Construction and abstraction: contrasting methods of supporting model building in learning science

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To what extent does long-term foreign language education help improve spoken second language lexical proficiency?

The current study examined lexical aspects of second language (L2) speech attainment in the foreign language (FL) classroom setting (i.e., several hours of target language input per week). A total of 72 second-year university students with seven years of FL study and no experience abroad participated in the study. Their spontaneous speech was analyzed via a set of lexical measures, and then compared to that of experienced, naturalistic Japanese L2 learners of English. According to the results, their lexical proficiency was factored into three dimensions—appropriateness (global, semantic, morphosyntactic accuracy), specificity (frequency, range) and abstractness (concreteness, meaningfulness, imageability, hypernymy). Overall, extensive FL education led many participants’ specificity performance to reach comparable proficiency levels to the baseline group. Approximately half of participants achieved such satisfactory proficiency in abstractness. The participants’ lexical appropriateness demonstrated a great deal of individual variability, and was linked to the extent to which they had recently practiced the target language

An Empirical Study of CSS Code Smells in Web Frameworks

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) has become essential to front-end web development for the specification of style. But despite its simple syntax and the theoretical advantages attained through the separation of style from content and behavior, CSS authoring today is regarded as a complex task. As a result, developers are increasingly turning to CSS preprocessor languages and web frameworks to aid in development. However, previous studies show that even highly popular websites which are known to be developed with web frameworks contain CSS code smells such as duplicated rules and hard-coded values. Such code smells have the potential to cause adverse effects on websites and complicate maintenance. It is therefore important to investigate whether web frameworks may be encouraging the introduction of CSS code smells into websites. In this thesis, we investigate the prevalence of CSS code smells in websites built with different web frameworks and attempt to recognize a pattern of CSS behavior in these frameworks. We collect a dataset of several hundred websites produced by each of 19 different frameworks, collect code smells and other metrics present in the CSS code of each website, train a classifier to predict which framework the website was built with, and perform various clustering tasks to gain insight into the correlations between code smells. Our results show that CSS code smells are highly prevalent in websites built with web frameworks, we achieve an accuracy of 39% in correctly classifying the frameworks based on CSS code smells and metrics, and we find interesting correlations between code smells

Practices in the Squale Quality Model (Squale Deliverable 1.3)

This document presents the Squale Software Quality Model as defined by Qualixo. It first reviews existing quality models and presents the Squale model with its particular- ity, namely a practice layer. Then it reviews in details an instance of this Squale Model with its Factors, Criteria and Practices, giving precise definitions and description1. Fi- nally, it discusses possible future enhancements of this model like new practices or its agreement with the program life-cycle and the change of needs during this life cycle

Pacifier overuse and conceptual relations of abstract and emotional concepts

This study explores the impact of the extensive use of an oral device since infancy (pacifier) on the acquisition of concrete, abstract, and emotional concepts. While recent evidence showed a negative relation between pacifier use and children’s emotional competence (Niedenthal et al., 2012), the possible interaction between use of pacifier and processing of emotional and abstract language has not been investigated. According to recent theories, while all concepts are grounded in sensorimotor experience, abstract concepts activate linguistic and social information more than concrete ones. Specifically, the Words As Social Tools (WAT) proposal predicts that the simulation of their meaning leads to an activation of the mouth (Borghi and Binkofski, 2014; Borghi and Zarcone, 2016). Since the pacifier affects facial mimicry forcing mouth muscles into a static position, we hypothesize its possible interference on acquisition/consolidation of abstract emotional and abstract not-emotional concepts, which aremainly conveyed during social and linguistic interactions, than of concrete concepts. Fifty-nine first grade children, with a history of different frequency of pacifier use, provided oral definitions of the meaning of abstract not-emotional, abstract emotional, and concrete words. Main effect of concept type emerged, with higher accuracy in defining concrete and abstract emotional concepts with respect to abstract not-emotional concepts, independently from pacifier use. Accuracy in definitions was not influenced by the use of pacifier, butcorrespondence and hierarchical clustering analyses suggest that the use of pacifier differently modulates the conceptual relations elicited by abstract emotional and abstract not-emotional. While the majority of the children produced a similar pattern of conceptual relations, analyses on the few (6) children who overused the pacifier (for more than 3 years) showed that they tend to distinguish less clearly between concrete and abstract emotional concepts and between concrete and abstract not-emotional concepts than children who did not use it (5) or used it for short (17). As to the conceptual relations they produced, children who overused the pacifier tended to refer less to their experience and to social and emotional situations, usemore exemplifications and functional relations, and less free associations

On the integration of digital technologies into mathematics classrooms

Trouche‘s (2003) presentation at the Third Computer Algebra in Mathematics Education Symposium focused on the notions of instrumental genesis and of orchestration: the former concerning the mutual transformation of learner and artefact in the course of constructing knowledge with technology; the latter concerning the problem of integrating technology into classroom practice. At the Symposium, there was considerable discussion of the idea of situated abstraction, which the current authors have been developing over the last decade. In this paper, we summarise the theory of instrumental genesis and attempt to link it with situated abstraction. We then seek to broaden Trouche‘s discussion of orchestration to elaborate the role of artefacts in the process, and describe how the notion of situated abstraction could be used to make sense of the evolving mathematical knowledge of a community as well as an individual. We conclude by elaborating the ways in which technological artefacts can provide shared means of mathematical expression, and discuss the need to recognise the diversity of student‘s emergent meanings for mathematics, and the legitimacy of mathematical expression that may be initially divergent from institutionalised mathematics

A Novel Intervention Approach Focusing on Social Communicative Functioning in Patients with Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorder: Effects of a Specific Speech-Gesture Training on Quality of Life and Neural Processing

Dysfunctional social communication is one of the most stable characteristics in patients with schizophrenia that severely affects quality of life. Interpreting abstract speech and integrating nonverbal information is particularly affected. Considering the difficulty to treat communication dysfunctions with usual intervention, we investigated the possibility to improve quality of life and co-verbal gesture processing in patients with schizophrenia by applying a multimodal speech-gesture (MSG) training. In the MSG training, we offered eight sessions (60 min each) including perceptive and expressive tasks as well as meta-learning elements and transfer exercises to 29 patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorder (SSD). Patients were randomized to a waiting-first group (N=20) or a training-first group (N=9), and were compared to healthy controls (N=17). Outcomes were quality of life and related changes in the neural processing of abstract speech-gesture information, which were measured pre-post training through standardized psychological questionnaires and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, respectively. Pre-training, patients showed reduced quality of life as compared to controls but improved significantly during the training. Strikingly, this improvement was correlated with neural activation changes in the middle temporal gyrus for the processing of abstract multimodal content. Improvement during training, self-report measures and ratings of relatives confirmed the MSG-related changes. Together, we provide first promising results of a novel multimodal speech-gesture training for patients with schizophrenia. We could link training induced changes in speech-gesture processing to changes in quality of life, demonstrating the relevance of intact communication skills and gesture processing for well-being