Whereas traditional models of psychological assessment have emphasized the use of standardized data to inform treatment or communicate about a client, collaborative/therapeutic approaches have focused on engaging clients in a relationship based on mutuality and alliance, wherein the assessment process is experienced as accessible and beneficial – potentially acting as a therapeutic intervention in and of itself (Finn, 2007; Finn & Tonsager, 1997). Although various forms of collaborative assessment have been practiced with adults, adolescents, and children, and have shown promise clinically, research is scant regarding the efficacy of this approach in the school context. The dearth of research evaluating the use of collaborative/therapeutic assessment models in schools is a valuable area of inquiry, both because psychological assessment is practiced frequently in schools, and because, beginning in 1997, amendments to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) called for increased student involvement in special education processes (Texas Education Agency, Office of Special Education, 2004). Such increased student involvement could be facilitated through the use of collaborative/therapeutic assessment methods in schools. The present study used a multiple baseline, single-case design to explore how participation in a school-based psychological assessment utilizing elements of collaborative/therapeutic assessment would affect six Central Texas high school students. The assessment was hypothesized to be an intervention that would positively affect the youths’ perceptions of their self-determination, self-efficacy, and internal locus of control. The study also explored how the intervention affected students’ self knowledge, and feelings of therapeutic alliance with the assessor, as well as their satisfaction with the assessment. Results indicated that, following their participation in the assessment intervention, students evidenced: (1) shifts towards a more internal locus of control, (2) increased ratings of therapeutic alliance, (3) increased ratings of self knowledge, and (4) satisfaction with the assessment intervention. This study offers a promising framework for the use of collaborative/therapeutic assessment methods within the school context as a means through which to empower students receiving special education services. / text

Research has paid little attention to clients’ experience of the psychological assessment process, particularly in regard to the experiences of children and their parents. Advocates of collaborative assessment have long espoused the therapeutic benefits of providing feedback that can help clients better understand themselves and improve their lives (Finn & Tonsager, 1992; Fischer, 1970, 1985/1994). Finn, Tharinger, and colleagues (2007; 2009) have extended a semi-structured form of collaborative assessment, Therapeutic Assessment (TA), with children. One important aspect of their method, drawn from Fischer’s (1985/1994) example, is the creation of individualized fables that incorporate assessment findings into a child-friendly format. The fables are then shared with the child and parents as assessment feedback. This study evaluated whether receiving this type of individualized, developmentally appropriate feedback would affect how children and their parents report experiencing the assessment process. The assessment process, with the exception of child feedback, was standard for the setting. Participants were 32 children who underwent a neuropsychological evaluation at a private outpatient clinic, along with their parents. Multivariate and univariate statistics were used to test differences between two groups: an experimental group that received individualized fables as child-focused feedback and a control group. Children in the experimental group reported a greater sense of learning about themselves, a more positive relationship with their assessor, a greater sense of collaboration with the assessment process, and a sense that their parents learned more about them because of the assessment than did children in the control group. Parents in the experimental group reported a more positive relationship between their child and the assessor, a greater sense of collaboration with the assessment process, and higher satisfaction with clinic services compared to the control group. Limitations to the study, implications for assessment practice with children, and future directions for research are discussed. / text

Because little was known about second language online collaborative reading, this study explored the application of an online annotation affordance, analyzing the processes and products of how Taiwanese schoolchildren used notetaking and sharing functions to develop their English reading comprehension. Fifth-grade students (N = 83) from three English classes were randomly assigned to three reading conditions: read-only (i.e., individual reading without making any annotation), individual annotation (i.e., making annotations for their own use), and collaborative annotation (i.e., making and sharing annotations on their reading experience with others while reading) for three reading sessions. Data sources included a background survey, reading comprehension tests (free recall and cued recall), reading affect surveys, students’ annotations, text-based stimulated recall protocols, and a survey about the frequency of online support consultation. Results of quantitative and qualitative analyses showed that there was no statistically significant difference among the reading groups in their free recall and cued recall performance, their reading enjoyment and engagement, and their perceptions of the reading activity’s helpfulness for reading comprehension. Despite the lack of overall significant difference in reading affect, the collaborative annotation group increased their affect levels across the reading sessions, and significantly raised enjoyment levels between first and second sessions. Supplementary analyses found that the relationship between the amount of annotation and students’ reading comprehension scores was positive but did not reach a statistically significant level. Additionally, the more often the participants consulted online resources, the lower were their cued recall scores. As for the functions served by students’ annotations, nine categories were identified. The most prevalent function for the individual annotation group was “Translations,” whereas “Responses to Peers” was the most frequent category for the collaborative annotation group. The amount of interaction with peers was positively associated with cued recall scores and negatively associated with amount of use of translation annotations. Analysis of processes revealed that students were different in how they read online and used annotations. Students provided multifaceted reasons for why they did or did not make annotations and reply to peers while reading, and for why they liked or disliked the online reading activities. / text

