published_or_final_version / Psychology / Master / Master of Philosophy

This research dealt with the use of oral individual testing as a teaching technique, as well as an evaluative tool. The research was also concerned with students' self-concept, nervous anxiety level, and attitude toward testing. The purpose was to increase student comprehension of content material, and through practice and feedback, raise students' self-concept and reduce his/her nervous anxiety. The four research hypotheses were: (1) there will be a difference in ability to take and pass tests and improve test scores; (2) there will be a difference in student attitude toward oral and written testing; (3) there will be a difference in student self-concept; and (4) there will be a difference in nervous anxiety level. All of these differences were shown over a two-semester span of the experiment. The sample consisted of 33 anatomy-physiology students enrolled in two sections taught by the researcher. Students within each of the experimental classes were assigned to two groups of equal numbers of students which alternated between written and oral testing throughout a two-semester sequence. Instruments used in this study included teacher constructed tests on the human anatomical and physiological systems. The format was identical for both oral and written testing on a particular system. Data were gathered on all test scores: medians, modes, means, and standard deviations were computed. Statistical data included a two-way analysis of variance, tukey HSD and Scheffe Post Hoc Tests, Reliability and Internal Consistency computer checks on teacher made tests, Likert attitudinal scales, and Taylor-Johnson Temperament Analysis. A researcher-student developed five-point Likert was used to measure student attitude toward oral and written tests. The Taylor-Johnson Temperament Analysis was used to gather pre and post data on self-concept and nervous anxiety levels. Individual student test score profiles showed change in ability to take and pass tests, as well as an improvement trend over the two-semester sequence. These were graphed by individual, and by class, for comparison. Statistical analysis showed significant differences in oral and written test scores, so post hoc tests were used to detect these differences. The analysis indicated students were able to improve test taking ability enough to change ranks within the class itself. Students consistently scored higher on oral ests than on written tests of identical format. Reliability and internal consistency checks on teacher made tests showed .95 and .97 consistency on oral and written tests, respectively. Likert scales showed data strongly supporting a student preference for oral testing. This preference included the ability to better tell what they knew; the ability to verbalize, hear and elaborate. Taylor-Johnson Temperament Analysis, pre and post testing, showed a significant rise in self-concept and a decrease in nervous anxiety level over the research time span. Interpretation of the data led to the rejection of the four null hypotheses and to the acceptance of the four research or alternative hypotheses. Repetition of this research using larger numbers of students in different subjects, and by different teachers in a variety of grade levels, would increase the viability of these data and challenge others to try oral individual testing as an alternative method of testing. This, then, would serve as a learning tool for the student as well as an evaluative tool for the teacher.

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Aktuell forskning inom social kognition tyder på att såväl fördomar som diskriminering kan befinna sig på implicit, det vill säga omedveten och automatisk nivå (Greenwald & Banaji,1995). Om lärare har implicita fördomar gentemot invandrarelever finns det därför risk för att de omedvetet diskriminerar dessa. Med anledning av detta undersöktes med hjälp av Implicit Association Test (Greenwald et al., 1998) 52 lärarstudenters implicita attityder gentemot invandrarelever. Dessutom undersöktes lärarstudenters explicita attityder gentemot samma grupp. Resultaten visade att en stor majoritet (79 %) av lärarstudenterna hade negativa attityder gentemot invandrarelever på implicit nivå, medan endast en dryg tredjedel uttryckte detta explicit. Det fanns dessutom ingen statistisk signifikant korrelation mellan de explicita och implicita måtten. Även om denna diskrepans kan bero på att deltagarna ville dölja sina negativa attityder gentemot invandrarelever, finns det anledning att tro att många lärarstudenter har implicita attityder som de inte är fullt medvetna om och som kan ligga till grund för omedveten diskriminering av invandrarelever.

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Testing integrated circuits to verify their operating frequency, known as delay testing, is essential to achieve acceptable product quality. The high cost of functional testing has driven the industry to automatically-generated structural tests, applied by low-cost testers taking advantage of design-for-test (DFT) circuitry on the chip. Traditional at-speed functional testing of digital circuits is increasingly challenged by new defect types and the high cost of functional test development. This research addressed the problems of accurate delay testing in DSM circuits by targeting resistive open and short circuits, while taking into account manufacturing process variation, power dissipation and power supply noise. In this work, we developed a class of structural delay tests in which we extended traditional launch-on-capture delay testing to additional launch and capture cycles. We call these Pseudofunctional Tests (PFT). A test pattern is scanned into the circuit, and then multiple functional clock cycles are applied to it with at-speed launch and capture for the last two cycles. The circuit switching activity over an extended period allows the off-chip power supply noise transient to die down prior to the at-speed launch and capture, achieving better timing correlation with the functional mode of operation. In addition, we also proposed advanced compaction methodologies to compact the generated test patterns into a smaller test set in order to reduce the test application time. We modified our CodGen K longest paths per gate automatic test pattern generator to implement PFT pattern generation. Experimental results show that PFT test generation is practical in terms of test generation time.

To perform fire engineering analysis, data on how an object or group of objects burn is almost always needed. This data should be collected and stored in a logical and complete fashion to allow for meaningful analysis later. This thesis details the design of a new fire test Data Base Management System (DBMS) termed UCFIRE which was built to overcome the limitations of existing fire test DBMS and was based primarily on the FDMS 2.0 and FIREBASEXML specifications. The UCFIRE DBMS is currently the most comprehensive and extensible DBMS available in the fire engineering community and can store the following test types: Cone Calorimeter, Furniture Calorimeter, Room/Corner Test, LIFT and Ignitability Apparatus Tests. Any data reduction which is performed on this fire test data should be done in an entirely mechanistic fashion rather than rely on human intuition which is subjective. Currently no other DBMS allows for the semi-automation of the data reduction process. A number of pertinent data reduction algorithms were investigated and incorporated into the UCFIRE DBMS. An ASP.NET Web Service (WEBFIRE) was built to reduce the bandwidth required to exchange fire test information between the UCFIRE DBMS and a UCFIRE document stored on a web server. A number of Mass Loss Rate (MLR) algorithms were investigated and it was found that the Savitzky-Golay filtering algorithm offered the best performance. This algorithm had to be further modified to autonomously filter other noisy events that occurred during the fire tests. This algorithm was then evaluated on test data from exemplar Furniture Calorimeter and Cone Calorimeter tests. The LIFT test standard (ASTM E 1321-97a) requires its ignition and flame spread data to be scrutinised but does not state how to do this. To meet these requirements the fundamentals of linear regression were reviewed and an algorithm to mechanistically scrutinise ignition and flame spread data was developed. This algorithm seemed to produce reasonable results when used on exemplar ignition and flame spread test data.