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Abstract The main purpose of this study is to investigate, through the ¡§Series¡¨ unit in the first volume of high school mathematics, the impact of the updated-version textbooks on the learning effectiveness of students so as to provide references to be used by future revisers of teaching materials. The research subjects were drawn from Kaohsiung City high schools. Three schools were selected (two public and one private). These three high schools, from the 1999 academic year, began to use mathematics textbooks of three different versions, one to each school. A first-year class and a second-year class were drawn from each school, and there were six classes in total. In total there were 237 students receiving the experimentation. The students from the same school, no matter they were first-year or second-year, had been taught by the same teacher in respect of the unit that was included in the study. Among the three schools, School ¥Ò®Õ admitted for the 1998 and 1999 school years new students with scores higher than 580 on the joint entrance examination, School ¤A®Õadmitted for the 1998 and 1999 school years new students with scores from 530 to 580 on the joint entrance examination, and School ¤þ®Õadmitted for the 1998 and 1999 school years new students with scores lower than 530 on the joint entrance examination. The three new versions used in the study were published by Nan-I Book Store, Ta Tung Information Enterprise, Co., Ltd., and Han Lin Publisher respectively. They are high school mathematics textbooks examined and approved by the Ministry of Education (excluding Teacher¡¦s Manual, supplementary materials, journals, reference books, etc). The outdated version was published by National Bureau of Editing and Translation. Mathematics Test written by the researcher was used as the testing tool, and the t-test method was adopted. Moreover, because the variances of the file data collected from a school fluctuated tremendously and the sample space was unequal, a single-factor ANOVA analysis was conducted to indicate whether there existed a significant difference between classes in terms of their learning achievement. The ¡§Questionnaire on Mathematics Opinions¡¨ was administered and the results were represented by ¡¥5¡¦, ¡¥4¡¦, ¡¥3¡¦, ¡¥2¡¦, ¡¥1¡¦, which indicated their scores. An ANOVA analysis was conducted to investigate the differences in students¡¦ learning attitude. After synthesizing the analytical results of this study, the author has come up with the following conclusions: ¤@¡BIt is known from t-test and ANOVA analysis: in School ¥Ò®Õ, there existed a significant difference between the first-year and the second-year students in respect of their learning effectiveness; in School ¤A®Õ, there existed no significant difference between the first-year and the second-year students in respect of their learning effectiveness; in School ¤þ®Õ, there existed no significant difference between the first-year and the second-year students in respect of their learning effectiveness. ¤G¡BAccording to the correct percentage of each question made by students and the error pattern, the test questions were classified into three types: concept, calculation, and comprehensive application (including questions that integrated comprehension, analysis, and application abilities). It was found from the classification of questions that: (1) Textbooks have no impact on both the well-established (School ¥Ò®Õ) and the weak (School ¤þ®Õ) students in respect of the effectiveness of learning concept questions. There is no difference between the outdated and the updated-version textbooks. However, as far as the students with ordinary achievement (School ¤A®Õ) are concerned, the updated-version textbooks have a significant impact on learning effectiveness. (2) Textbooks have an impact on both the well-established (School ¥Ò®Õ) and the weak (School¤þ®Õ) students in respect of the effectiveness of learning calculation questions, and the first-year students have benefited more from the updated-version textbooks than have their second-year counterparts in terms of the effectiveness in learning calculation questions. However, as far as the students with ordinary achievement (School ¤A®Õ) are concerned, the updated-version textbooks have a significant impact on the effectiveness of their learning to reduce cycle fractions, but have no significant impact on their learning other calculation questions. (3) Textbooks have an impact on the effectiveness of learning comprehensive application questions, as far as both the well-established (School¥Ò®Õ ) and the students with ordinary achievement (School¤A®Õ) are concerned. Moreover, the first-year students have benefited less from the updated-version textbooks than have their second-year counterparts in terms of the effectiveness in learning comprehensive application questions. However, as far as the weak students (School¤þ®Õ) are concerned, the updated-version textbooks have a significant impact on the effectiveness of their learning comprehensive application questions. In particular, the updated-version textbooks have an especially significant impact on the effectiveness in learning the comprehensive application questions of regression principle. ¤T¡BFrom investigating the difference between attitude toward and effectiveness in learning mathematics as far as different groups are concerned, it has been found: There existed a significant difference between learning attitude and learning effectiveness as far as the first-year and the second-year students of School ¥Ò®Õ are concerned. There existed no significant difference between learning attitude and learning effectiveness as far as the first-year students of School ¤A®Õare concerned. There existed a significant difference between learning attitude and learning effectiveness as far as the second-year students of School ¤þ®Õ are concerned. There existed no significant difference between learning attitude and learning effectiveness as far as the first-year and the second-year students of School ¤þ®Õ are concerned. ¥|¡BFrom the correlation between the learning attitude (consisting of five sub- categories: learning habit, learning process, learning desire, learning method, and test preparation) and the learning effectiveness of the first-year and second-year students of the three schools, it has been found: ¡]1¡^ As far as the correlations between their learning effectiveness and their learning desire and between their learning effectiveness and their learning method are concerned, there existed a significant difference between the first-year and the second-year students. Because both learning desire and learning method are related to textbooks, the updated-version textbooks had a significant impact on the learning effectiveness of the first-year students of School ¥Ò®Õ. ¡]2¡^ On the average, there existed a significant correlation between the learning effectiveness of the second-year students of School¥Ò®Õ , School ¤A®Õ, and School ¤þ®Õ and each of the five sub-categories of learning attitude (learning habit, learning process, learning desire, learning method, test preparation). Their performance on each sub-category of learning attitude is more or less related to textbooks. Therefore, there existed a significant correlation between the updated-version textbooks and each of the five sub-categories of learning attitude. ¡]1¡^ The correlation between learning effectiveness and learning method presented by the first-year students of School ¥Ò®Õ and School ¤þ®Õ (especially School ¥Ò®Õ) is more significant than that presented by their second-year counterparts. ¡]4¡^ The correlation between learning effectiveness and test preparation presented by the first-year students of School ¥Ò®Õ, School ¤A®Õand School ¤þ®Õ is more significant than that presented by their second-year counterparts.

Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) have long been the backbone of standardized testing in academia and industry. Correspondingly, there is a constant need for the authors of MCQs to write and refine new questions for new versions of standardized tests as well as to support measuring performance in the emerging massive open online courses, (MOOCs). Research that explores what makes a question difficult, or what questions distinguish higher-performing students from lower-performing students can aid in the creation of the next generation of teaching and evaluation tools. In the automated MCQ answering component of this thesis, algorithms query for definitions of scientific terms, process the returned web results, and compare the returned definitions to the original definition in the MCQ. This automated method for answering questions is then augmented with a model, based on human performance data from crowdsourced question sets, for analysis of question difficulty as well as the discrimination power of the non-answer alternatives. The crowdsourced question sets come from PeerWise, an open source online college-level question authoring and answering environment. The goal of this research is to create an automated method to both answer and assesses the difficulty of multiple choice inverse definition questions in the domain of introductory biology. The results of this work suggest that human-authored question banks provide useful data for building gold standard human performance models. The methodology for building these performance models has value in other domains that test the difficulty of questions and the quality of the exam takers.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, 1988. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 259-274).

One of the most long-standing and controversial questions in historical Jesus research is that of whether Jesus was a Davidic messianic figure. This question is part of the broader ‘messianic question’, i.e., the question of whether Jesus thought of himself as a messiah and, if so, in what sense. Virtually every comprehensive work on the historical Jesus addresses this more focused Davidic messianic question at some point, as do numerous journal articles and essays in edited volumes. However, detailed studies devoted to this particular question are lacking. This dissertation is my attempt at such a study. I will divide this dissertation into two parts, each of which I believe offers a significant contribution to scholarship. The first, ‘Challenging the Status Quo’, will highlight three trends that I believe have dominated recent research on the Davidic messianic question with the aim being to demonstrate that the manner in which scholars have gone about answering this question is significantly problematic and that a fresh approach is therefore needed. I will then offer an approach that I believe will meet this need. The second part of this study, ‘The Making of Jesus the Davidic Messiah’, is where I will attempt to implement the fresh approach that I will have offered. More specifically, I will attempt to determine whether Jesus’ inner circle of disciples, i.e., the Twelve, viewed him as the Davidic Messiah and how Jesus behaved in response to this view. This group dynamic of which Jesus was a part will then serve as the basis on which I will offer my answer to the Davidic messianic question. In the end, examining this interplay between Jesus and the Twelve leads me to conclude that the historical Jesus was, in fact, a Davidic messianic figure. It would be ideal if I could convince others of this and perhaps move scholars closer to a consensus. However, even if I cannot accomplish this, it is my hope that this study will at least continue to move research on the Davidic messianic question forward.

