Help Of Computer Technology Research Articles

Utilizing parental observations and computer technology in developing a child‐screening instrument in Singapore

It is widely known that parent–teacher partnerships are vital to children's progress in their development and learning in schools. These partnerships involve parent–teacher conferences, parents helping in the classroom, teachers making home visits and parent education seminars. However, partnerships rarely extend to having parents involved in the assessment process of their children in a significant way. In Singapore, opportunities for parents to be involved in the assessment process exist but only when invited by a professional, and this is only to a limited extent. Routinely, when professionals assess a child, parents are asked for their observations of their progress at home. However, such information gathered from parents is informal, unorganized and used on a supplementary basis. Hence, it was the purpose of this research project to develop a child‐screening instrument that utilized observations of Singaporean parents in an organized fashion by the help of computer technology. With this, it is hoped that the involvement in the assessment process will educate and empower parents to make decisions and play a more active role in the identification of their children's learning needs. This paper reports the use of parents' observations of their children across five developmental domains in the device of a computer‐based child‐screening questionnaire in Singapore. The Developmental Screening Questionnaire (DSQ) is developed as an initial screening tool to detect potentially at‐risk children within the age range of one to six years. This paper also describes the validity and utility of the instrument, making use of computer technology in the test administration process.

Exploring measures and perceptions of fluency in the speech of second language learners

The research reported in this paper explores which variables predict native and non-native speaking teachers' perception of fluency and distinguish fluent from non-fluent L2 learners. In addition to traditional measures of the quality of students' output such as accuracy and lexical diversity, we investigated speech samples collected from 16 Hungarian L2 learners at two distinct levels of proficiency with the help of computer technology. The two groups of students were compared and their temporal and linguistic measures were correlated with the fluency scores they received from three experienced native and three non-native speaker teacher judges. The teachers' written comments concerning the students' performance were also taken into consideration. For all the native and non-native teachers, speech rate, the mean length of utterance, phonation time ratio and the number of stressed words produced per minute were the best predictors of fluency scores. However, the raters differed as regards how much importance they attributed to accuracy, lexical diversity and the mean length of pauses. The number of filled and unfilled pauses and other disfluency phenomena were not found to influence perceptions of fluency.

Computer vision and digital imaging technology in melanoma detection

With today's treatment options, melanoma cure rates can be improved only if the diagnosis is made early enough to allow for curative surgery. Since clinical signs of malignancy in a pigmented lesion are often ambiguous and even dermatology experts may misdiagnose melanoma, diagnostic tools and procedures have been developed to assist the clinician in the diagnostic workup. Epiluminescence microscopy or dermatoscopy is widely used to inspect the melanin reticulum at the epidermo-dermal junction zone for signs indicative of early tumor growth. With the help of computer technology, digital dermatoscopy systems have entered the diagnostic arena capable of accurately assessing skin surface features modeled along the ABCD criteria already used for clinical assessment of pigmented skin lesions. Today's technically refined computer-based systems provide sophisticated functionalities for automated feature extraction and lesion assessment for quantitative analysis, and may also be used for education and training purposes. Semin Oncol 29:308-327. Copyright 2002, Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved.