This study examined the relationships between students' foreign language classroom anxiety and cognitive test anxiety and their College English Test Band 4 (CET-4) performance. A questionnaire was distributed to 921 Chinese university students to understand the nature and degree of the examined relationships. Follow-up interviews with 12 students were used to shed further light on uncovering mechanisms of relationships found in the survey. Results revealed three factors of anxiety, explaining 43. 14% of the total variance examined in the quesionnaire items. Means, standard deviations, the internal consistency for each factor, and zero-order correlations among the three factors were calculated. Correlation and multiple regression of the anxiety factors and test scores were then conducted. Results confirmed that cognitive test anxiety factor was a significant negative predictor of language achievement. Interview results did not fully support the relationships found in the survey. Most students did not perceive themselves to be very anxious in their university settings, either in classrooms or in testing situations. However, they did express their anxiety toward English speaking skills in the classroom. The differential perspectives of anxiety revealed from both analyses indicate that a better understanding of language classroom anxiety and cognitive test anxiety can help students and teachers optimize their foreign langauge learning and teaching practices.
This study investigates the feedback practices and perceptions of lecturers and students in a UK university setting. To assess how lecturers give feedback in practice, 47 pieces of lecturer-written feedback were categorised into a total of 571 analytical points.Analysing the feedback from lecturers' perspectives in terms of the value of feedback, the role of feedback and the effectiveness of feedback helps in an understanding of the rationale for and effects of feedback provision. The results of feedback analyses from students' perspectives show the impact of individual background and intercultural communication barriers on the effective reception of feedback. Differences were identified between students and lecturers' views of feedback as an assessment for learning tool.
different and much more academically oriented than at the three lower levels.In summary, the GEPT appears to be a solid, traditional test battery with a focus on high practicality at the three lower levels, whereas the two upper levels resemble more recent generations of academically and communicatively oriented tests. The test is widely available throughout Taiwan (at least at the lower levels) and less costly for test takers than other options like TOEFL or IELTS. Construct validation research, investigations of social and educational impact, and empirical anchoring of can-do statements appear to be the most pressing items for GEPT research.
An ameliorated ultrawide band (UWB) and high‐gain microstrip antenna based on planar metamaterial is presented and discussed in this paper. The proposed antenna with a compact size of 32 × 28 × 0.794 mm3 has mesh‐shaped patch and patterned ground plane with crossed strip gaps. By means of novel planar metamaterial structure, impedance bandwidth and gain own a significant improvement. The simulations show that the antenna has a super‐wide band (less than −10 dB), from 3.06 GHz to 36.4 GHz, covering the entire UWB frequency band (from 3.1 GHz to 10.6 GHz) set by FCC. Within the operating band of concern, the antenna gain can reach as high as 8.02 dB. Due to the surface wave coming from the patterned patch and ground plane, the antenna presents end‐fire directional radiation in the higher frequency region. To validate the simulation results, a prototype is fabricated and measured. And the measured results are in good agreement with the simulation results. It is obvious that advantages mentioned above will enable the proposed antenna to be well applied in the short‐range wireless communication system.
Aircraft are frequently exposed to cold environments and ice accumulation on aircraft surface may lead to catastrophic accidents. An effective solution of ice protection is a critical requirement in the aerospace industry.For the research and development of icephobic coatings, the current coating design target mainly focuses on lowering the ice adhesion strength between the ice and the surface. However, as a passive ice protection approach, the use of icephobic coating often has to be combined with an active ice protection solution (e.g. electro-thermal heating, hot air bleeding, and vibration, etc.), especially for the in-flight application where the reliability of ice protection must be ensured. Therefore, ice adhesion strength is no longer the sole criterion to evaluate the icephobic performance of a coating or a surface. It is a need to establish a more practical strategy for the design of icephobic coatings and surface. In this work, an energy saving strategy is proposed to assess the de-icing performance of the icephobic coating and surface when active heating is involved. The energy consumed for the de-icing operation assisted by the ice gravity is used as the key criterion for the overall performance of icephobic coating and surface. Successful validation has been achieved for evaluating the deicing performance of selected coatings and surfaces, which demonstrates an alternative strategy for the design and practical application of icephobic coatings and surfaces in ice protection.
Pearson Test of English Academic (PTE Academic) has six item types that assess academic writing either independently or integratively. This research focuses on evaluating the construct validity and effectiveness of the six writing item types. Exploratory Factor Analysis was performed to examine the underlying writing constructs as measured by the six item types. Item scores for different writing skills were subjected to Rasch IRT analysis. The difficulty of the item types was estimated and the effectiveness of each item type was evaluated by calculating the information function of each one. The results identified two writing constructs: an Analytical/Local Writing construct and a Synthetic/Global Writing construct. The study has implications for test developers on the use of multiple item types and their effectiveness, and for test users on how they can improve their writing skills.
Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have the potential to reduce the workload for the second language (L2) teachers and test developers. We propose two AI distractor-generating methods for creating Chinese vocabulary items: semantic similarity and visual similarity. Semantic similarity refers to antonyms and synonyms, while visual similarity refers to the phenomenon that two phrases share one or more characters in common. This study explores the construct validity of the two types of selected-response vocabulary tests (AI-generated items and human expert-designed items) and compares their item difficulty and item discrimination. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected. Seventy-eight students from Beijing Language and Culture University were asked to respond to AI-generated and human expert-designed items respectively. Students’ scores were analyzed using the two-parameter item response theory (2PL-IRT) model. Thirteen students were then invited to report their test taking strategies in the think-aloud section. The findings from the students’ item responses revealed that the human expert-designed items were easier but had more discriminating power than the AI-generated items. The results of think-aloud data indicated that the AI-generated items and expert-designed items might assess different constructs, in which the former elicited test takers’ bottom-up test-taking strategies while the latter seemed more likely to trigger test takers’ rote memorization ability.
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