• Journal of Gifted/Talented Education
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.699-719
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• 2016

Alternate pictures that are proven to be equivalent are in high demand to assess creative thinking and language skills. This study aimed to investigate the equivalence of three pictures ('Dog owners,' 'Lost Dog,' and 'Overslept') recently developed for use in a creative writing task. Middle school students (N=183) wrote a story in English based on one of the three prompts distributed randomly. Four writing features (fluency, syntactic complexity, lexical diversity, and temporality) were analyzed with Coh-Metrix and MANCOVA. The three prompts were largely equivalent in their capacity to detect differences among writers in all the features of writing. The difficulty levels of the three prompts, however, were not necessarily the same. Two prompts, Dog Owners and Lost Dog, were verified as equivalent prompts, and therefore, they are recommended as alternate forms to assess creative language skills in repeated measurements. The Overslept prompt had greater facility in eliciting diverse words and more temporal connectives in composing stories. The differential difficulty shown among the prompts suggests that the validity of using different picture versions in repeated assessment remains questionable unless those versions undergo equivalence verification.

• 한국신재생에너지학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2009.06a
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• pp.288-294
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• 2009

Various polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) startup procedures were tested to explore possible techniques for reducing performance decay and improving durability during repeated startup-shutdown cycles. The effects of applying a dummy load, which prevents cell reversal by consuming the air at the cathode, on the degradation of a membrane electrode assembly (MEA) were investigated via single cell experiments. The electrochemical results showed that application of a dummy load during the startup procedure significantly reduced the performance decay, the decrease in the electrochemically active surface area (EAS), and the increase in the charge transfer resistance ($R_{ct}$), which resulted in a dramatic improvement in durability. After 1200 startup-shutdown cycles, post-mortem analyses were carried out to investigate the degradation mechanisms via various physicochemical methods including FESEM, an on-line $CO_2$ analysis, EPMA, XRD, FETEM, SAED, FTIR. After 1200 startup-shutdown cycles, severe Pt particle sintering/agglomeration/dissolution and carbon corrosion were observed at the cathode catalyst layer when starting up a PEMFC without a dummy load, which significantly contributed to a loss of Pt surface area, and thus to cell performance degradation. However, applying a dummy load during the startup procedure remarkably mitigated such severe degradations, and should be used to increase the durability of MEAs in PEMFCs. Our results suggest that starting up PEMFCs while applying a dummy load is an effective method for mitigating performance degradation caused by reverse current under a repetition of unprotected startup cycles.