Analyzing Student Writing: A Multiple Case Study Exploring Kindergarten Teacher Knowledge of Early Writing Development

The developmental nature of early writing warrants targeted instruction in writing concepts and skills in kindergarten classrooms. Given the complexity of writing and early writing development, research into kindergarten teacher knowledge of early writing development and how this influences instructional practices is appropriate. To conduct this research, data was collected from an online questionnaire, a semistructured interview, and student writing sample analysis tasks of five kindergarten teachers. Qualitative data analysis was conducted and provided descriptions of individual teachers’ instructional practices for writing and an in-depth description of the proposed teacher-student interactions from the student writing sample analysis tasks. Findings revealed that influences other than knowledge of early writing development exist and impact instructional practices of writing

HOW ADOLESCENT SECOND LANGUAGE WRITERS DEVELOP WRITING COMPETENCE THROUGH MULTIMODAL ACTIVITIES

The purpose of the study was to examine how the processes and different activities that adolescent English L2 writers engage in producing multimodal texts influence the development of their multimodal and writing competence. This dissertation fills existing gaps regarding how multimodal pedagogies are implemented in L2 contexts to facilitate adolescent L2 writers' development of writing and multimodal competence. The research was conducted in an English classroom within a junior high school (JHS) located in a small village in southern Ghana. Forty-eight second year JHS students (the equivalent of 8th grade) participated in the study; three of these were selected as focal students. Both qualitative and quantitative data were collected concurrently through an embedded, developmental case study design, with the quantitative data playing a supportive role. Data collected through this design included surveys, multiple drafts of students' expository texts, posters, poster presentations, guided reflections and text-based interviews. The qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data showed that the adolescent L2 writers' mediated, distributed and complex multimodal activities created opportunities for developing new intellectual tools, strategic competence, and technical knowledge about multimodal composing as well as an in-depth understanding of, and interest in, social and cultural issues that affected the writers and their communities. The qualitative and quantitative analyses of the multiple drafts of the writers' expository texts also suggested that the multimodal activities helped the writers to improve the development and organization of their ideas and the overall quality of their paper. These findings offer new insight and ways to think about how L2 teachers can develop students' academic language by helping students draw on ideas from their multimodal texts to revise their word-based expository texts and other genres of writing. Next, not only does this research help to expand the definition of adolescent English L2 writing competence beyond word-based composing, but it also provides an empirical evidence of how this reconceptualization can play out in concrete adolescent English L2 writing contexts. Finally, by bringing together multiple theoretical and interdisciplinary perspectives, this study offers a new framework for examining transformations in students' understanding of multimodal meaning making

A Case Study of English Language Learners’ Multimodal Compositions and Identity Representations

English learners’ literacy practices have become multimodal in today’s media and technology saturated world. Studies have investigated the application of multimodal composing in English language learning (ELL) classrooms and found that multimodal composing fostered students’ English achievement and understanding of course content more effectively than the lecture-type instruction (e.g. Yang & Wu, 2012). However, the examination of ELLs’ multimodal writing practices and their identity representation through out-of-class spaces have not been fully explored. This qualitative case study investigated international multilingual students’ choices of multimodal resources and how they used their preferred resources to design multimodal compositions to write about their previous and current English learning experiences, and how their social and literate identities are revealed from their multimodal compositions. There were three overarching research questions: first, how do ELLs use multimodal resources to write about their experiences of learning English in and out of the U.S. in a multimodal composing workshop? Second, how are their identities portrayed in their multimodal compositions and self-descriptions? Third, what are their perceptions of using multimodal resources to express themselves? Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, workshop observation notes, video-recorded workshop sessions, participants’ multimodal compositions and researcher’s log. Social semiotic multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) (Jewitt, 2009, 2011), and grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) were the primary data analysis methods. The study was situated in the frameworks of multimodality (e.g. Jewitt, 2008; Kress, 1997) and sociocultural and literate identities theory (e.g. Holland et al., 1998; Vasudevan et al., 2010). Participants were a group of ELLs recruited from an Intensive English Program (IEP) in a university located in the southeastern region of the US. A series of 10 workshop sessions were scheduled to investigate ELLs’ multimodal composing practices and identity manifestation. Participants were found to use a combination of words and images to compose multimodal texts to write about their personal journey of English learning regardless of their age, gender, and nationality. Revolutionary perceptions about multimodal composing both in and out-of-classroom spaces were advocated by participants to satisfy their various writing purposes and communication needs

Theoretical Understandings and Empirical Approaches to the Measurement of Children\u27s Early Composing

Whereas interest in young children’s writing has increased in recent years, the focus has centered more around transcription skills (i.e., letter formation and spelling) and less upon children’s early composing. Of the limited research that does exist on early composing, there is little shared understanding around the conceptualization of the construct or how it should be measured. Research to date has utilized varied and sometimes conflicting scoring and assessment techniques to assess early composing skills in young children. In order to more fully conceptualize this construct, the first study synthesizes extant literature focused upon early writing and composing to understand the nature and measurement of emergent composing. The second study aims to examine composing by exploring 160 prekindergarten children’s performance on a testing battery including a number of pre-existing and alternative writing assessments in order to explore the nature, measurement, and variability of early composing skills. In addition, this study will examine language, literacy, and executive function skills as they relate to children’s performance on early composition tasks. Partial correlations, controlling for children’s age, will be used to determine the degree of relation among children’s composing scores. Partial correlations will also be used to examine the associations of composing scores and children’s language, literacy, and cognitive skills. Multiple linear regressions will be utilized to determine the nature and degree of relation among children’s language, literacy, and executive function skills and early composing. Research of this nature has implications for a more comprehensive understanding of early composing and will lead to a deeper understanding of how to more effectively measure this construct

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Is image analysis based on Gestalt theory a valuable approach teaching photography?

The general aim of the thesis is to justify the claim that image analysis based on Gestalt psychology can be helpful in improving students' understanding and practice in photography. The thesis firstly identifies the technique-led curriculum as the major problem in photographic education in Taiwan as well as in the teacher-researcher's classroom. A new teaching programme integrating image analysis with Gestalt theory was formulated at the beginning of the target semester, in an attempt to develop students' ability to produce and appreciate photographs.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

High-performance hardware accelerators for image processing in space applications

