Reference centiles based on year-to-year changes for a longitudinal evaluation of motor performance in children and adolescents

Objectives The aim was to evaluate the longitudinal course of motor skills development in children with a view to improve the understanding of intra-individual variance. Previous publications have been based on cross-sectional data or analyzed longitudinal studies in a cross-sectional manner. Design Longitudinal. Year-to-year change. Methods The present study is based on motor function data collected in the LIFE Child study (Germany). The participants (6 to 17 years) completed parts of the motor tests according to the standard of the German Motor Performance Test 6–18 (DMT). For a total of 1653 participants, 4616 motor tests with an annual interval in the period 2011 to 2019 were included in the evaluation. Results We were able to produce gender and age-specific change centiles for the test items standing long jump, jumping sideways, push-ups, stand and reach and balancing walking backwards. Each set of centiles revealed a range of variability in motor development in children and adolescents, with distinct progressive patterns in the different test items and different genders. The supplied tables offer an indication of expected year-to-year change for each test item depending on age and gender. Depending on the test item and the mean age, a deterioration in test results after a one-year interval was observed, despite cross-sectional centiles showing an upward trend. Conclusion We present a user-friendly tool as a way to assess individual dynamic changes in motor development of children and adolescents. In combination with the well-known cross-sectional centiles as baseline, this can be helpful for the scientific evaluation of motor skills tests and can also be used in school settings.

Is Test Item Arrangement a Factor in the Academic Achievement of Undergraduate Pharmacy Students in Chemistry?

Aims: To determine the effect of test item arrangements in ascending, descending and no consistent order of difficulty in multiple choice tests on undergraduate pharmacy students’ academic achievement in a chemistry course. The present study served as an attempt to relate the effect of test item arrangement on undergraduate pharmacy students’ academic achievement in a chemistry course in Nigerian Universities. Study Design: Quasi-experimental research design of pre-test posttest non-equivalent group design was adopted in carrying out this research. Place and Duration of Study: This study was carried out in ten Nigerian Universities between August, 2020 to April, 2021. Methodology: We sampled 200 participants (111 male, 89 females; age range 16 – 27 years) undergraduate pharmacy students drawn from ten (10) Universities in Nigeria. Twenty undergraduate pharmacy students offering Basic Principle of Chemistry (Chem. 101) were randomly selected from each of the selected universities for the study. Results: The mean scores when test items were arranged in ascending, descending, and no consistent orders of item difficulty were 44.38, 37.85 and 40.13 respectively. Their differential mean scores were 6.53, 2.28 and 4.26 in the same order. This implies that pharmacy students obtained higher scores when test items were arranged in ascending order of difficulty, followed by no consistent order and least in descending order of difficulty. The findings further revealed no significant arrangement by gender interaction effect on undergraduate pharmacy students` performance in the three tests. Conclusion: This study will help pharmacy lecturers in determining the most appropriate test item order which will help the students obtain high scores in any pharmaceutical test. The researchers conducted a quasi-experimental study on the topic as part of their undergraduate curriculum to examine the best test item format that will enhance pharmacy students' academic achievement in a chemistry course.

Experimental interpretation of adequate weight-metric combination for dynamic user-based collaborative filtering

Recommender systems include a broad scope of applications and are associated with subjective preferences, indicating variations in recommendations. As a field of data science and machine learning, recommender systems require both statistical perspectives and sufficient performance monitoring. In this paper, we propose diversified similarity measurements by observing recommendation performance using generic metrics. Considering user-based collaborative filtering, the probability of an item being preferred by any user is measured. Having examined the best neighbor counts, we verified the test item bias phenomenon for similarity equations. Because of the statistical parameters used for computing in a global scope, there is implicit information in the literature, whether those parameters comprise the focal point user data statically. Regarding each dynamic prediction, user-wise parameters are expected to be generated at runtime by excluding the item of interest. This yields reliable results and is more compatible with real-time systems. Furthermore, we underline the effect of significance weighting by examining the similarities between a user of interest and its neighbors. Overall, this study uniquely combines significance weighting and test-item bias mitigation by inspecting the fine-tuned neighborhood. Consequently, the results reveal adequate similarity weight and performance metric combinations. The source code of our architecture is available at https://codeocean.com/capsule/1427708/tree/v1.

Effects of Age and Self-Performance on Memory for the Actions of Other People

This research tested whether performing an action themselves leads young and older adults to have difficulty remembering which of a number of other people had performed that same action. It also tested whether observing another person perform an action leads to false memory for self-performance of that action. Young adults and healthy older adults 62 to 88 years of age viewed videos of actors performing actions. After viewing some of the actions, participants were instructed to perform those same actions themselves. Participants were tested one week later on their memory for their own actions and for the actions of the actors in the videos. Older adults were more strongly influenced by self-performance than were young adults when asked whether the actor in a test item had performed the same action previously. Young adults performed better than older adults at discriminating the correct and incorrect actors in the videos, although both groups showed reduced discrimination for actions that they had also performed themselves. The two groups were equally likely to falsely remember having performed an action that had only appeared in the videos, but young adults were better able than older adults to correctly identify the actions that they had in fact performed. Older adults thus have greater difficulty than young adults at distinguishing self-performed actions from actions performed by other people. This suggests the existence of common representations for the actions of oneself and others that must be bound to identity information to specify the correct source of the actions.

