This study investigated the application and the effect of Group Investigation(GI) in the College English Program in a Chinese University. A qualitative case study method was used to understand the GI system used by Ch...This study investigated the application and the effect of Group Investigation(GI) in the College English Program in a Chinese University. A qualitative case study method was used to understand the GI system used by Chinese instructors as well as the achievements acquired and challenges met by the participants. Three instructors and fifteen second-year-undergraduates taking a course titled Sources of European Culture participated. Interviews, observations, and documents were used to collect the data. Data analysis showed Chinese instructors applied a GI technique similar to that discussed by Johnson and Johnson(1999); however, GI in the Chinese context demanded more effort from the teacher for designing tasks and provided help in modeling uses of English and in preparing visual, especially Power Point, presentations. Although participants used their mother tongue at some stages, their autonomy over English learning was activated, and horizons in the course content were broadened.展开更多
A method of minimizing rankings inconsistency is proposed for a decision-making problem with rankings of alternatives given by multiple decision makers according to multiple criteria. For each criteria, at first, the ...A method of minimizing rankings inconsistency is proposed for a decision-making problem with rankings of alternatives given by multiple decision makers according to multiple criteria. For each criteria, at first, the total inconsistency between the rankings of all alternatives for the group and the ones for every decision maker is defined after the decision maker weights in respect to the criteria are considered. Similarly, the total inconsistency between their final rankings for the group and the ones under every criteria is determined after the criteria weights are taken into account. Then two nonlinear integer programming models minimizing respectively the two total inconsistencies above are developed and then transformed to two dynamic programming models to obtain separately the rankings of all alternatives for the group with respect to each criteria and their final rankings. A supplier selection case illustrated the proposed method, and some discussions on the results verified its effectiveness. This work develops a new measurement of ordinal preferences’ inconsistency in multi-criteria group decision-making （MCGDM） and extends the cook-seiford social selection function to MCGDM considering weights of criteria and decision makers and can obtain unique ranking result.展开更多
A new prioritization method in the analytic hierarchy process （AHP）, which improves the group fuzzy preference programming （GFPP） method, is proposed. The fuzzy random theory is applied in the new prioritization m...A new prioritization method in the analytic hierarchy process （AHP）, which improves the group fuzzy preference programming （GFPP） method, is proposed. The fuzzy random theory is applied in the new prioritization method. By modifying the principle of decision making implied in the GFPP method, the improved group fuzzy preference programming （IGFPP） method is formulated as a fuzzy linear programming problem to maximize the average degree of the group satisfaction with all possible group priority vectors. The IGFPP method inherits the advantages of the GFPP method, and solves the weighting trouble existed in the GFPP method. Numerical tests indicate that the IGFPP method performs more effectively than the GFPP method in the case of very contradictive comparison judgments from decision makers.展开更多
基金supported by the 2013 Fundamental Re-search Funds for the Central Universities of Xi’an Jiaotong UniversityThe Subject of Shaanxi Province Educational Science Twelveth-Five-Year Plan
文摘This study investigated the application and the effect of Group Investigation(GI) in the College English Program in a Chinese University. A qualitative case study method was used to understand the GI system used by Chinese instructors as well as the achievements acquired and challenges met by the participants. Three instructors and fifteen second-year-undergraduates taking a course titled Sources of European Culture participated. Interviews, observations, and documents were used to collect the data. Data analysis showed Chinese instructors applied a GI technique similar to that discussed by Johnson and Johnson(1999); however, GI in the Chinese context demanded more effort from the teacher for designing tasks and provided help in modeling uses of English and in preparing visual, especially Power Point, presentations. Although participants used their mother tongue at some stages, their autonomy over English learning was activated, and horizons in the course content were broadened.
基金supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (60904059 60975049)+1 种基金the Philosophy and Social Science Foundation of Hunan Province (2010YBA104)the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (863 Program)(2009AA04Z107)
文摘A method of minimizing rankings inconsistency is proposed for a decision-making problem with rankings of alternatives given by multiple decision makers according to multiple criteria. For each criteria, at first, the total inconsistency between the rankings of all alternatives for the group and the ones for every decision maker is defined after the decision maker weights in respect to the criteria are considered. Similarly, the total inconsistency between their final rankings for the group and the ones under every criteria is determined after the criteria weights are taken into account. Then two nonlinear integer programming models minimizing respectively the two total inconsistencies above are developed and then transformed to two dynamic programming models to obtain separately the rankings of all alternatives for the group with respect to each criteria and their final rankings. A supplier selection case illustrated the proposed method, and some discussions on the results verified its effectiveness. This work develops a new measurement of ordinal preferences’ inconsistency in multi-criteria group decision-making （MCGDM） and extends the cook-seiford social selection function to MCGDM considering weights of criteria and decision makers and can obtain unique ranking result.
基金Sponsored by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (70471063)
文摘A new prioritization method in the analytic hierarchy process （AHP）, which improves the group fuzzy preference programming （GFPP） method, is proposed. The fuzzy random theory is applied in the new prioritization method. By modifying the principle of decision making implied in the GFPP method, the improved group fuzzy preference programming （IGFPP） method is formulated as a fuzzy linear programming problem to maximize the average degree of the group satisfaction with all possible group priority vectors. The IGFPP method inherits the advantages of the GFPP method, and solves the weighting trouble existed in the GFPP method. Numerical tests indicate that the IGFPP method performs more effectively than the GFPP method in the case of very contradictive comparison judgments from decision makers.
