Thesis (M.Ed.) -- Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1971. / Typescript. Bibliography : l. [150]-154. Also available online.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Central Florida, 2008. / Adviser: Anthony Grajeda. Includes bibliographical references (p. 155-179).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Bowling Green State University, 2008. / Document formatted into pages; contains xiv, 199 p. : ill. (some col.) Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Rhode Island, 2008. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 115-117).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii, 1994.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii, 1994.

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How effective is a notation in conveying the writer's intent correctly? This paper identifies understandability of design notations as an important aspect which calls for an experimental comparison. We compare the success of university students in interpreting business process descriptions, for an established graphical notation (BPMN) and for an alternative textual notation (based on written use-cases). Because a design must be read by diverse communities, including technically-trained professionals such as developers and business analysts, as well as end-users and stakeholders from a wider business setting, we used different types of participants in our experiment. Specifically, we included those who had formal training in process description, and others who had not. Our experiments showed significant increases by both groups in their understanding of the process from reading the textual model. This was not so for the graphical model, where only the trained readers showed significant increases. This finding points at the value of educating readers of graphical descriptions in that particular notation when they become exposed to such models in their daily work.

The automatic recognition of hand-written text has been a goal for over thirty five years. The highly ambiguous nature of cursive writing (with high variability between not only different writers, but even between different samples from the same writer), means that systems based only on visual information are prone to errors. It is suggested that the application of linguistic knowledge to the recognition task may improve recognition accuracy. If a low-level (pattern recognition based) recogniser produces a candidate lattice (i.e. a directed graph giving a number of alternatives at each word position in a sentence), then linguistic knowledge can be used to find the 'best' path through the lattice. There are many forms of linguistic knowledge that may be used to this end. This thesis looks specifically at the use of collocation as a source of linguistic knowledge. Collocation describes the statistical tendency of certain words to co-occur in a language, within a defined range. It is suggested that this tendency may be exploited to aid automatic text recognition. The construction and use of a post-processing system incorporating collocational knowledge is described, as are a number of experiments designed to test the effectiveness of collocation as an aid to text recognition. The results of these experiments suggest that collocational statistics may be a useful form of knowledge for this application and that further research may produce a system of real practical use.

Magister Curationis - MCur / Background: Written feedback from lecturers to their students, in higher education institutions, plays an important role in improving students’ performance. However, students’ perceptions of written feedback on assessments could influence its utilization to improve their performance. Despite the high priority placed on written feedback, to date, insufficient research studies have been conducted on the student nurses’ perceptions of written feedback. Purpose and Objective: The purpose of this descriptive study is to describe student nurses’ perceptions of written feedback on assessments at a university in the Western Cape. The objective of this study is to determine student nurses’ perceptions of written feedback on assessment. Methodology: A quantitative descriptive survey research design was employed to conduct this study at a university in the Western Cape. The target population for this study was 106 student nurses registered in the nursing foundation programme for the year 2015. This study employed all-inclusive sampling of foundation student nurses registered in the year 2015. A questionnaire was used to collect data from the participants. A total of 74 participants were available for the study, of whom, 69 submitted their questionnaires, resulting to a response rate of 93.2%. The data was analyzed by using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 23 and was presented in frequency tables, percentages and bar graphs. Ethics approval was obtained from the Senate Higher Degree and the Senate Research Committees of the institution under study, before commencing. Permission was also obtained from the Dean of Research and Head of the School of Nursing, before the commencement of the study. The purpose of the study was explained, and a consent form was signed, before the questionnaires were administered to participants. Findings: The findings of this study indicated that students receive feedback on assessment, were in line with the assessment criteria. The study also found that students perceived receiving plenty of quality written feedback in good time to be useful. The results of this study indicated that the inability to understand written feedback, the limited opportunity to clarify feedback and negatively written comments, hinders the use of written feedback. Recommendations: There is the need for lecturers to provide written feedback that could be useful for students to improve on their performance. There is also the need for written feedback to be delivered to students electronically. Lecturers need to discuss written feedback with their students after delivery. The need for a qualitative study to be conducted on student’s and lecturers experiences on written feedback on assessment is recommended.