Student participation and attainment in mathematics is an issue in education policies and practices for many countries. Some academics, teachers and policy makers claim that student attitudes in mathematics exercise a decisive causal influence on participation and attainment in mathematics. To ensure that education policies and practices are well-evidenced, it is important that assessments of these attitudes are sufficiently validated for such claims. The influential Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) includes assessments of student self-confidence in mathematics. This involves two sets of questionnaire items, with one set relating to self-efficacy and the other set relating to selfconcept. While the self-concept items refer to the mathematics domain as a whole, the self-efficacy items refer to individual mathematics tasks. Self-efficacy has been incorporated in models of self-regulated learning and, although one model indicates that self-efficacy may be significant for formative assessment, there is disagreement about relations between self-efficacy, participation and attainment. Although there have been several studies of mathematical self-efficacy, their assessments have generally lacked sufficient validations. The OECD validation of the PISA mathematical self-efficacy assessment itself lacks transparency and requires more evidence. The present study provides an independent validation of the assessment and uses mathematical self-concept as a point of comparison. The validation has a mixed methodology integrating evidence from the PISA 2003 data set and documentation for 41 countries with cognitive interviewing of students in England, Estonia, Hong Kong and the Netherlands. The validation identifies threats to validity that weaken extrapolation from the assessment to real-world situations, particularly in Hong Kong. These threats are traced to the formulation of the mathematics tasks in the self-efficacy items. The findings have implications for the interpretation and development of mathematical self-efficacy assessments as the basis for understanding relations with participation and attainment.

Today knowledge base authoring for the engineering of intelligent systems is performed mainly by using tools with graphical user interfaces. An alternative human-computer interaction para- digm is the maintenance and manipulation of electronic documents, which provides several ad- vantages with respect to the social aspects of knowledge acquisition. Until today it hardly has found any attention as a method for knowledge engineering. This thesis provides a comprehensive discussion of document-centered knowledge acquisition with knowledge markup languages. There, electronic documents are edited by the knowledge authors and the executable knowledge base entities are captured by markup language expressions within the documents. The analysis of this approach reveals significant advantages as well as new challenges when compared to the use of traditional GUI-based tools. Some advantages of the approach are the low barriers for domain expert participation, the simple integration of informal descriptions, and the possibility of incremental knowledge for- malization. It therefore provides good conditions for building up a knowledge acquisition pro- cess based on the mixed-initiative strategy, being a flexible combination of direct and indirect knowledge acquisition. Further it turns out that document-centered knowledge acquisition with knowledge markup languages provides high potential for creating customized knowledge au- thoring environments, tailored to the needs of the current knowledge engineering project and its participants. The thesis derives a process model to optimally exploit this customization po- tential, evolving a project specific authoring environment by an agile process on the meta level. This meta-engineering process continuously refines the three aspects of the document space: The employed markup languages, the scope of the informal knowledge, and the structuring and organization of the documents. The evolution of the first aspect, the markup languages, plays a key role, implying the design of project specific markup languages that are easily understood by the knowledge authors and that are suitable to capture the required formal knowledge precisely. The goal of the meta-engineering process is to create a knowledge authoring environment, where structure and presentation of the domain knowledge comply well to the users’ mental model of the domain. In that way, the approach can help to ease major issues of knowledge-based system development, such as high initial development costs and long-term maintenance problems. In practice, the application of the meta-engineering approach for document-centered knowl- edge acquisition poses several technical challenges that need to be coped with by appropriate tool support. In this thesis KnowWE, an extensible document-centered knowledge acquisition environment is presented. The system is designed to support the technical tasks implied by the meta-engineering approach, as for instance design and implementation of new markup lan- guages, content refactoring, and authoring support. It is used to evaluate the approach in several real-world case-studies from different domains, such as medicine or engineering for instance. We end the thesis by a summary and point out further interesting research questions consid- ering the document-centered knowledge acquisition approach. / Ein Meta-Engineering Ansatz für dokumentenzentrierte Wissensakquisition

The aims of this project are to investigate the possibility and potential of automatically classifying Web documents according to a traditional library classification scheme and to investigate the extent to which automatic classification can be used in automatic metadata generation on the web. The Wolverhampton Web Library (WWLib) is a search engine that classifies UK Web pages according to Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC). This search engine is introduced as an example application that would benefit from an automatic classification component such as that described in the thesis. Different approaches to information resource discovery and resource description on the Web are reviewed, as are traditional Information Retrieval (IR) techniques relevant to resource discovery on the Web. The design, implementation and evaluation of an automatic classifier, that classifies Web pages according to DDC, is documented. The evaluation shows that automatic classification is possible and could be used to improve the performance of a search engine. This classifier is then extended to perform automatic metadata generation using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Dublin Core. A proposed RDF data model, schema and automatically generated RDF syntax are documented. Automatically generated RDF metadata describing a range of automatically classified documents is shown. The research shows that automatic classification is possible and could potentially be used to enable context sensitive browsing in automated web search engines. The classifications could also be used in generating context sensitive metadata tailored specifically for the search engine domain.

Rezension zu Griese, Sabine: Andreas Gardt, Mireille Schnyder u. Jürgen Wolf (Hgg.): Buchkultur und Wissensvermittlung in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, Berlin u. Boston: de Gruyter. 2011, 310 S.

Die Erinnerungskultur schlägt um in Erinnerungskult. wenn das, was über alle Konstruktionsabsicht hinaus sich zum Wissensschatz angehäuft hat, als geplantes Produkt von Strategien, Methoden und Techniken erscheint: Unsere eigene Meisterschaft wird in die Vergangenheit projiziert. Indem wir die Gelehrten des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts zu unseren Kollegen machen und sie in ehemaliger Lebendigkeit auferstehen lassen, unterlaufen wir das Vergessen, das sie ereilt hat, und erhoffen ein ähnliches Schicksal für uns selbst. Aber ist die Gelehrtengeschichte heute nicht im gleichen Maße Rettung eines Vergessenen wie Nachahmung desselben?

John S. Haggerty. / Final report; / Includes bibliographical references. / Sponsored by DARPA, Office of Naval Research (ONR) and U.S. Army Research Office (ARO) N00014-82-K-0350

by Kevin Sparks, Jefferson Tester. / Series statement from publisher's list. / Includes bibliographical references.

by Martin L. Baughman ... [et al.]. / "December 1985, Revised February 1986." / Includes bibliographical references.

by S.R. Connors. / "January 1992." / Includes bibliographical references (p. 21-22).

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