reader tries to subvert the protocol. Our first protocol makes changes to the cards and readers, our second modifies the readers and the banking backend, and our third allows the detection of relay attacks, after they have happened, with only changes to the readers.

Object personification is the attribution of human characteristics to non-human agents. In online forums, autistic individuals commonly report experiencing this phenomenon. Given that approximately half of all autistic individuals experience difficulties identifying their own emotions, the suggestion that object personification may be a feature of autism seems almost paradoxical. Why would a person experience sympathy for objects, when they struggle to understand and verbalise the emotions of other people as well as their own? An online survey was used to assess tendency for personification in 87 autistic and 263 non-autistic adults. Together, our results indicate that object personification occurs commonly among autistic individuals, and perhaps more often (and later in life) than in the general population. Given that in many cases, autistic people report their personification experiences as distressing, it is important to consider the reasons for the increased personification and identify structures for support.

My 1996 paper [1] challenged the VL community to ask What do we think we are doing? It might now be called a Systematic Literature Review, although formal procedures for SLR were not developed until later [5]. It made a textual analysis of publications in which authors described a cognitive rationale for VL research, observing that many relied on insights from folk psychology, from introspection, or speculative computer analogies to the brain. This was a study of metacognition — beliefs about one's cognitive ability that shape the mental strategies we choose. In the case of programming language designers, the choices being shaped were not their own problem-solving strategies (something we all do), but the design rationale for new languages (which will affect others). The paper was written in the first year of my PhD, which should be encouraging to students wondering what will happen to their own work in 20 years time. It was inspired by research I had been doing for Hitachi, in a team designing a new VL. Sadly ‘AppGallery’ was not a commercial success. More interestingly, my own scientific assumptions turned out to be wrong — as reported in later VL papers [2], in my PhD dissertation, and in a ToCHI publication where I tried to reconstruct why we had believed it was a good idea in the first place [3]. At VL'96, scientific attention to human factors was a minority interest, and few user studies were reported. I remember that Judy Gurka seemed to ask the right questions about testing effectiveness of algorithm animation [4]. And the two keynote speakers — Thomas Green and Ben Shneiderman — demonstrated growing engagement of VL with HCI. However, within a few years, the whole VL community became convinced that these were the central questions in our work — first with a radical change of name to Human-Centric Computing, and then to the integration of VL and HCC One might assume it is easy to recognize influential papers. But this paper was controversial. It didn't include any technical work, let alone report user studies. It was a textual critique, but written by an engineer who simply needed better information about users, and had set out to ask what guidance was available for the design of VLs. Yet although the motivation came from engineering, the paper didn't make an engineering contribution, so people wondered whether some other publication venue would be more appropriate. When aiming to demonstrate conference quality through low acceptance ratios, it is often easier to reject a discussion paper like this one in favour of research that offers simpler conclusions, hard evidence and scientific consensus. This question of whether papers at a conference like VL should only present scientific or engineering results continues to be active 20 years later. In 1996, VL had been proceeding on the assumption that the primary focus of the conference should be on engineering work. The fact that engineering work relied on hidden psychological assumptions had not been noticed. However, bringing in more insights from human-facing fields such as HCI, and broadening the base of disciplinary enquiry, did help to overturn fallacies that had been acquired by holding to a strictly engineering mindset. We continue to face similar problems today. HCI has changed greatly over the past 20 years. In particular, HCI researchers now understand that hypothesis-testing experiments are not sufficient for interaction design: different kinds of empirical data must be acquired and integrated into explanatory and predictive theories of human behavior. But there are still advocates for approaches to programming language research that reject theories of design, relying on common sense and experimental measurements. It is hard for young researchers to argue for better theory in the face of demands for engineering evidence, so I hope that this award is a reminder that we still need to have informed debate about what we think we are doing.