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Factoid Question Answering is an exciting area of Natural Language Engineering that has the potential to replace one major use of search engines today. In this dissertation, I introduce a new method of handling factoid questions whose answers are proper names. The method, Topic Indexing and Retrieval, addresses two issues that prevent current factoid QA system from realising this potential: They can’t satisfy users’ demand for almost immediate answers, and they can’t produce answers based on evidence distributed across a corpus. The first issue arises because the architecture common to QA systems is not easily scaled to heavy use because so much of the work is done on-line: Text retrieved by information retrieval (IR) undergoes expensive and time-consuming answer extraction while the user awaits an answer. If QA systems are to become as heavily used as popular web search engines, this massive process bottle-neck must be overcome. The second issue of how to make use of the distributed evidence in a corpus is relevant when no single passage in the corpus provides sufficient evidence for an answer to a given question. QA systems commonly look for a text span that contains sufficient evidence to both locate and justify an answer. But this will fail in the case of questions that require evidence from more than one passage in the corpus. Topic Indexing and Retrieval method developed in this thesis addresses both these issues for factoid questions with proper name answers by restructuring the corpus in such a way that it enables direct retrieval of answers using off-the-shelf IR. The method has been evaluated on 377 TREC questions with proper name answers and 41 questions that require multiple pieces of evidence from different parts of the TREC AQUAINT corpus. With regards to the first evaluation, scores of 0.340 in Accuracy and 0.395 in Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) show that the Topic Indexing and Retrieval performs well for this type of questions. A second evaluation compares performance on a corpus of 41 multi-evidence questions by a question-factoring baseline method that can be used with the standard QA architecture and by my Topic Indexing and Retrieval method. The superior performance of the latter (MRR of 0.454 against 0.341) demonstrates its value in answering such questions.

This thesis addresses the efforts of different states to establish their authority over the Pashtun ethnic group. The Pashtun are at the heart of the conflict in Afghanistan, and provide both an important and current example of why "ungoverned spaces" have become such hot topic among many of the world's countries. People that exist within a sovereign state's borders and outside the state's authority present a dangerous problem to both the state itself and the international community. To address the challenges facing a state engaged in establishing its authority over the Pashtun, this thesis identifies normative and organizational structural factors associated with rural Pashtun tribes and discusses how these factors impede state authority. These factors are applied to three cases which involved a modern government's efforts to establish its authority over the Pashtun. In almost every case, the state failed when it either misunderstood the importance of these structural factors or willfully ignored them to pursue other interests. Looking beyond the Pashtun case, the research in this thesis determines that policies focused purely on suppression, isolation, or accommodation are destined to fail in establishing state authority. The common failing of these three policies occurs when the state fails to understand the difference between establishing order and establishing authority. Finally, the state must seriously consider its capacity to expand its authority-the lower the capacity, the longer it will take and the more accommodating (but not purely accommodating) the state must act. / US Air Force (USAF) author.

This thesis has three main objectives in examining the Slave Trade Question, an aspect of British-American diplomacy from 1840-1862: (1)to give a balanced treatment to both issues,(2) show their relationship to other foreign and domestic problems of the early Victorian Era, and (3) to present new material and views.

M.A. (Greek) / When I was in Primary School I recall hearing and reading about the exploits and conquests of Alexander the Great. To me, Alexander the Great or Μεγαλέξανδρος was more than a great warrior who tamed Bucephalus at a young age and then proceeded to conquer the known world before the age of thirty. Personally, he was a champion for Greece and for Hellenism. Alexander the Great ensured that Greece and Hellenism would become known and respected throughout the ages. Films have been made and books have been written about him. References have even made about him and his empire in Holy Scriptures like the Bible (in Daniel 7:6, 8:5-7, 11:3-4) as the Four-Horned Goat, the Four-Winged Leopard and the metal statue and the Quran (as Dhul-Qarnayn the Two-Horned One). When I was in High School I recall how passionately the global Hellenic community reacted when a small republic on Greece’s northern frontier proclaimed its independence with the official name “Republic of Macedonia”. This event struck a deeply emotional chord within me. I viewed this occurrence as a theft of my heritage. A proud heritage that was being appropriated by a young republic that was desperate to clutch onto anything in order to assign legitimacy to its newly-found independent status. For this reason, I did not hesitate to select this research topic when I decided to proceed with my postgraduate studies. This topic may not be the most unique one, especially within European and specifically Balkan academic circles, but it is a topic that has been deeply embedded in my conscience as a patriotic Greek who was determined to tackle this issue with the simple objective of proving that “Macedonia is Greek”. But one cannot be subjective in academic and scientific research and provide a discourse that is based on evidence that has been fuelled by passion. An academic researcher has a moral obligation to be objective and to inform on the basis of factual evidence and reason. There is a fine line between subjective emotion and objective truth when it comes to matters of patriotism and nationalism. Patriotism and nationalism can lead to fanaticism which I believe can ultimately defeat logic. A person can love his or her country and heritage and at the same 4 time refrain from feeling a sense of entitlement and demanding exclusivity to national symbolic factors. The most critical element is to be free from prejudice when attempting to uncover the truth...