Journal on Efficiency and Responsibility in Education and Science

12-25

Authors: Ivana Čechová, Jiří Neubauer, Marek Sedlačík

Higher education institutions are continually striving to make education relevant to the working environment students will encounter upon graduation. One of the tools for enhancing an institution’s quality and sufficiently informing students about their outcomes and learning opportunities is a quality assessment. Quality assessment is a long process which establishes measurable student learning outcomes, then analyses and interprets them. This enables students to receive feedback on their learning and helps them to improve their performance. The authors’ objective was to gather empirical data on students´ learning in order to improve the process of learning and to refine study programmes. A longitudinal study was used to observe students’ performance and outcomes from entrance exams to state exams. Statistical analysis revealed that there is a correlation between the results of the admission tests and the study results, especially the connection between the results of the entrance test and the chance of successful completion of studies. No statistically significant correlation was found between the overall results of military students’ studies. An interesting issue is a comparison between military and civilian students, as well as civilian students´ results. As a continuous process, assessment of students’ performance was observed up until the Final State Examination.

78-84

Authors: Mikuláš Gangur, Miroslav Plevný

The paper presents a possible way of solving the problem of creating more test variants for a large number of students divided into groups. The proposed solution may consist in introducing a parameterized automatic test generator. The principle of an automatic parameterized test generator is shown. The process of the question tree construction according to the increasing numbers of questions in the banks of the particular subjects leads to a combinatorial explosion. This often results in the excessive time of generation of the different variants of tests. To solve this problem, a heuristic method based on a pre-processing stage that precedes the construction of the searching tree is proposed. Further, the results of the experiments comparing the time of the test generation and the congruence of the test variants generated by the algorithm either using or non-using this heuristics are presented. According to these results, the use of the generator with the proposed heuristics provides a considerably shorter time of generation, and the congruence of the generated test variants is even better in most cases.

53-64

Authors: Melanie Gurat

The main purpose of the study is to understand the mathematical problem-solving strategies among student teachers. This study used both quantitative and qualitative type of research. Aside from the semi-structured interviews, data were gathered through participant's actual mathematical problem-solving outputs and the videotaped interviews. Findings revealed that the problem-solving strategies among student teachers in the Problem-Solving subject are cognitive, metacognitive and other strategies. The cognitive strategies used by the student teachers are rehearsal, elaboration, and organization. The metacognitive strategies are critical thinking and self-regulation. Other strategies are overlapping the cognitive and metacognitive strategies. These are prediction/orientation, planning, monitoring, and evaluating. The findings also suggest a significant influence of the strategies to the academic performance of the student teachers.

29-37

Authors: Joshua Abah Abah, Terungwa James Age, Mercy Onyinyechi Okoronkwo

This study is a correlational survey of the impact of home involvement on the mathematics achievement of Basic 5 pupils in North Bank suburb of Makurdi, Benue State, Nigeria. The study is the outcome of the first phase of a local intervention programme targeted at encouraging homes in the suburb to actively support the mathematics education of children at the Basic Education level. The participants of the study comprise 73 Basic 5 pupils along with their parents across three basic schools in the suburb. The mathematics achievement scores of the pupils for the First Term of the 2016/2017 Academic Session were correlated with home involvement scores generated from the adopted Parental Involvement Questionnaire. The correlational analysis established a weak positive relationship (r = 0.0177, p = 0.9241; and r = 0.174, p = 0.2884) between home involvement and mathematics achievement. Further interaction with pupils revealed that outside pupils’ parents, certain friends, members of extended family and neighbours play vital roles, ranging from re-teaching class work at home to providing guidance for mathematics homework.

9-15

Authors: Adéla Fajčíková, Hana Urbancová, Lenka Kučírková

The effort of every organisation is to have talented staff, and in the case that these employees are available in the organisation is to ensure they are motivated to stay in the organisation. The aim of the paper is to evaluate the influence of decisive factors on the implementation of activities relating to talent management and the approach of Czech organisations to this new trend as well. Data was obtained through questionnaire surveys in selected Czech organisations in 2014/2015 (n = 389), 2015/2016 (n = 402) and in 2016/2017 (n = 207). The results showed that the chances to implement talent management were significantly higher for organisations operating in national or international markets, organisations with more than 50 employees and organisations with a separate HR department, where this chance was even 4.1 times higher. Surveyed organisations use talent management the most often in the areas of employees´ recruitment, employees´ training and development, and their evaluation and remuneration.