The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of GeoGebra training on teachers and learners in rural geometry classrooms. The conceptual framework that was used in this study was based on the four-level training evaluation framework of Kirkpatrick (1996), focusing on the first three levels only while the fourth level was not considered. The study was conducted in disadvantaged and under-resourced schools situated in the Mpumalanga Province of South Africa. This undertaking was considered as a way of promoting what was perceived as a simple but effective method of teaching and learning with technology. The technology-enhanced teaching strategy was employed with the anticipation of enhancing the development of geometrical concepts that are seen as too abstract by the majority of learners in resource-constrained areas. Hence, the focus of this study was on the teaching and learning of the properties of triangles and the properties of quadrilaterals in Grade 10 using GeoGebra and traditional methods. Within the non-equivalent, quasi-experimental design, both qualitative and quantitative approaches were used. Four purposively sampled Grade 10 teachers from four schools and their classes comprising of 165 learners participated. The data collection involved pre- and post-tests, questionnaires, lesson observations, and interviews. Learners’ achievement was measured by outcomes obtained from marked and recorded achievements tests. The qualitative data collected from the teachers through questionnaires, lesson observations and interviews were coded and categorised into themes. This analysis revealed that most participants had positive training experiences and preferred using GeoGebra in the teaching and learning of geometry despite a lack of resources in their schools. The findings also showed that there was lack of training workshops that focused on appropriate teachers` knowledge and skills that are connected to technological innovations, particularly in GeoGebra. The quantitative data analysis results showed a significant difference in the mean scores for both groups respectively in favour of learners taught with GeoGebra compared to a chalk and talk method. The teachers’ implementation of and enthusiasm about GeoGebra had a positive influence on learner achievement. Based on the results, it was concluded that as a pedagogical tool, GeoGebra can work effectively in rural schools where geometry is hardly taught. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2020. / Science, Mathematics and Technology Education / PhD / Unrestricted

This dissertation reports an evaluation study which was done with an educational programme for Automotive Service Technicians which was adapted for South African conditions and derived from a programme used internationally, and originally developed in Schweinfurt, Germany in 2005. The programme was designed to answer to particular problems experienced during automotive driveline-component installations. Since the inception of this programme, ZF Germany had been training representatives from their different subsidiaries over the world on the essential elements of automotive driveline installation protocol. The representatives were trained to adapt the core programme in accordance with the particulars of the vehicle populations in each respective country, and the researcher has performed this task The aim of this research was to evaluate the effectiveness of one particular module known as “Guidelines to clutch replacement” with regard to bringing about the desired changes in knowledge, attitude and behaviour within the trainees. Previous anecdotal feedback from the industry had suggested that the programme had been helpful in the reduction of installation errors, but the extent of the successes and failures of the programme had been unknown until this study. The training department at ZF South Africa was tasked to design further training modules based on the findings of the module under study in order to establish the successes and failures of the core concept for improvement of successive programmes. The approach for this programme evaluation was utilization-focused which allowed the researcher to choose from and combine a variety of data collection strategies over the complete range of summative and formative evaluation approaches. However, in keeping with the stated aim of this study, this study had been limited to a summative inquiry by employing a quantitative data collection strategy at the hand of a quasi-experimental research design. This research report presents the findings of a one-day intervention programme that was offered to Automotive Service Technicians in the Gauteng area. The conceptual framework that was adopted for the research was based on the four level evaluation framework of Kirkpatrick (1998) with the first three levels having been empirically tested and the fourth level discussed on the basis of empirical information. Findings suggest that although the levels of knowledge-acquisition could not to be considered as high, behaviour modification had indeed been observed to be in alignment with the clutch-installation-protocol and almost all the respondents had adopted the protocol as their preferred way of executing clutch installations. In addition, most respondents found the programme to be pleasant and of a high utility value. Certain problems with the programme became evident, such as the pace having been too fast; printed hand-outs were not considered to have high utility