As the preceding chapter suggests, vocational educators are likely to find more than one assessment strategy that will serve their purpose. Two important criteria for deciding which assessment to use in a particular situation are the quality of the information provided and the feasibility of the assessment process. This chapter describes these criteria and compares selectedand constructed-respo...

The needs assessment process is indeed complex in the social service context. Whereas most contexts can start with a presumption of "no need," the social service context frequently must start with an assumption of "need met-->change." In addition, underlying values--the individual's, the assessor's, the society's--all play a part in the judgment process. The assumption that the involvement of a...

The idea that learning disabilities are the result of deficiencies in one or more of the basic psychological processes required for learning is a core concept that needs to be maintained. However, problems in the application of traditional process-oriented approaches to diagnosis and treatment of learning disabilities suggest a need to alter the manner in which these basic processes are concept...

In the field of forensic human factors, experts are often called upon to assess and evaluate the adequacy of new or existing products' warnings or warnings systems. The usual goal of this evaluation is to arrive at a simple binary decision regarding the warning in question (i.e., does it "pass/fail", or is it "adequate/inadequate"). However, such a warning assessment process may in fact be quit...

Automatic detection of keywords and general topics is a specialpurpose auxiliary task in the website quality assessment process. We describe the approach to obtaining such information used in the MedIEQ project, discuss problems related to the type of human language used in medical websites, and illustrate them on examples.

The characteristics of the society in which we live, where knowledge and the ways of its use are the most important in everyday life, brings new challenges for higher education. The extensive use of technology in learning and working is forcing its use in the assessment process. A lot of software packages exist in the market to realize automated assessment. In this article we analyze different ...

In a randomized controlled trial, 205 students were followed from grades 1 to 3 with a focus on changes in their writing trajectories following an evidence-based intervention during the spring of second grade. Students were identified as being at-risk (n=138), and then randomized into treatment (n=68) versus business-as-usual conditions (n=70). A typical group also was included (n=67). The writ...

Considerable attention has been devoted to selecting bioindicator species as part of monitoring programs for exposure and effects from contaminants in the environment. Yet the rationale for selection of bioindicators is often literature-based, rather than developed with a firm site-specific base of data on contaminant levels in a diverse range of organisms at different trophic levels in the sam...

Pain is a dynamic, unpleasant sensory experience with many physical, psychological, and social implications. Assessment of pain within a bicultural environment has the potential to cause ineffective pain management and unnecessary suffering amongst Indigenous people. It has been recognised that non-Indigenous nurses sometimes demonstrate culturally unsafe practices during the pain assessment pr...

The need to develop nurses as managers and leaders is crucial to the retention of registered nurses at a time of work force shortages and an increasingly aging work force in most Western industrialized countries. This article describes a creative and collaborative educational initiative developed at a large regional teaching hospital in New South Wales, Australia, designed to address this need....