One of the problems in the research area Student Modelling is the difficulty of relating different student modelling techniques to each other. This paper presents a new way of looking at the student modelling problem in order to give one possible framework in which to fit the different techniques. This is based on looking at student modelling as the process of bridging the gap between the stude...

This issue of Perspectives on Medical Education contains a thought-provoking article by Young, Cummings & StOnge, looking specifically at the stability of difficulty and discrimination indices when calculated for small samples of students. They concluded that difficulty and discrimination scores calculated based upon small samples are not stable across cohorts and therefore should be interprete...

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Health secretary Alan Johnson announced in March the identities of the first five academic health science centres in the UK, one of which is the result of a collaboration between Imperial College London and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. These centres are partnerships between world-class universities and leading NHS organisations, and this article examines the implications of their esta...

While the gap between theory and practice is slowly closing, the evolutionary computation community needs to concentrate more heavily on the middle ground. This paper defends the position that contemporary analytical tools facilitate such a concentration. Empirical research can be improved by considering modern analytical techniques in experimental design. In addition, formal analytical extensi...

Practice is usually based on tradition, rituals and outdated information; there is often an additional gap between theoretical knowledge and its application in practice. This theory-practice gap has long existed (Allmark, 1995; Hewison et al, 1996). It often arises when theory is ignored because it is seen as idealistic and impractical, even if it is practical and beneficial. Most research rela...