Reading scientific papers in portable document format (PDF)-columned formats on computer screens is sometimes daunting and unfriendly. This is mainly due to the fact that PDF-columned texts are often truncated from the top or the bottom of pages so that readers have to scroll up–down repeatedly in the same page to get the whole text read. To make the reading process as smooth as possible, PDF viewers should be designed as responsive tools with responsive layouts that should automatically adapt the amount of readable text to the sizes of the displaying monitors so that readers will not waste time in repetitive vertical and horizontal scrolling movements within the same page. Here, I discuss such a problem-solving proposal that could be implemented in PDF viewers to improve the readability of PDF-columned texts and to make the reading process as flexible and painless as possible

Computers can serve as useful tools in developing children's literacy. The study compared the nature of mother-child interactions spelling words using a computer vs. pencil and paper and explored whether mothers have a consistent mediation style beyond the writing tool. We videotaped 49 preschoolers and their mothers in their homes, spelling an eight-item shopping list, half of the words using a pencil and half using a computer. We coded the interactions, and compared between them while controlling for the child's spelling level. The results show that mothers supported their children somewhat differently based on the writing tool. When using the computer, mothers supported their children through a more complete cognitive spelling process and gave them more independence. When using the pencil, mothers were more willing to ignore errors and entered into their child's space more frequently. Beyond these differences, we found support for some consistency in the mothers' mediation across the two writing tools. When given a choice of tools to spell a word, children preferred the computer. We call for raising parents' and teachers' awareness of the opportunities that the computer offers for joint writing and early literacy activities with children as a complement to traditional early literacy support.

New policy tackles perverse incentives that drive ‘publish or perish’ culture and might be encouraging questionable research practices. New policy tackles perverse incentives that drive ‘publish or perish’ culture and might be encouraging questionable research practices.

The effectiveness of tablet computers to supplement or replace paper-based text in everyday life has yet to be fully revealed. Previous investigations comparing reading performance using tablets and paper have, however, reported inconsistent results. Furthermore, the interpretability of some previous findings is limited by lack of experimental control over variables like text display conditions. In the current study, we investigated reading performance for text presented on tablet and paper. Crucially, the levels of luminance and contrast were matched precisely across tablet and paper. The study used Arabic text which differs substantially from the languages used previously to investigate effects of tablet and paper on reading, thus offering a distinctive test of the influence of these two media on reading performance. The results suggest that when text display conditions are well-matched, there is no reliable difference in reading performance between the two media. Also, neither the order of medium (reading from tablet or paper first), nor familiarity with using a tablet significantly influence reading performance. These results call into question previous suggestions that reading from tablets is linked to poorer reading performance, and demonstrate the benefits of controlling text display conditions. These findings are of interest to reading scientists and educators.

Part of an actor's job is being able to cold read: to take words directly from the page and to read them as if they were his or her own, often without the chance to read the lines beforehand. This is particularly difficult when two or more actors need to perform a dialogue cold. The need to hold a paper script in hand hinders the actor's ability to move freely. It also introduces a visual distraction between actors trying to engage with one another in a scene. This preliminary study uses Google Glass displayed cue cards as an alternative to traditional scripts, and compares the two approaches through a series of two-person, cold-read performances. Each performance was judged by a panel of theatre experts. The study finds that Glass has the potential to aid performance by freeing actors to better engage with one another. However, it also found that by limiting the display to one line of script at a time, the Glass application used here makes it difficult for some actors to grasp the text. In a further study, when asked to later perform the text from memory, actors who had used Glass recalled only slightly fewer lines than when they had learned using paper.

Lecturers who use the ‘one-minute paper’ generally praise it as a learning tool, for the teacher as well as the students. This article surveys the literature on this widely applicable technique and presents new evidence on students’ opinions of it and the extent of its use in the classroom. The benefits for both students and teachers appear sizeable for such a modest amount of time and effort, and students generally perceive the one-minute paper favourably. However, the one-minute paper can be easily employed to excess, reflected in quickly declining response rates over the course of two lecture series. Survey evidence suggests that the one-minute paper is perhaps not used especially extensively in UK and US higher education, largely due to lack of knowledge of its existence and the perception that it would be too time-consuming to analyse the responses.

Competitive environments in which individuals compete for mutually-exclusive outcomes require rational decision making in order to maximize gains but often result in poor quality heuristics. Reasons for the greater reliance on lose-shift relative to win-stay behaviour shown in previous studies were explored using the game of Rock, Paper, Scissors and by manipulating the value of winning and losing. Decision-making following a loss was characterized as relatively fast and relatively inflexible both in terms of the failure to modulate the magnitude of lose-shift strategy and the lack of significant neural modulation. In contrast, decision-making following a win was characterized as relatively slow and relatively flexible both in terms of a behavioural increase in the magnitude of win-stay strategy and a neural modulation of feedback-related negativity (FRN) and stimulus-preceding negativity (SPN) following outcome value modulation. The win-stay/lose-shift heuristic appears not to be a unified mechanism, with the former relying on System 2 processes and the latter relying on System 1 processes. Our ability to play rationally appears more likely when the outcome is positive and when the value of wins are low, highlighting how vulnerable we can be when trying to succeed during competition.

A great deal of attention has recently been paid to gesture and its effects on thinking and learning. It is well established that the hand movements that accompany speech are an integral part of communication, ubiquitous across cultures, and a unique feature of human behavior. In an attempt to understand this intriguing phenomenon, researchers have focused on pinpointing the mechanisms that underlie gesture production. One proposal--that gesture arises from simulated action (Hostetter & Alibali Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 15, 495-514, 2008)--has opened up discussions about action, gesture, and the relation between the two. However, there is another side to understanding a phenomenon and that is to understand its function. A phenomenon's function is its purpose rather than its precipitating cause--the why rather than the how. This paper sets forth a theoretical framework for exploring why gesture serves the functions that it does, and reviews where the current literature fits, and fails to fit, this proposal. Our framework proposes that whether or not gesture is simulated action in terms of its mechanism--it is clearly not reducible to action in terms of its function. Most notably, because gestures are abstracted representations and are not actions tied to particular events and objects, they can play a powerful role in thinking and learning beyond the particular, specifically, in supporting generalization and transfer of knowledge.

E-readers are fast rivaling print as a dominant method for reading. Because they offer accessibility options that are impossible in print, they are potentially beneficial for those with impairments, such as dyslexia. Yet, little is known about how the use of these devices influences reading in those who struggle. Here, we observe reading comprehension and speed in 103 high school students with dyslexia. Reading on paper was compared with reading on a small handheld e-reader device, formatted to display few words per line. We found that use of the device significantly improved speed and comprehension, when compared with traditional presentations on paper for specific subsets of these individuals: Those who struggled most with phoneme decoding or efficient sight word reading read more rapidly using the device, and those with limited VA Spans gained in comprehension. Prior eye tracking studies demonstrated that short lines facilitate reading in dyslexia, suggesting that it is the use of short lines (and not the device per se) that leads to the observed benefits. We propose that these findings may be understood as a consequence of visual attention deficits, in some with dyslexia, that make it difficult to allocate attention to uncrowded text near fixation, as the gaze advances during reading. Short lines ameliorate this by guiding attention to the uncrowded span.

The lack of writing skills among rural ESL primary school pupils in Malaysia has been identified based on the school level assessments. Based on the teachers as the researchers’ perspectives, the problem of writing among these rural young learners is cause by the lack of vocabulary acquisition where they don’t have choices of words in expressing their ideas in writing. Therefore, the researchers propose method with a writing module focusing on vocabulary enhancement in improving the writing skills among these learners. This module i.e. the VAW Module uses the VAW Method that comprises of vocabulary enhancement (V), application and practice (A) and Writing (W) is anticipated to help the pupils to power up their writing before they undergo the Primary School Achievement Test (UPSR) in Year 6 i.e. the national examination taken by all students in Malaysia at the end of their sixth year in primary school before they leave for secondary school.