value, and sensitivity to personal and cultural differences were found to be lacking. The low levels recorded for knowledge acquisition may be language related which possibly relates to the fast pace of the course. The research findings suggest that the course should be spread over two days instead of one day and be augmented with practical demonstrations and re-designed printed hand-outs. In order to effectively measure level four of the Kirkpatrick framework, criteria of concern should be negotiated with participating organisations in order to provide relative data for answering research questions on this level. Procedures for collecting data over the course of several years need to be established and agreed upon by all stakeholders for such data to be reliable and valid in the inclusion of a time-series study. Regarding a relatively simple programme such as the programme under study with programme objectives that have a predominant procedural-knowledge focus, the Kirkpatrick framework has been found to be effective and its procedures may be applied in other industry-based training programmes. An added academic contribution to the previous one is that the Kirkpatrick framework as utilised in this study has shown that the framework offers a high utility value for fast-paced short courses where contact time with trainees are limited and evaluation designs need to fit in with the practical limitations. The high utility value of the Kirkpatrick framework became evident in the findings of this study where transfer of learning had evidently taken place regardless of possible learning problems such as language barriers. / Dissertation (MEd)--University of Pretoria, 2014. / tm2015 / Science, Mathematics and Technology Education / MEd / Unrestricted

This research evaluates two-dimensional top-down dungeon generated levels regarding fundamental and micro dungeon design patterns. Additionally, it investigates the meaningfulness of the evaluation results in terms of accessibility to level designers and similar. The research method concentrates on two dungeon-generation techniques – Cellular Automata and Drunkard Walk. Each generated level gets evaluated based on three evaluation stages that build on top of each other: the passability of each tile; categorization of each collection of tiles with the same attributes; and player-centric gameplay data. The results show key differences between Cellular Automata and Drunkard Walk as the risk of using Cellular Automata to generate up to 90% unreachable space, while drunkard walk always has a playable relative space size of 100%. The evaluation also shows results that depend on the requirements of a game or constraints of a level designer. Cellular Automata generates more rooms, while Drunkard Walk provides more decisions per room. In conclusion, the evaluation results show differences between the two algorithms, presented using a vocabulary that is familiar to a level designer.

<p>  </p> <p>Recently, aircraft using liquid hydrogen gas-turbine engines (also referred to as liquid hydrogen aircraft) have drawn more attention from the aviation industry as an option to decarbonize commercial aviation. Liquid hydrogen aircraft can have a lower environmental impact than kerosene aircraft and can be a vital part of the net-zero carbon emission plan. However, uncertainties and challenges still exist, including the design of liquid hydrogen aircraft, how their operation might differ from kerosene aircraft, and most importantly, the feasibility of achieving aviation decarbonization goals when these aircraft operate in fleets alongside existing fleets of aircraft. This paper focuses on the modeling and the design of liquid hydrogen aircraft and describes operational studies to evaluate the environmental impact of introducing liquid hydrogen aircraft into a fleet operating on a worldwide network. The studies use the Fleet-Level Environmental Evaluation Tool (FLEET) to simulate different scenarios and account for the estimated hydrogen cost and equivalent carbon emissions. Results show that the “most likely" scenario where a 175-seat class single-aisle liquid hydrogen aircraft enter service in 2035, could result in a total fleet-level carbon emission reduction of 7.11% compared to a baseline scenario with no liquid hydrogen aircraft in the airline fleet. The simulation considers different liquid hydrogen pricing scenarios and equivalent carbon emissions assumptions. A fleet with multiple seat classes of liquid hydrogen aircraft may result in smaller carbon emission reduction than might initially be expected due to the delayed replacements of Jet-A aircraft in the fleet caused by the high costs of liquid hydrogen aircraft. The FLEET simulations show a maximum possible reduction of 45.72% of the total fleet-level carbon emission in 2050 comparing to the baseline scenario with no-liquid hydrogen aircraft, obtained by introducing multiple models of liquid hydrogen aircraft using green hydrogen to replace the existing fleet instead of future kerosene aircraft. The introduction of liquid hydrogen aircraft also significantly impact the profitability of the total fleet, which has an unexpected impact on the fleet allocation and composition. Further studies on the liquid hydrogen fleet pricing and implementation, as well as refinements on the FLEET tool, are recommended in order to gain a more realistic understanding of how the liquid hydrogen fleet might impact the global aviation.</p>

No description available.

