Science and Decisions National Research Council; Division on Earth and Life Studies; Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology
09/2009
eBook
Odprti dostop
Risk assessment has become a dominant public policy tool for making choices, based on limited resources, to protect public health and the environment. It has been instrumental to the mission of the ...U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as well as other federal agencies in evaluating public health concerns, informing regulatory and technological decisions, prioritizing research needs and funding, and in developing approaches for cost-benefit analysis.
However, risk assessment is at a crossroads. Despite advances in the field, risk assessment faces a number of significant challenges including lengthy delays in making complex decisions; lack of data leading to significant uncertainty in risk assessments; and many chemicals in the marketplace that have not been evaluated and emerging agents requiring assessment.
Science and Decisions makes practical scientific and technical recommendations to address these challenges. This book is a complement to the widely used 1983 National Academies book, Risk Assessment in the Federal Government (also known as the Red Book). The earlier book established a framework for the concepts and conduct of risk assessment that has been adopted by numerous expert committees, regulatory agencies, and public health institutions. The new book embeds these concepts within a broader framework for risk-based decision-making. Together, these are essential references for those working in the regulatory and public health fields.
Most people have struggled with reading in one situation or another, depending on their appreciation for the content, their prior experiences, and the texts. This department column shares ways for ...educators to help literacy learners unlock their potential with instruction anchored in their skills, knowledge, ways of learning, interests, and attitudes.
Advancing Natural Language Processing in Educational Assessment examines the use of natural language technology in educational testing, measurement, and assessment. Recent developments in natural ...language processing (NLP) have enabled large-scale educational applications, though scholars and professionals may lack a shared understanding of the strengths and limitations of NLP in assessment as well as the challenges that testing organizations face in implementation. This first-of-its-kind book provides evidence-based practices for the use of NLP-based approaches to automated text and speech scoring, language proficiency assessment, technology-assisted item generation, gamification, learner feedback, and beyond. Spanning historical context, validity and fairness issues, emerging technologies, and implications for feedback and personalization, these chapters represent the most robust treatment yet about NLP for education measurement researchers, psychometricians, testing professionals, and policymakers.
Since the Kurikulum Merdeka was implemented to respond to the learning loss students experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic, student-centered learning assessment (SCLA) has become a significant ...part of current Indonesian senior high school educational initiatives. However, previous research found that teachers need more understanding of the concept of SCLA. Thus, this study explores vocational high school EFL teacher's understanding of SCLA in implementing problem-based learning in the Kurikulum Merdeka aligned with the theory from Jonassen (2000). This qualitative case study employed an interview as the main instrument to discover an understanding from one teacher. Based on the data analysis through thematic analysis, the findings revealed that the teacher had a fair understanding of the student-centered learning assessment's concepts, advantages, and obstacles. Nevertheless, the teacher still needed to learn more about SCLA. Although not all of the research findings were relevant to the previous study and the theory, the teacher reasonably implemented the student-centered learning assessment while improving the future teaching- learning process, particularly the assessment system. Moreover, there is an expectation for the school, principals, and other stakeholders to pay attention to providing teachers with training regarding student-centered learning assessment. In addition, teachers are expected to be willing to stay up-to-date with the change of curriculum, including the shift in the assessment form, teachers' role, and learning to understand the current curriculum and the learning methods.
There is a pressing need to capture and track subtle cognitive change at the preclinical stage of Alzheimer's disease (AD) rapidly, cost‐effectively, and with high sensitivity. Concurrently, the ...landscape of digital cognitive assessment is rapidly evolving as technology advances, older adult tech‐adoption increases, and external events (i.e., COVID‐19) necessitate remote digital assessment. Here, we provide a snapshot review of the current state of digital cognitive assessment for preclinical AD including different device platforms/assessment approaches, levels of validation, and implementation challenges. We focus on articles, grants, and recent conference proceedings specifically querying the relationship between digital cognitive assessments and established biomarkers for preclinical AD (e.g., amyloid beta and tau) in clinically normal (CN) individuals. Several digital assessments were identified across platforms (e.g., digital pens, smartphones). Digital assessments varied by intended setting (e.g., remote vs. in‐clinic), level of supervision (e.g., self vs. supervised), and device origin (personal vs. study‐provided). At least 11 publications characterize digital cognitive assessment against AD biomarkers among CN. First available data demonstrate promising validity of this approach against both conventional assessment methods (moderate to large effect sizes) and relevant biomarkers (predominantly weak to moderate effect sizes). We discuss levels of validation and issues relating to usability, data quality, data protection, and attrition. While still in its infancy, digital cognitive assessment, especially when administered remotely, will undoubtedly play a major future role in screening for and tracking preclinical AD.
