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Software Used (software + used)
Selected AbstractsSoftware Use in Psychometric ResearchEDUCATIONAL MEASUREMENT: ISSUES AND PRACTICE, Issue 1 2004Gary Skaggs Research on psychometric methods is heavily dependent on software. The quality, availability, and documentation of such software are critical to the advancement of the field. In 2000, an ad hoc committee of NCME recommended that NCME adopt policies that promote greater availability and better documentation of software. This article follows the ad hoc committee's report by examining the use of software in four top-tiered journals in recent years. The results indicated that the most frequently cited programs were those written by the articles' authors. The documentation and availability for these programs are often not clear, particularly for software used for simulations. The use of proprietary software was not widespread in the four journals, but there is still room for concern in the future. This article recommends that NCME form a permanent committee to address software issues. [source] Computer-assisted vs. teacher-directed teaching of numeracy in adultsJOURNAL OF COMPUTER ASSISTED LEARNING, Issue 3 2000Abstract, Whilst a good deal of research literature has been published on using Computer-Assisted Instruction (CAI) to help teach children with learning disabilities, there are fewer published studies examining the use of CAI with adults with a mild learning disability. This paper reports on an experiment comparing computer-assisted and teacher-implemented instruction in numeracy with this population, with a third group acting as a control group. All groups were pre-tested on two psychometric tests of numeracy, after which the experimental groups received one half-day per week training in numeracy, with all groups being reassessed after three months and after six months. It was found that overall the three groups improved in their numeracy scores, and that teacher-led and computer groups improved more as a function of time on the intervention than did the control group. The issue of how much teacher support is required when this population uses CAI is discussed, as are some of the strengths and weaknesses of the software used in the study. [source] Identifying high maintenance legacy softwareJOURNAL OF SOFTWARE MAINTENANCE AND EVOLUTION: RESEARCH AND PRACTICE, Issue 6 2002Matthew S. Harrison Abstract Legacy software maintenance is a significant cost item for many engineering organizations. This study is a preliminary report on work to investigate maintenance data, usage, and source code for legacy software used by an engineering design company to support a variety of functions, including electromagnetic, thermal, mechanical loading, vibration, and aerodynamic analysis. The results verify the applicability to legacy engineering software of previous research that concluded that size and structural metrics alone are not good indicators of high maintenance costs. Unlike previous research, the study also evaluates the effect of program usage on maintenance cost. Over the three-year period of this study of 71 legacy engineering programs, 11 of the programs (15%) accounted for 80% of all maintenance and 67% of all program runs. The highest maintenance programs were not always the largest programs or the worst structured programs. 49% of the programs accounted for only 1% of total maintenance but 42% of the total lines of code (LOC) thus invalidating LOC as an indicator for maintenance cost. While additional work is needed to validate these findings across other organizations and other code sets, these preliminary results provide strong evidence that expected program usage can be a useful indicator of long-term maintenance cost. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Monitoring the anomalous scattering signal and noise levels in X-ray diffraction of crystalsACTA CRYSTALLOGRAPHICA SECTION D, Issue 3 2004Zheng-Qing Fu A statistical index Ras is proposed in order to monitor the overall signal-to-noise ratio in an anomalous scattering data set. In this approach, symmetry-equivalent reflections are merged and grouped into centric and non-centric subsets. Reflections in the centric subset, which in theory should be equal, are used to estimate the noise level in the data. This approach differs from that used by most data-processing programs, in which the centric reflections are merged and averaged. By preserving the differences in centric reflections during data processing, an internal measure of the noise level can be estimated and used to analyze the quality of the anomalous signal in the data. An index Ras is defined as the ratio of the average Bijvoet difference of merged acentric reflections to merged centric reflections. Test results on a variety of data show that Ras has good correlation with the capability to determine the anomalous scattering substructure from the data. Ras can also be useful in monitoring the quality of the data in terms of the data-collection strategy, instrument settings and data-processing software used. Ras analysis has been implemented in the program 3DSCALE as part of a data-processing program suite that is under development in our laboratory. [source] | ||||||||||