Research in information retrieval deals with the theories and models that constitute the foundations for any kind of service that provides access or pointers to particular elements of a collection of documents in response to a submitted information need. The specific field of information retrieval evaluation is concerned with the critical assessment of the quality of search systems. Empirical evaluation based on the Cranfield paradigm using a specific collection of test queries in combination with relevance assessments in a laboratory environment is the classic approach to compare the impact of retrieval systems and their underlying models on retrieval effectiveness. In the past two decades international campaigns, like the Text Retrieval Conference, have led to huge advances in the design of experimental information retrieval evaluations. But in general the focus of this system-driven paradigm remained on the comparison of system results, i.e. retrieval systems are treated as black boxes. This approach to the evaluation of retrieval system has been criticised for treating systems as black boxes. Recent works on this subject have proposed the study of the system configurations and their individual components. This thesis proposes a generic approach to the evaluation of retrieval systems at the component-level. The focus of the thesis at hand is on the key components that are needed to address typical ad-hoc search tasks, like finding books on a particular topic in a large set of library records. A central approach in this work is the further development of the Xtrieval framework by the integration of widely-used IR toolkits in order to eliminate the limitations of individual tools. Strong empirical results at international campaigns that provided various types of evaluation tasks confirm both the validity of this approach and the flexibility of the Xtrieval framework. Modern information retrieval systems contain various components that are important for solving particular subtasks of the retrieval process. This thesis illustrates the detailed analysis of important system components needed to address ad-hoc retrieval tasks. Here, the design and implementation of the Xtrieval framework offers a variety of approaches for flexible system configurations. Xtrieval has been designed as an open system and allows the integration of further components and tools as well as addressing search tasks other than ad-hoc retrieval. This approach ensures that it is possible to conduct automated component-level evaluation of retrieval approaches. Both the scale and impact of these possibilities for the evaluation of retrieval systems are demonstrated by the design of an empirical experiment that covers more than 13,000 individual system configurations. This experimental set-up is tested on four test collections for ad-hoc search. The results of this experiment are manifold. For instance, particular implementations of ranking models fail systematically on all tested collections. The exploratory analysis of the ranking models empirically confirms the relationships between different implementations of models that share theoretical foundations. The obtained results also suggest that the impact on retrieval effectiveness of most instances of IR system components depends on the test collections that are being used for evaluation. Due to the scale of the designed component-level evaluation experiment, not all possible interactions of the system component under examination could be analysed in this work. For this reason the resulting data set will be made publicly available to the entire research community. / Das Forschungsgebiet Information Retrieval befasst sich mit Theorien und Modellen, die die Grundlage für jegliche Dienste bilden, die als Antwort auf ein formuliertes Informationsbedürfnis den Zugang zu oder einen Verweis auf entsprechende Elemente einer Dokumentsammlung ermöglichen. Die Qualität von Suchalgorithmen wird im Teilgebiet Information Retrieval Evaluation untersucht. Der klassische Ansatz für den empirischen Vergleich von Retrievalsystemen basiert auf dem Cranfield-Paradigma und nutzt einen spezifischen Korpus mit einer Menge von Beispielanfragen mit zugehörigen Relevanzbewertungen. Internationale Evaluationskampagnen, wie die Text Retrieval Conference, haben in den vergangenen zwei Jahrzehnten zu großen Fortschritten in der Methodik der empirischen Bewertung von Suchverfahren geführt. Der generelle Fokus dieses systembasierten Ansatzes liegt jedoch nach wie vor auf dem Vergleich der Gesamtsysteme, dass heißt die Systeme werden als Black Box betrachtet. In jüngster Zeit ist diese Evaluationsmethode vor allem aufgrund des Black-Box-Charakters des Untersuchungsgegenstandes in die Kritik geraten. Aktuelle Arbeiten fordern einen differenzierteren Blick in die einzelnen Systemeigenschaften, bzw. ihrer Komponenten. In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird ein generischer Ansatz zur komponentenbasierten Evaluation von Retrievalsystemen vorgestellt und empirisch untersucht. Der Fokus der vorliegenden Dissertation liegt deshalb auf zentralen Komponenten, die für die Bearbeitung klassischer Ad-Hoc Suchprobleme, wie dem Finden von Büchern zu einem bestimmten Thema in einer Menge von Bibliothekseinträgen, wichtig sind. Ein zentraler Ansatz der Arbeit ist die Weiterentwicklung des Xtrieval Frameworks mittels der Integration weitverbreiteter Retrievalsysteme mit dem Ziel der gegenseitigen Eliminierung systemspezifischer Schwächen. Herausragende Ergebnisse im internationalen Vergleich, für verschiedenste Suchprobleme, verdeutlichen sowohl das Potenzial des Ansatzes als auch die Flexibilität des Xtrieval Frameworks. Moderne Retrievalsysteme beinhalten zahlreiche Komponenten, die für die Lösung spezifischer Teilaufgaben im gesamten Retrievalprozess wichtig sind. Die hier vorgelegte Arbeit ermöglicht die genaue Betrachtung der einzelnen Komponenten des Ad-hoc Retrievals. Hierfür wird mit Xtrieval ein Framework dargestellt, welches ein breites Spektrum an Verfahren flexibel miteinander kombinieren lässt. Das System ist offen konzipiert und ermöglicht die Integration weiterer Verfahren sowie die Bearbeitung weiterer Retrievalaufgaben jenseits des Ad-hoc Retrieval. Damit wird die bislang in der Forschung verschiedentlich geforderte aber bislang nicht erfolgreich umgesetzte komponentenbasierte Evaluation von Retrievalverfahren ermöglicht. Mächtigkeit und Bedeutung dieser Evaluationsmöglichkeiten werden anhand ausgewählter Instanzen der Komponenten in einer empirischen Analyse mit über 13.000 Systemkonfigurationen gezeigt. Die Ergebnisse auf den vier untersuchten Ad-Hoc Testkollektionen sind vielfältig. So wurden beispielsweise systematische Fehler bestimmter Ranking-Modelle identifiziert und die theoretischen Zusammenhänge zwischen spezifischen Klassen dieser Modelle anhand empirischer Ergebnisse nachgewiesen. Der Maßstab des durchgeführten Experiments macht eine Analyse aller möglichen Einflüsse und Zusammenhänge zwischen den untersuchten Komponenten unmöglich. Daher werden die erzeugten empirischen Daten für weitere Studien öffentlich bereitgestellt.

This diploma thesis deals with speaking skills and their development for the purposes of the Maturita exam. It is divided into 6 chapters. The theoretical part deals with speaking as a skill, basic definitions of the Maturita exam and, more specifically, it gives a detailed overview and comparison of the Maturita oral performance and interactive skills at both levels. The practical part covers the analysis of three sets of books that are used during the English lessons in secondary education. Key words: Maturita exam, basic level, higher level, evaluation, course books

Lietuvos Respublikos pacientų teisių ir žalos sveikatai atlyginimo įstatyme yra įtvirtinta paciento teisė gauti ne bet kokias, o kokybiškas sveikatos priežiūros paslaugas. Minėtame įstatyme apibrėžta, kad kokybiškos sveikatos priežiūros paslaugos – tai prieinamos, saugios, veiksmingos sveikatos stiprinimo, ligų prevencijos, diagnostikos, ligonių gydymo ir slaugos paslaugos, kurias tinkamam pacientui, tinkamu laiku, tinkamoje vietoje suteikia tinkamas sveikatos priežiūros specialistas pagal šiuolaikinio medicinos ir slaugos mokslo lygį ir gerą patirtį, atsižvelgdami į paslaugos teikėjo galimybes ir paciento poreikius bei lūkesčius, juos tenkindami ar viršydami. Darbo tikslas – įvertinti Vilniaus miesto ambulatorinių asmens sveikatos priežiūros įstaigų paslaugomis besinaudojančių asmenų nuomonę apie asmens sveikatos priežiūros paslaugų kokybę Vilniaus mieste, o uždaviniai: ištirti asmens sveikatos priežiūros paslaugų kokybę, įvertinti Vilniaus miesto ambulatorinių asmens sveikatos priežiūros įstaigų paslaugomis besinaudojančių asmenų pasitenkinimą gautomis asmens sveikatos priežiūros paslaugomis ir nustatyti sąsajas tarp teikiamų asmens sveikatos priežiūros paslaugų kokybės ir respondentų pasitenkinimo gautomis asmens sveikatos priežiūros paslaugomis. Vykdant sveikatos priežiūros įstaigų teikiamų paslaugų vertinimo pacientų požiūriu Vilniaus mieste momentinį tyrimą, buvo Vilniaus miesto ambulatorinėse asmens sveikatos priežiūros įstaigose – Šeškinės, Antakalnio ir Centro... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / The Law on the rights of patients and compensation for the damage to their health of the Republic of Lithuania establishes the right of a patient to receive not just any healthcare services but the services of high quality. The abovementioned law defines the high quality health care services as accessible, safe, efficient health improvement, disease prevention, diagnostic, patient treatment and nursing services which are provided to an appropriate patient at an appropriate time and place by an appropriate health care professional according to the level of modern medical and nursing science and good practice, taking into account the service provider’s possibilities and the patient’s needs and expectations by satisfying or exceeding them. The objective of the paper is to evaluate the opinion of individual persons who are using ambulatory personal health care institutions in Vilnius on the quality of the services they are rendered and the tasks of the paper involved examination of the quality of the healthcare services, evaluation of the satisfaction level of the individual persons who are using the services of the personal healthcare institutions in respect of the personal healthcare services they have received and establishing the correlation between the service quality of the personal healthcare institutions and the satisfaction of the respondents in relation to the personal healthcare services they have received. During the instant survey of the quality of healthcare... [to full text]