Mars is a hard place to reach. While there have been many notable success stories in getting probes to the Red Planet, the historical record is full of bad news. The success rate for actually landing on the Martian surface is even worse, roughly 30%. This low success rate must be mainly credited to the Mars environment characteristics. In the Mars atmosphere strong winds frequently breath. This phenomena usually modifies the lander descending trajectory diverging it from the target one. Moreover, the Mars surface is not the best place where performing a safe land. It is pitched by many and close craters and huge stones, and characterized by huge mountains and hills (e.g., Olympus Mons is 648 km in diameter and 27 km tall). For these reasons a mission failure due to a landing in huge craters, on big stones or on part of the surface characterized by a high slope is highly probable. In the last years, all space agencies have increased their research efforts in order to enhance the success rate of Mars missions. In particular, the two hottest research topics are: the active debris removal and the guided landing on Mars. The former aims at finding new methods to remove space debris exploiting unmanned spacecrafts. These must be able to autonomously: detect a debris, analyses it, in order to extract its characteristics in terms of weight, speed and dimension, and, eventually, rendezvous with it. In order to perform these tasks, the spacecraft must have high vision capabilities. In other words, it must be able to take pictures and process them with very complex image processing algorithms in order to detect, track and analyse the debris. The latter aims at increasing the landing point precision (i.e., landing ellipse) on Mars. Future space-missions will increasingly adopt Video Based Navigation systems to assist the entry, descent and landing (EDL) phase of space modules (e.g., spacecrafts), enhancing the precision of automatic EDL navigation systems. For instance, recent space exploration missions, e.g., Spirity, Oppurtunity, and Curiosity, made use of an EDL procedure aiming at following a fixed and precomputed descending trajectory to reach a precise landing point. This approach guarantees a maximum landing point precision of 20 km. By comparing this data with the Mars environment characteristics, it is possible to understand how the mission failure probability still remains really high. A very challenging problem is to design an autonomous-guided EDL system able to even more reduce the landing ellipse, guaranteeing to avoid the landing in dangerous area of Mars surface (e.g., huge craters or big stones) that could lead to the mission failure. The autonomous behaviour of the system is mandatory since a manual driven approach is not feasible due to the distance between Earth and Mars. Since this distance varies from 56 to 100 million of km approximately due to the orbit eccentricity, even if a signal transmission at the light speed could be possible, in the best case the transmission time would be around 31 minutes, exceeding so the overall duration of the EDL phase. In both applications, algorithms must guarantee self-adaptability to the environmental conditions. Since the Mars (and in general the space) harsh conditions are difficult to be predicted at design time, these algorithms must be able to automatically tune the internal parameters depending on the current conditions. Moreover, real-time performances are another key factor. Since a software implementation of these computational intensive tasks cannot reach the required performances, these algorithms must be accelerated via hardware. For this reasons, this thesis presents my research work done on advanced image processing algorithms for space applications and the associated hardware accelerators. My research activity has been focused on both the algorithm and their hardware implementations. Concerning the first aspect, I mainly focused my research effort to integrate self-adaptability features in the existing algorithms. While concerning the second, I studied and validated a methodology to efficiently develop, verify and validate hardware components aimed at accelerating video-based applications. This approach allowed me to develop and test high performance hardware accelerators that strongly overcome the performances of the actual state-of-the-art implementations. The thesis is organized in four main chapters. Chapter 2 starts with a brief introduction about the story of digital image processing. The main content of this chapter is the description of space missions in which digital image processing has a key role. A major effort has been spent on the missions in which my research activity has a substantial impact. In particular, for these missions, this chapter deeply analizes and evaluates the state-of-the-art approaches and algorithms. Chapter 3 analyzes and compares the two technologies used to implement high performances hardware accelerators, i.e., Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) and Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Thanks to this information the reader may understand the main reasons behind the decision of space agencies to exploit FPGAs instead of ASICs for high-performance hardware accelerators in space missions, even if FPGAs are more sensible to Single Event Upsets (i.e., transient error induced on hardware component by alpha particles and solar radiation in space). Moreover, this chapter deeply describes the three available space-grade FPGA technologies (i.e., One-time Programmable, Flash-based, and SRAM-based), and the main fault-mitigation techniques against SEUs that are mandatory for employing space-grade FPGAs in actual missions. Chapter 4 describes one of the main contribution of my research work: a library of high-performance hardware accelerators for image processing in space applications. The basic idea behind this library is to offer to designers a set of validated hardware components able to strongly speed up the basic image processing operations commonly used in an image processing chain. In other words, these components can be directly used as elementary building blocks to easily create a complex image processing system, without wasting time in the debug and validation phase. This library groups the proposed hardware accelerators in IP-core families. The components contained in a same family share the same provided functionality and input/output interface. This harmonization in the I/O interface enables to substitute, inside a complex image processing system, components of the same family without requiring modifications to the system communication infrastructure. In addition to the analysis of the internal architecture of the proposed components, another important aspect of this chapter is the methodology used to develop, verify and validate the proposed high performance image processing hardware accelerators. This methodology involves the usage of different programming and hardware description languages in order to support the designer from the algorithm modelling up to the hardware implementation and validation. Chapter 5 presents the proposed complex image processing systems. In particular, it exploits a set of actual case studies, associated with the most recent space agency needs, to show how the hardware accelerator components can be assembled to build a complex image processing system. In addition to the hardware accelerators contained in the library, the described complex system embeds innovative ad-hoc hardware components and software routines able to provide high performance and self-adaptable image processing functionalities. To prove the benefits of the proposed methodology, each case study is concluded with a comparison with the current state-of-the-art implementations, highlighting the benefits in terms of performances and self-adaptability to the environmental conditions

Labor Logs In A Multimodal Curriculum: Revealing Valuable Assessment Practices In Technical Communication And First-Year Writing Courses

This project discusses the creation and implementation of labor logs in multimodal curricula in two levels of writing courses and how these labor logs support students’ development of meta-awareness through reflection-in-action (Yancey, 1998). Labor logs create a space for students to focus on in the moment recognition, or monitoring, of what takes place as they work through a project (VanKooten, 2016; Trimble and Jankens, 2019). By turning the focus of labor-based assessment (Inoue, 2019) to multimodal projects, this project clarifies the work that labor logs and multimodal pedagogies do in first-year writing and technical communication courses: indicating for students a connection between all modes of composing and revealing to them the nature and the value of what they do while composing. Qualitative evidence from two IRB-approved studies is used to accomplish two main aims: to understand how labor logs indicate meta-awareness of composing practices and rhetorical sensitivity of the student, and finally, how labor logs can be used as a tool for various assessment practices. The analysis of students’ labor logs in technical communication and first-year writing courses shows students heightened awareness of individualistic methods of composing and demonstrating a process of evaluation that is clear to the student and the instructor. This project makes a significant contribution to scholarship on assessment practices in multimodal pedagogies and antiracist assessment ecologies