A common way of discussing generalisation is to search for one conception - a monist view. Another approach is to create a dichotomy between quantitative and qualitative research, each having a single definition - a dualist perspective. A pluralist view is argued for here, i.e. the existence of several lines of reasoning, each of which can be evaluated in specific cases in terms of usefulness, strengths and weaknesses. Five different lines of reasoning about generalization, which could possibly be useful in qualitative research, are presented. They are: 'studies that undermine established universal “truths”', 'the ideographic study', 'enhancing the generalisation potential by maximizing variation', 'generalisation through context similarity' and 'generalisation through recognition of patterns.' Each is critically commented on.This is an electronic version of an article published in:Staffan Larsson, A pluralist view of generalization in qualitative research, 2009, International Journal of Research & Method in Education, (32), 1, 25-38.Journal of Research & Method in Education is available online at informaworldTM:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17437270902759931Copyright: Taylor & Francishttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/default.as

We introduce an architecture and toolkit for building dialogue managers currently being developed in the TRINDI project, based on the notions of information state and dialogue move engine. The aim is to provide a framework for experimenting with implementations of different theories of information state, information state update and dialogue control. A number of dialogue managers are currently being built using the toolkit, and we present overviews of two of them. We believe that this framework will make implementation of dialogue processing theories easier, also facilitating comparison of different types of dialogue systems, thus helping to achieve a prerequisite for arriving at a best practice for the development of the dialogue management component of a spoken dialogue system.

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The main purpose of this study is to focus on Swedish PE teachers’ experiences with a criterion-referenced grading system and its practical consequences. It aims specifically at investigating the dimensionality of grades and how teacher reason and effectuate when grading students. The study consists of two parts: quantitative data collection of grades in PE given between 2000 and 2009 and 20 semi-structured interviews with PE teachers that were analyzed qualitatively. The study has shown that the principles of fair and equitable grading in Swedish PE should be strongly questioned due to lack of transparency, validity and reliability. Grading in Swedish PE seems to be arbitrary and the grading system is not accessible or transparent to the students.

We propose a probabilistic type theory in which a situation s is judged to be of a type T with probability p. In addition to basic and functional types it includes, inter alia, record types and a notion of typing based on them. The type system is intensional in that types of situations are not reduced to sets of situations. We specify the fragment of a compositional semantics in which truth conditions are replaced by probability conditions. The type system is the interface between classifying situations in perception and computing the semantic interpretations of phrases in natural language.