Self-Insight Dunning, David
2005, 20121012, 2005-02-17, 2012-10-12
eBook
People base thousands of choices across a lifetime on the views they hold of their skill and moral character, yet a growing body of research in psychology shows that such self-views are often ...misguided or misinformed. Anyone who has dealt with others in the classroom, in the workplace, in the medical office, or on the therapist's couch has probably experienced people whose opinions of themselves depart from the objectively possible.
This book outlines some of the common errors that people make when they evaluate themselves. It also describes the many psychological barriers - some that people build by their own hand - that prevent individuals from achieving self-insight about their ability and character.
The first section of the book focuses on mistaken views of competence, and explores why people often remain blissfully unaware of their incompetence and personality flaws. The second section focuses on faulty views of character, and explores why people tend to perceive they are more unique and special than they really are, why people tend to possess inflated opinions of their moral fiber that are not matched by their deeds, and why people fail to anticipate the impact that emotions have on their choices and actions.
The book will be of great interest to students and researchers in social, personality, and cognitive psychology, but, through the accessibility of its writing style, it will also appeal to those outside of academic psychology with an interest in the psychological processes that lead to our self-insight.
This Open Access book summarizes the key findings from the second cycle of IEA’s International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS), conducted in 2018. ICILS seeks to establish how well ...schools around the globe are responding to the need to provide young people with the necessary digital participatory competencies. Effective use of information and communication technologies (ICT) is an imperative for successful participation in an increasingly digital world. ICILS 2018 explores international differences in students’ computer and information literacy (CIL), namely their ability to use computers to investigate, create, and communicate at home, at school, in the workplace, and in the community. Participating countries also had an option to administer an assessment of students’ computational thinking (CT), focused on their ability to recognize aspects of real-world problems appropriate for computational formulation, and to evaluate and develop algorithmic solutions to those problems, so that the solutions could be operationalized with a computer. The data collected by ICILS 2018 show how digital competencies can be assessed using instruments representing authentic contexts for ICT use, and how students’ CIL and CT skills relate to school learning experiences, out-of-school contexts, and student characteristics. Those data also show how learning technologies are used in classrooms around the world. Background questionnaires asked students about their use of ICT, and collected information from teachers, schools, and national education systems about the resourcing and teaching of CIL (and CT) within their countries. The results of ICILS 2018 will enable policymakers and education systems to develop a better understanding of the contexts and outcomes of CIL (and CT) education programs.
This article is a written version of the Presidential Address I gave at the annual meeting of the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) in April 2017. It is a call to NCME members (and ...others who read this, of course) to rebalance their focus so that classroom assessments are seen as being at least as important as large-scale assessments for education (in fact, in my view, they are more important). The article reviews research literature about the effects of classroom assessment to establish its importance for education. Then, the roles of large-scale assessment are reviewed, and, in particular, it is noted how these can have negative results when the large-scale assessments are not well aligned with sound curriculum and instructional and assessment practices grounded in theories of learning. In the next two sections (a) the idea of a learning progression is described as a way to facilitate the coherence between classroom and large-scale assessment and (b) the idea of a 'roadmap' is described, being the assessment components of the learning progression. This is followed by a description of an example of such a roadmap, developed for the Assessing Data Modeling and Statistical Reasoning project using the BEAR Assessment System (BAS). Finally, a concluding discussion reviews the ways that the coherence between large-scale and classroom assessments can be achieved using the BAS, and hence make measurement more important for education. Author abstract
Fungicides are indispensable to global food security and their use is forecasted to intensify. Fungicides can reach aquatic ecosystems and occur in surface water bodies in agricultural catchments ...throughout the entire growing season due to their frequent, prophylactic application. However, in comparison to herbicides and insecticides, the exposure to and effects of fungicides have received less attention. We provide an overview of the risk of fungicides to aquatic ecosystems covering fungicide exposure (i.e., environmental fate, exposure modeling, and mitigation measures) as well as direct and indirect effects of fungicides on microorganisms, macrophytes, invertebrates, and vertebrates. We show that fungicides occur widely in aquatic systems, that the accuracy of predicted environmental concentrations is debatable, and that fungicide exposure can be effectively mitigated. We additionally demonstrate that fungicides can be highly toxic to a broad range of organisms and can pose a risk to aquatic biota. Finally, we outline central research gaps that currently challenge our ability to predict fungicide exposure and effects, promising research avenues, and shortcomings of the current environmental risk assessment for fungicides.
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