Current undergraduate medical curricula provides relatively little time for cadaver dissection. The Department of Human Anatomy and Physiology at the University of Padova has organized a pilot project with the University Hospital for the donation of body parts that are surgically removed for therapeutic purposes and destined under Italian law for…

There appears to be some degree of hesitation and lack of confidence among professionals in conducting capacity assessments. This document explains a two-phase process developed and implemented by a multi-disciplinary group of professionals during a pilot project. The first phase in the decision making process is to determine to what extent the…

As part of a focused, methodical, and evaluative approach to emerging technologies, QR codes are one of many new technologies being used by the UC Irvine Libraries. QR codes provide simple connections between print and virtual resources. In summer 2010, a small task force began to investigate how QR codes could be used to provide information and…

Purpose: To evaluate the utility of a pitch elevation task in the assessment of oropharyngeal dysphagia. Method: This study was a pilot prospective cohort study including 40 consecutive patients (16 male and 24 female) who were referred by their physician for a swallowing evaluation. Patients were evaluated with a noninstrumental clinical…

Mobile learning--the use of mobile devices for educational purposes by students--is rapidly moving from an experimental initiative by a few innovative districts over the last five years to a broadly accepted concept in K12. The latest research and surveys, results of pilot programs, and analysis of trends in both public education and the broader…

Pilot studies are often recommended by scholars and consultants to address a variety of issues, including preliminary scale or instrument development. Specific concerns such as item difficulty, item discrimination, internal consistency, response rates, and parameter estimation in general are all relevant. Unfortunately, there is little discussion…

This pilot study aims at integrating a socio-pragmatic concept, Cooperative Principles, into an experimental writing project on the genres of comparison and contrast. It reports on a six-week study of five undergraduates voluntarily recruited in a university located in central Taiwan. In surveying their writing momentum before and after the…

A wide range of graduate attributes are listed, categorized and prioritized by different higher education institutions. However, one attribute that is less visible in the literature is creativity. In the current study, creativity has emerged as a desirable graduate attribute among students and employers. This paper presents an exploratory…

The Open Academic Analytics Initiative (OAAI) is a collaborative, multi-year grant program aimed at researching issues related to the scaling up of learning analytics technologies and solutions across all of higher education. The paper describes the goals and objectives of the OAAI, depicts the process and challenges of collecting, organizing and…

Recently, the use of children's picture books to teach English has been increasing in Japan. An advantage of these books is the high proportion of basic vocabulary they include. Can picture books also be useful for teaching Japanese students Italian and increasing their motivation? The present study analyses the effectiveness of employing a…

Student learning style differences have been widely researched in both traditional face-to-face and online learning environments (Irani, Scherler & Harrington, 2003;Steinbronn, 2007; Williamson & Watson, 2007; Ugur, Akkoyunlu & Kurbanoglu, 2001). After conducting a literature review of adult student learning styles and teaching method…

The objectives of this study were to assess the impacts of Inclusive Education (IE) Project implemented in government schools of Islamabad and anticipate its practicability for public schools. Quantitative and qualitative methods were applied for data collection. Study instruments were structured interviews, unstructured focus group discussions,…

This paper explores automated methods for measuring features of student writing and determining their relationship to writing quality and other features of literacy, such as reading rest scores. In particular, it uses the "e-rater"™ automatic essay scoring system to measure "product" features (measurable traits of the final…

This paper focuses on the psychometric analysis of lecturers' beliefs on teaching function (LBTF) survey using Rasch Model analysis. The sample comprised 34 Community Colleges' lecturers. The Rasch Model is applied to produce specific measurements on the lecturers' beliefs on teaching function in order to generalize results and inferential…

Many preschool children fail to achieve the National Association for Sport and Physical Education physical activity recommendations placing themselves at increased risk of overweight and its associated health consequences. The early learning and care system is well positioned to intervene. Yet few child obesity prevention efforts have focused on…