Kyungho Jang

The Effects of a Translation Bias on the Scores for the Basic Economics Test

International comparisons of economic understanding generally require a translation of a standardized test written in English into another language. Test results can differ based on how researchers translate the English written exam into one in their own language. To confirm this hypothesis, two differently translated versions of the Basic Economics Test (BET) (Walstad, Rebeck, and Butters 2010a) were given to elementary school students in Korea. We found the possibility of overestimating or underestimating the levels of economic understanding by various sources of translation bias. Therefore, it is important to carefully interpret the assessment results of international comparisons. Our study is applicable not only to international comparisons of economic literacy but also to any comparison of knowledge across cultures or languages within a country.

Assessment of Economic Education in Korea’s Higher Education

Economic education has occupied a preeminent and indispensable place in the university curricula in Korea for decades. Considered as one of the most rigorous and prestigious majors, economics departments in Korean universities have invariably attracted applicants of superior grades and qualifications. With this background, this chapter summarizes the current status of economic education in universities in Korea. This chapter also reviews the assessment tools designed to measure economic understanding along with their main characteristics and provide detailed information on the assessment efforts to measure economic literacy at the college level and their main results, more specifically, Test of Understanding of College Economics (TUCE), College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT), and two nationally accredited qualification tests: the Test of Economic Sense and Thinking (TESAT) and the Test of Economic and Strategic Business Thinking (MK TEST). This chapter calls for a development of a standardized international assessment tool that can measure the economics understanding of college students and adults in hopes to more precisely identify the level of economics understanding of Korean college students by country to country comparison among their similarly situated international peers.

An Analysis of 119 Emergency Calls: Focused on Conversation Time and Contents

The call-takers in the 119 General Situation Room are playing important roles in recognizing the first crisis situation such as fire, rescue, and emergency, and in starting up the response system. In particular, with regard to the emergency calls, the prompt and accurate surveillance can determine the patients life as well as the prognosis. Based on April 8-December 31, 2014 Prehospital Care Reports in a metropolitan city, we analyzed the conversation turns and the conversation time between the agent and the caller, and the time of the conversation structure and sequence according to the reception routes and the severity of symptoms. The conversation analysis between the agent and the caller will be useful for the development and improvement of the action manual in the future.

Emergency dispatching based on automatic speech recognition

In emergency dispatching at 119 Command & Dispatch Center, some inconsistencies between the `standard emergency aid system` and `dispatch protocol,` which are both mandatory to follow, cause inefficiency in the dispatcher`s performance. If an emergency dispatch system uses automatic speech recognition (ASR) to process the dispatcher`s protocol speech during the case registration, it instantly extracts and provides the required information specified in the `standard emergency aid system,` making the rescue command more efficient. For this purpose, we have developed a Korean large vocabulary continuous speech recognition system for 400,000 words to be used for the emergency dispatch system. The 400,000 words include vocabulary from news, SNS, blogs and emergency rescue domains. Acoustic model is constructed by using 1,300 hours of telephone call (8 kHz) speech, whereas language model is constructed by using 13 GB text corpus. From the transcribed corpus of 6,600 real telephone calls, call logs with emergency rescue command class and identified major symptom are extracted in connection with the rescue activity log and National Emergency Department Information System (NEDIS). ASR is applied to emergency dispatcher`s repetition utterances about the patient information. Based on the Levenshtein distance between the ASR result and the template information, the emergency patient information is extracted. Experimental results show that 9.15% Word Error Rate of the speech recognition performance and 95.8% of emergency response detection performance are obtained for the emergency dispatch system.

Study of Korean Symptom Expression in 119 Emergency Calls

To help emergency medical dispatchers receive rapid and accurate identification and corrective action status determination of an emergency call, and to support the automatic processing of a voice recognition system to the Korean emergency medical dispatch system, emergency call records were analyzed. Furthermore, a list of Korean symptoms expression were produced and the characteristics of the symptoms that appear on the actual wording of the telephone records were identified. This language list and its characteristics will be useful for training emergency medical dispatchers.

Analysis of the Time Intervals in 119 Ambulance Services

The ambulance service time interval, in particular the response time, has been used as an important indicator for the quality control of ambulance services in that it can be improved to increase the probability of survival and decrease the sequela-related disability. Based on the 2011~2014 Prehospital Care Reports in a metropolitan city, this study analyzed the time interval of ambulance services considering the patient’s characteristics and chief complaints. If the definition of the time of ambulance services can be refined further, and a variety of economic and social factors and local characteristics would can be analyzed, the quality of the ambulance service is expected to be enhanced significantly.