Every word signifies multiple senses. Many studies using comprehension-based measures suggest that polysemes' senses (e.g., paper as in printer paper or term paper) share lexical representations, whereas homophones' meanings (e.g., pen as in ballpoint pen or pig pen) correspond to distinct lexical representations. Less is known about the lexical representations of polysemes compared to homophones in language production. In this study, speakers named pictures after reading sentence fragments that primed polysemes and homophones either as direct competitors to pictures (i.e., semantic-competitors), or as indirect-competitors to pictures (e.g., polysemous senses of semantic competitors, or homophonous meanings of semantic competitors). Polysemes (e.g., paper) elicited equal numbers of intrusions to picture names (e.g., cardboard) compared to in control conditions whether primed as direct competitors (printer paper) or as indirect-competitors (term paper). This contrasted with the finding that homophones (e.g., pen) elicited more intrusions to picture names (e.g., crayon) compared to in control conditions when primed as direct competitors (ballpoint pen) than when primed as indirect-competitors (pig pen). These results suggest that polysemes, unlike homophones, are stored and retrieved as unified lexical representations.

Advent of technology has caused growing interest in using computers to convert conventional paper and pencil-based testing (Henceforth PPT) into Computer-based testing (Henceforth CBT) in the field of education during last decades. This constant promulgation of computers to reshape the conventional tests into computerized format permeated the language assessment field in recent years. But, enjoying advantages of computers in language assessment raise the concerns of the effects that computerized mode of testing may have on CBT performance. Thus, this study investigated the score comparability of Vocabulary in Use test taken by 30 Iranian undergraduate students studying at a state university located in Chabahar region of Iran (CMU) to see whether scores from two administrations of testing mode were different. Therefore, two similar tests were administered to the male and female participants on two testing mode occasions with four weeks interval. Employing One-Way ANOVA statistical test to compare the mean scores and Pearson Correlation test to find the relationship between mode preference and performance revealed that two sets of scores were not different and gender difference was not also considered a variable that might affect performance on CBT. Based on the results, computerized version of the test can be considered a favorable alternative for the state undergraduate students in Iran.

actively at work on the concept of the terminology used in our field to identify children who are handicapped by their behavior. During the past two years a subcommittee appointed by the Executive Committee has been developing and revising a position paper which focuses on terminology. The entire text of the paper is presented on the following pages. The initial ideas for the paper's content were discussed and agreed upon in April 1983 at the Spring Executive Committee meeting. During the ensuing year a position statement was published in Behavioral Disorders and comments were solicited. A draft version of the position paper was prepared for the Spring Executive meeting in April 1984. In September 1984 38 persons in our field were sent copies of the draft for review, and their comments were solicited. Those comments were considered at the Fall Executive Committee meeting. At that meeting the Executive Committee finalized the content of the paper, and the final draft was completed in February 1985. While the text which follows represents the end product of the original subcommittee, it remains open for comments and consideration from the membership. In order to facilitate such comments, the Executive Committee conducted a program session entitled Issues in Terminology for Children Who Are Handicapped by Their Behavior during the 1985 CEC Conference in Anaheim. At that session the position was reviewed and five professionals responded, representing various perspectives on the issue. There was also an audience response period. If, after reading the paper, you wish to comment, please do so. Comments should be in writing and directed to Dr. Sharon Huntze, Department of Special Education, University of Missouri-Columbia, 515 South Sixth Street, Columbia, MO 65211, or to any other member of the Executive Committee.

People read more slowly from CRT displays than from paper (see, for example, Gould and Grischkowsky, 1984). This report summarizes ten experiments and several more analyses that seek to explain the cause of this reading-speed difference. Typically, each experiment isolates one variable and studies whether it explains the difference. Results show that no one variable studied (e.g., experience in using CRT displays; display orientation; character size, font, or polarity) explains it. The tentative conclusion is that the difference is due to a combination of variables, probably centering on the image quality of the characters themselves.