Blending Individual and Group Assessment: A Model for Measuring Student Performance

Two sections of a college discrete mathematics class were taught using cooperative learning techniques throughout the semester. The 33 students were randomly assigned into groups of three. Their final examination consisted of an individual and group blended examination where students worked in their groups and discussed questions, but each student had a different version of the examination and their own questions to answer. Afterwards, students were given a questionnaire and one group from each section was interviewed to see how they rated blended assessment. The majority of students preferred the blended examination over an individual examination, but not everybody felt this way. Benefits of the blended examination include being able to verbalize the questions which led to a better understanding of them and a more relaxed atmosphere which may be helpful for students with test anxiety. Concerns about the blended examination such as time, fairness, and trouble concentrating were raised.

TCP Symbiosis

In this chapter, we introduce a robust, self-adaptive and scalable congestion control mechanism for TCP. We change the window size of a TCP connection according to the information of the physical and available bandwidths of the end-to-end network path. The bandwidth information is obtained by an inline network measurement technique. We also borrowed algorithms from biophysics to update the window size: the logistic growth model and the Lotka-Volterra competition model. The greatest advantage of using these models is that we can refer previous discussions and results for various characteristics of the mathematical models, including scalability, convergence, fairness and stability in these models. Through mathematical analysis and simulation experiments, we compare the proposed mechanism with traditional TCP Reno, HighSpeed TCP, Scalable TCP and FAST TCP, and exhibit its effectiveness in terms of scalability to the network bandwidth and delay, convergence time, fairness among competing connections, and stability.