Identifying consumers' motor ability for consistent and reliable control can be a difficult yet essential part of a single switch assessment. Current literature does not identify the essential components of a single switch evaluation. Therefore, the following focus group study was conducted. Six occupational therapists with experience in assistive technology service delivery participated in a f...

Between 2001 and 2003 the London Health Commission undertook health impact assessments (HIAs) on a series of strategies developed by the Greater London Authority and the Mayor of London. The HIAs were rapid, each involving a literature review and a participant workshop. In all cases the reports made a series of recommendations that were given to the Mayor. The HIAs led to changes and ensured th...

We have conducted an investigation into how well students in introductory science classes (both physics and chemistry) are able to predict which questions they will or will not be able to answer correctly on an upcoming assessment. An examination of the data at the level of students’ overall scores reveals results consistent with the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which low-performing students tend ...

Conducting a barriers analysis is an important first step when designing proenvironmental behavior change interventions. Yet, detailed information on common barriers to energy conservation campaigns remains unavailable. Using a pair of original surveys, we leverage the theory of planned behavior to report on the most important barriers for fourteen energy conservation behaviors common in univer...

There are few practical examples of the use of RRA in the field of health and nutrition described in the literature. This paper describes the use of wealth ranking as part of rapid nutritional assessments undertaken in Darfur by an Oxfam nutrition team led by myself. The assessments were unique in approach as they combined two complementary techniques; wealth ranking (Grandin, 1988) and measure...

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. ...

Parametric design is an emerging research issue in the design domain. However, our current understanding of creativity in relation to either a process or product standpoint is limited. This paper presents a formal approach for the description and identification of creativity from both perspectives. The framework combines: (i) protocol analysis for encoding cognitive design activities, providing...

This paper presents a case study of evaluating intelligent tutoring modules for procedural knowledge acquisition in numeric disciplines. As Iqbal et al. (1999) have noted, the benefit of carrying out evaluation of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) is to focus the attention away from short-term delivery and open up a dialogue about issues of appropriateness, usability and quality in system desi...

Because of the importance of special functions, several books and a large collection of papers have been devoted to the numerical computation of these functions, the most well-known being the NBS handbook by Abramowitz and Stegun. But up to this date, symbolic and numeric environments offer no routines for the validated evaluation of special functions. We point out how a provable correct functi...