Communities of practices are particular and identified knowledge networks involved in a new global, virtual and digital framework. The study of their specific characteristics, the Legitimate Peripheral Participation and the duality Reification/Participation, provides the necessary background to understand and formalize the barriers and the limits in this new context. <br />In order to overcome these ones, the analysis of the tools and the methods for computerized reification (content analysis, information architecture, information visualization) and for enrichment and assessment of content and users (Human-Computer Interactions, Collaborative filtering) enables to develop a methodology to support the application of an automated and interactive reification process in a virtual Communities of Practices.

Tenured and tenure-track faculty members at institutions of higher education, especially those at Research I institutions, are being asked to do more than ever before. With rapidly changing technology, significant decreases in public funding, the shift toward privately funded research, and the ever increasing expectations of students for an education that adequately prepares them for professional careers, engineering faculty are particularly challenged by the escalating demands on their time. In 1996, the primary accreditation organization for engineering programs (ABET) adopted new criteria that required, among other things, engineering programs to teach students to function on multidisciplinary teams and to communicate effectively. In response, most engineering programs utilize project teams as a strategy for teaching these skills. The purpose of this qualitative study of tenured and tenure track engineering faculty at a Research I institution in the southwestern United States was to explore the variety of ways in which the engineering faculty responded to the demands placed upon them as a result of the increased emphasis on project teams in undergraduate engineering education. Social role theory and organizational climate theory guided the study. Some faculty viewed project teams as an opportunity for students to learn important professional skills and to benefit from collaborative learning but many questioned the importance and feasibility of teaching teamwork skills and had concerns about taking time away from other essential fundamental material such as mathematics, basic sciences and engineering sciences. Although the administration of the College of Engineering articulated strong support for the use of project teams in undergraduate education, the prevailing climate did little to promote significant efforts related to effective utilization of project teams. Too often, faculty were unwilling to commit sufficient time or effort to make project teamwork a truly valuable learning opportunity because those efforts were not perceived to be valuable and were rarely rewarded. Few formal professional development opportunities were available and few incentives were in place to encourage other informal efforts to develop the necessary skills. Those who committed significant effort to project teams were challenged by concerns about team composition, student accountability and assigning individual grades for group teamwork.

In the context of internationally challenging economic, design has been regarded as a key factor in assisting design and manufacturing companies to survive. By using up-to-date computer-supported technology, the global design collaboration based on multidisciplinary and distributed environment is becoming a mainstream to new product development (NPD). However, during the process of collaborative design, risk is rarely mentioned. In particular, due to the complexity of design process and lack of efficient design decision-making, there have been some design collaboration failures across multiple companies. Some design projects cannot deliver the benefits as companies have expected through the collaboration. Moreover, a number of stakeholders, managers and designers expressed their disappointment at not seeing the projected savings in cost and time, which critically discredited the value of design collaboration. Many studies in academia and commercial cases have suggested that risk assessment can be applied as an effective means in the realm of design. Nevertheless, few of them conducted risk management research associated with design constraints under a collaborative environment from both theoretical and practical perspectives. In current risk practice, many risk practitioners simply report key risks to their management teams and no further analysis, which might subsequently result in confusion with excessive discussions. Consequently, to prevent the failure of design collaboration and perform a satisfactory risk assessment, it is important to perform risk management with an upstream perspective and at an operational level. An approach, called constraint-based design risk management (DRM) where a conceptual framework has been proposed on the basis of collaborative design features, risk management process and Theory of Constraints (TOC). Moreover, a DRM matrix has been developed to map, measure and mitigate collaborative design risk through evaluating the critical design constraints, and then specified design risk variables in the light of risk criteria. Design constraints are quantitative parameters that frequently affect main design processes and decisions. The combination of design constraints and risk criteria can be accessible and applicable by designers and design mangers. In addition, a Bayesian weighting method based on Bayesian theorem has been developed to measure collaborative design risk in a more efficient manner. Ultimately, a DRM tool has been created as a simulated scenario prototype, which incorporated with three case-study evaluations, to demonstrate the importance and effectiveness of using TOC and risk theory in the realm of design collaboration.

The conditional independence assumption imposed by the hidden Markov models (HMMs) makes it difficult to model temporal correlation patterns in human speech. Traditionally, this limitation is circumvented by appending the first and second-order regression coefficients to the observation feature vectors. Although this leads to improved performance in recognition tasks, we argue that a straightforward use of dynamic features in HMMs will result in an inferior model, due to the incorrect handling of dynamic constraints. In this thesis I will show that an HMM can be transformed into a Trajectory-HMM capable of generating smoothed output mean trajectories, by performing a per-utterance normalisation. The resulting model can be trained by either maximisingmodel log-likelihood or minimisingmean generation errors on the training data. To combat the exponential growth of paths in searching, the idea of delayed path merging is proposed and a new time-synchronous decoding algorithm built on the concept of token-passing is designed for use in the recognition task. The Trajectory-HMM brings a new way of sharing knowledge between speech recognition and synthesis components, by tackling both problems in a coherent statistical framework. I evaluated the Trajectory-HMM on two different speech tasks using the speaker-dependent MOCHA-TIMIT database. First as a generative model to recover articulatory features from speech signal, where the Trajectory-HMM was used in a complementary way to the conventional HMM modelling techniques, within a joint Acoustic-Articulatory framework. Experiments indicate that the jointly trained acoustic-articulatory models are more accurate (having a lower Root Mean Square error) than the separately trained ones, and that Trajectory-HMM training results in greater accuracy compared with conventional Baum-Welch parameter updating. In addition, the Root Mean Square (RMS) training objective proves to be consistently better than the Maximum Likelihood objective. However, experiment of the phone recognition task shows that the MLE trained Trajectory-HMM, while retaining attractive properties of being a proper generative model, tends to favour over-smoothed trajectories among competing hypothesises, and does not perform better than a conventional HMM. We use this to build an argument that models giving a better fit on training data may suffer a reduction of discrimination by being too faithful to the training data. Finally, experiments on using triphone models show that increasing modelling detail is an effective way to leverage modelling performance with little added complexity in training.

This research contributes to the field of ontology-based semantic matching techniques and also to the field of Instant Messaging (IM) based enhanced presence. It aims to achieve a mutually beneficial development of two fields through interactions in their use of data and their functionality. With respect to semantic matching this research has developed a collaborative and self-evolutionary approach based on user involvement in order to overcome disadvantages of traditional ontology-based approaches. At the same time, enhanced semantic matching algorithms were also explored and developed to achieve better performance when searching and querying through the ontology. In order to realize this automatic, dynamic and collaborative approach, a Jabber-based IM system was built to support its development with specific data and to evaluate its performance. In the prototype of the system, Computer Science area is selected to be the domain of the ontology in order to demonstrate the practicability of the new approach. With respect to enhanced presence an efficient semantic-based contacts search engine which can feature context-based search ranking is provided to support academic researchers. It is especially designed to help new academic researchers to find potential contacts who share a common research interest. It enriches the IM system's presence information, and helps the user to pick the most suitable contacts and conveniently organize meetings or co-operating with others. Consequently, this research improves the efficiency of users' academic researching, and extends users' relationship radius during their academic research careers. The contributions are particularly highlighted by the comprehensive support during the academic user's self-educational process.

This article is about technology search as an example of a knowledge acquisition task in industry. Technology search is about finding technology related information in structured as well as unstructured sources. This information is needed to support optimal decision making in business processes. There are new opptortunities for technology search and challenges that need to be addressed. This article outlines some of these challenges and presents two concepts to address them in a search system.

In this thesis I address challenges related to the design, development anddeployment of web and mobile technologies used to support CollaborativeSeamless Learning (CSL) activities practiced across a variety of learningcontexts. The scientific publications at the core of this thesis offer adescription of the research I have performed over the last five years, andcomprise studies involving several hundred users.My research efforts included the elicitations of the requirements for and thedesign of a number of web and mobile tools to support collaborative seamlesslearning activities. A web-based environment called CeLS was developed tosupport the orchestration of CSL activities. It was then expanded to integratemobile solutions, aimed to extend the ability of CeLS to support educationalinteractions performed inside as well as outside physical classroom. Thesemobile solutions were designed to implement learning activities that supportdata collection, personal response systems and interaction with mobile videos.The main aim of the research was to investigate how best to design tools andsystems to support students during the enactment of collaborative seamlesslearning activities, and to provide teachers with artifacts to design and assessthose. Special emphasis has been given to the exploration of approaches thatenhance the flow, reusability and sharing of learner-generated content acrossdifferent learning activities. Several studies were conducted in order to validateand assess these ideas and concepts. Various data collection methods wereused to gather data from different stakeholders during the deployment of thedifferent CSL activities. The outcomes were processed and analyzed resultingin a set of recommendations concerning the design, development anddeployment of web and mobile applications to support collaborative seamlesslearning. A software architecture including various web and mobile integratedcomponents used to support innovative CSL activities is also proposed.