UCLA School of Education and Information Studies

Children are one of the most affected groups during the Syrian Civil War. They feel the trauma of the war and death of people that they loved, and now, they are suffering from many problems (Gomleksiz & Aslan, 2018). More than half a million Syrian refugee students are not enrolled in school in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon (Culbertson & Constant, 2015). If they are lucky enough to attend school, many education problems are waiting for them such as adapting to a new educational culture, classroom environment, curriculum and language problems. Before these problems are solved, many of them are expected to engage in the classroom and be graded on the same level as native students (Emin, 2016). To provide a better and fairer learning environment in classrooms, comparative studies on refugee education across national contexts should be conducted (Ficarra, 2017). Since Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan struggle with similar issues, a comparative study about the fairness problems such as expectations of academic achievement, school discipline and other forms of inequity that Syrian refugee students experience in classroom can potentially offer solutions to these problems facing educators and policy-makers. Accordingly, this literature review will be conducted to compare studies about these areas. This literature review investigates the following question: How is the equality between refugees and native students especially in mixed classes provided during assessments of students’ academic achievement in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon?A big gap is found related to this research question in the literature. Major problems that should be solved to create equality in the mixed classes in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon have been determined such as financial, political, and educational issues in this literature review.  

As science becomes more dependent upon digital data, the need for data curation and for data digital libraries becomes more urgent. Questions remain about what researchers consider to be their data, their criteria for selecting and trusting data, and their orientation to data challenges. This paper reports findings from the first 18 months of research on astronomy data practices from the Data Conservancy. Initial findings suggest that issues for data production, use, preservation, and sharing revolve around factors that rarely are accommodated in use cases for digital library system design including trust in data, funding structures, communication channels, and perceptions of scientific value.

This article presents and validates a clustering-based method for creating cultural ontologies for community-oriented information systems. The introduced semiautomated approach merges distributed annotation techniques, or subjective assessments of similarities between cultural categories, with established clustering methods to produce cognate ontologies. This approach is validated against a locally authentic ethnographic method, involving direct work with communities for the design of fluid ontologies. The evaluation is conducted with of a set of Native American communities located in San Diego County (CA, US). The principal aim of this research is to discover whether distributing the annotation process among isolated respondents would enable ontology hierarchies to be created that are similar to those that are crafted according to collaborative ethnographic processes, found to be effective in generating continuous usage across several studies. Our findings suggest that the proposed semiautomated solution best optimizes among issues of interoperability and scalability, deemphasized in the fluid ontology approach, and sustainable usage.