Changing Verbal Label Assignments Selects the Memory System for Responses in an Immediate Visual Recognition Task

The dual system hypothesis posits the existence of two neural systems for memory and learning in the mammalian brain: the habit system and the improvisational system. This study sought to determine whether both systems are involved in a visual recognition task originally outlined in Sternberg (1966) and whether each system could be selectively engaged on the basis of response assignment. Seventeen undergraduate students participated in an immediate visual recognition task where they responded whether or not a test consonant was present in a previous study sequence of one to six consonants by pressing one key for same or another key for different. When the different response was assigned to the spatially right “J” key, reaction time for targets and lures was a function of the study sequence size, indicating that the study sequence was serially scanned and compared with the test item by the habit system. However, when the same response was assigned to the spatially right “J” key, reaction time was not a function of study sequence size, indicating that the test item was not compared with the study sequence and responses were instead determined by perceived recency/novelty of the test item by the improvisational system. Differences in reaction time depending on response assignment suggest the selection of one memory system over the other based on verbal labels assigned to response keys in different spatial locations. Verbal label refers to the label of same or different assigned to the response keys in the experiment instructions. Results expand upon Sternberg (1966)—which used the same visual recognition task design as this study but did not account for response assignment, obscuring evidence of contributions from both memory systems—and provide more evidence for the dual-system hypothesis by demonstrating the involvement of both memory systems in immediate visual recognition.

HUBUNGAN PENGUASAAN KOSAKATA SISWA DENGAN KEMAMPUAN BERBICARA SISWA KELAS XI SMA NEGERI 1 LEDO TAHUN AJARAN 2016/2017

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui hubungan penguasaan kosakata siswa dengan keterampilan berbicara mereka. Penelitian ini dilakukan melalui desain korelasional. Sampel penelitian ini adalah siswa kelas XI SMAN 1 Ledo tahun pelajaran 2016-2017. Penelitian ini merupakan penelitian korelasi dengan Teknik pengumpulan data kuantitatif deskriptif statistic dan inferensial statistik. alat yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah rubrik score speaking performance untuk mengukur keterampilan berbicara siswa, sedangkan untuk mengukur penguasaan kosakata siswa (vocabulary mastery) menggunakan Multiple choice test (tes pilihan ganda) dimana secara manual (test Item validity and reliability) telah dilakukan validitas dan relibilitas terhadap kedua alat test tersebut. Untuk menganalisis data didalam penelitian ini penulis menggunakan descriptive statistic (nilai individu atau individual score, nilai rata rata atau mean score) dan inferential statistic (pearson product momen correlation) untuk menghitung variable penguasaan kosakata (vocabulary mastery) dan keterampilan berbicara (speaking skill). Hasil penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa untuk tingkat Kosa Kata dan Prestasi Berbicara Siswa pada kelas XI SMAN 1 Ledo berada pada tingkat yang baik. Peneliti juga menemukan bahwa terdapat korelasi positif antara penguasaan kosakata dengan keterampilan berbicara siswa kelas XI SMAN 1 Ledo tahun pelajaran 2016-2017 dengan signifikansi korelasi sebesar 0,943. Korelasi tersebut tergolong korelasi erat artinya kedua variabel memiliki korelasi yang kuat. Berdasarkan hasil penelitian dapat disimpulkan penguasaan kosakata dan keterampilan berbicara siswa berkorelasi positif, artinya tingkat penguasaan kosakata tertinggi maka tingkat keterampilan berbicara juga tinggi. Oleh karena itu, guru yang berperan dalam mengontrol siswa dalam proses belajar mengajar juga penting untuk mengetahui peningkatan kosa kata dan keterampilan berbicara.

Utilizing test items analysis to examine the level of difficulty and discriminating power in a teacher-made test

Apart from teaching, English language teachers need to assess their students by giving a test to know the students� achievements. In general, teachers are barely conducting item analysis on their tests. As a result, they have no idea about the quality of their test distributed to the students. The present study attempts to figure out the levels of difficulty (LD) and the discriminating power (DP) of the multiple-choice (MC) test item constructed by an English teacher in the reading comprehension test utilizing test item analysis. This study employs a qualitative approach. For this purpose, a test of 50-MC test items of reading comprehension was obtained from the students� test results. Thirty-five students of grade eight took part in the MC test try-out. They are both male (15) and female (20) students of junior high school 2 Kempo, in West Nusa Tenggara Province. The findings revealed that16 items out of 50 test items were rejected due to the poor and worst quality level of difficulty and discriminating index. Meanwhile, 12 items need to be reviewed due to their mediocre quality, and 11 items are claimed to have good quality items. Besides, 11 items out of 50 test items were considered as the excellent quality as their DP scores reached around 0.44 through 0.78. The implications of the present study will shed light on the quality of teacher-made test items, especially for the MC test.