Scene understanding is a central field in computer vision that attempts to detect objects in a scene and reason about their spatial, functional and semantic relations. While many works focus on things (objects with a well-defined shape), less attention has been given to stuff classes (amorphous background regions). However, stuff classes are important as they allow to explain many aspects of an image, including the scene type, thing classes likely to be present and physical attributes of all objects in the scene. The goal of this thesis is to restore the balance between stuff and things in scene understanding. In particular, we investigate how the recognition of stuff differs from things and develop methods that are suitable to deal with both. We use stuff to find things and annotate a large-scale dataset to study stuff and things in context. First, we present two methods for semantic segmentation of stuff and things. Most methods require manual class weighting to counter imbalanced class frequency distributions, particularly on datasets with stuff and thing classes. We develop a novel joint calibration technique that takes into account class imbalance, class competition and overlapping regions by calibrating for the pixel-level evaluation criterion. The second method shows how to unify the advantages of region-based approaches (accurately delineated object boundaries) and fully convolutional approaches (end-to-end training). Both are combined in a universal framework that is equally suitable to deal with stuff and things. Second, we propose to help weakly supervised object localization for classes where location annotations are not available, by transferring things and stuff knowledge from a source set with available annotations. This is particularly important if we want to scale scene understanding to real-world applications with thousands of classes, without having to exhaustively annotate millions of images. Finally, we present COCO-Stuff - the largest existing dataset with dense stuff and thing annotations. Existing datasets are much smaller and were made with expensive polygon-based annotation. We use a very efficient stuff annotation protocol to densely annotate 164K images. Using this new dataset, we provide a detailed analysis of the dataset and visualize how stuff and things co-occur spatially in an image. We revisit the question whether stuff or things are easier to detect and which is more important based on visual and linguistic analysis.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of the in-service teacher training program, The Certificate for Teachers of English (CTE), run jointly by two departments: The Department of Basic English (DBE) and the Department of Modern Languages (DML) of the School of Foreign Languages (SFL) at Middle East Technical University (METU) in terms of whether it achieved its objectives and to provide suggestions regarding the redesigning of the program for the following years. The model used for evaluating the program was one proposed by Kirkpatrick (1998 / first devised in 1959). This model entails 4 levels of evaluation to carry out while evaluating training programs. Reaction, Learning, Behavior and Results. The research questions focused in this study are all in line with these four levels. The participants of the study were four folded. The main participants were the trainees attending the program. (N=6, 2 from DML / 4 from DBE). Another group of participants were the trainers of the program. (N=2). The third group of participants was the chairpersons at the two departments. Finally, data were collected from the students of the trainees and non trainees. Data was collected via questionnaires from the trainees and their students, interviews with trainees, trainers and chairpersons, observations of sessions of the program and trainees&rsquo / lessons, and related documents of the program. The data collected was analyzed qualitatively using the Miles and Huberman (1994) procedure for analyzing qualitative data: data reduction, data display and conclusion drawing/verification. Results revealed that the CTE program was effective in terms of achieving its objectives. However, there could be improvements in certain components of the program. Another result of the study was that the application of Kirkpatrick&rsquo / s training program evaluation model was not very effective in the evaluation of the CTE program. The main drawback was that the model is a nonlinear one which made it difficult to concentrate on a particular level of evaluation at a particular time. Therefore the suggestion for a more linear and definite model for the evaluation of the CTE program was proposed.