This study reports the development and evaluation of a web-based interactive writing environment designed for elementary school students. The environment includes three writing themes, “story pass on”, “story chameleon” and “thousand ideas”, to encourage reading comprehension, creativity and problem-solving skills of students. Three assessment mechanisms, expert assessment, self-assessment and ...

Peer review has been defined as a process of subjecting an author's scholarly work, research or ideas to the scrutiny of others who are experts in the same field. It functions to encourage authors to meet the accepted high standards of their discipline and to control the dissemination of research data to ensure that unwarranted claims, unacceptable interpretations or personal views are not publ...

Constructing and evaluating explanations are important science practices, but in large classes it can be difficult to effectively engage students in these practices and provide feedback. Peer review and grading are scalable instructional approaches that address these concerns, but which raise questions about the validity of the peer grading process. Calibrated Peer Review (CPR) is a web-based s...

Systematic reviews are popular. A recent estimate indicates that 11 new systematic reviews are published daily. Nevertheless, evidence indicates that the quality of reporting of systematic reviews is not optimal. One likely reason is that the authors' reports have received inadequate peer review. There are now many different types of systematic reviews and peer reviewing them can be enhanced by...

Conversational discourse is a cognitive and social process influenced by both discourse content and pragmatic factors, such as the participants’ prior knowledge; these factors may also affect how simulated conversations with virtual agents unfold, with implications for design. This study explored effects of question content and perceived expertise of a virtual agent on students’ interactions wi...

It is my pleasure to introduce the inaugural issue of the first peer-reviewed, fully open access journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The scientific community has been abuzz with enthusiasm about open access, but with some legitimate concerns about the credibility of some of those journals from less reputable publishers and the level of peer review—or lack thereof—for open access ar...

The paper deals with the problem of choosing the most effective methods of processing expert information if there are several results of expert evaluation on the problem. The problem of levelling expert assessments, which differ much from the other set of estimates, is considered. Ratios for the weighting factors of individual expert assessments, taking into account the extent of the deviation ...