Adapting robot behavior to user's capabilities: a dance instruction study.

The ALIZ-E1 projects goal is to design a robot companion able to maintain affective interactions with young users over a period of time. One of these interactions consists in teaching a dance to hospitalized children according to their capabilities. We propose a methodology for adapting both, the movements used in the dance based on the users cognitive and physical capabilities through a set of metrics, and the robots interaction based on the users personality traits

An Argument for The Great Divorce in the Public School Ninth Grade English Classroom

C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce (1946) can provide a useful supplement for ninth grade English instruction because of its quality as a literary work, the ideas it represents, its commentary on enduring human questions, and its connections to its historical context. At its core, the book reflects on recurring philosophical and religious ideas in a way that simultaneously links to and transcends its time. It also exhibits hallmarks of literary excellence, such as formal consistency and a comprehensive view of its themes. The Great Divorce’s skillful use of literary elements suits it for instruction, adapting form to purpose. The many criteria for selecting works for the classroom prove The Great Divorce to be worthy of inclusion in ninth grade instruction

Adapting Instruction to Learning Styles

https://digitalcommons.wpi.edu/gps-posters/1429/thumbnail.jp

Instruct-Align: Teaching Novel Languages with to LLMs through Alignment-based Cross-Lingual Instruction

Instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable generalization capability over multiple tasks in multiple languages. Nevertheless, their generalization towards different languages varies especially to underrepresented languages or even to unseen languages. Prior works on adapting new languages to LLMs find that naively adapting new languages to instruction-tuned LLMs will result in catastrophic forgetting, which in turn causes the loss of multitasking ability in these LLMs. To tackle this, we propose the Instruct-Align a.k.a (IA)$^1$ framework, which enables instruction-tuned LLMs to learn cross-lingual alignment between unseen and previously learned languages via alignment-based cross-lingual instruction-tuning. Our preliminary result on BLOOMZ-560M shows that (IA)$^1$ is able to learn a new language effectively with only a limited amount of parallel data and at the same time prevent catastrophic forgetting by applying continual instruction-tuning through experience replay. Our work contributes to the progression of language adaptation methods for instruction-tuned LLMs and opens up the possibility of adapting underrepresented low-resource languages into existing instruction-tuned LLMs. Our code will be publicly released upon acceptance

English-language writing instruction in Poland: Adapting to the local EFL context

This paper is intended to foster reflection about the development of a locally-suitable approach to English-language writing instruction in Poland. In order to provide background information to contextualize a subsequent discussion of English-language writing, the paper starts with a brief overview of the history of L2 writing instruction, including an overview of the four most influential approaches to teaching ESL composition in the U.S. from 1945–1990: Controlled Composition, Current-Traditional Rhetoric, the Process Approach, and English for Academic Purposes. This is followed by a discussion of the concept of a „needs analysis,” where it is noted that needs analysis is complex in foreign language contexts such as Poland, where students may not have obvious, immediate needs for writing in English after graduation. The notion of needs analysis is illustrated with an example drawn from the English Institute at the University of Łódź. The needs analysis indicated that some students of English had negative attitudes and/or anxiety towards writing in English, but some had positive attitudes based on previous experiences with creative and expressive writing. Additionally, it was determined that students needed to learn many skills for writing academic papers that they had not learned in secondary school and that require extensive instruction and practice. Based on the needs analysis, it was determined that the purposes of a new writing course for first-year English majors should be to foster and develop positive attitudes toward writing and to support students’ academic work. The assignments and activities for the course are described. Additionally, a description is provided of the possible purposes that Polish students in general might have for writing in English, the goals that instructors might pursue in assigning writing, and the types of writing teachers might assign. Recommendations are provided for responding to student writing

Ada-Instruct: Adapting Instruction Generators for Complex Reasoning

Generating diverse and sophisticated instructions for downstream tasks by Large Language Models (LLMs) is pivotal for advancing the effect. Current approaches leverage closed-source LLMs, employing in-context prompting for instruction generation. However, in this paper, we found that in-context prompting cannot generate complex instructions with length $\ge 100$ for tasks like code completion. To solve this problem, we introduce Ada-Instruct, an adaptive instruction generator developed by fine-tuning open-source LLMs. Our pivotal finding illustrates that fine-tuning open-source LLMs with a mere ten samples generates long instructions that maintain distributional consistency for complex reasoning tasks. We empirically validated Ada-Instruct's efficacy across different applications, including code completion, mathematical reasoning, and commonsense reasoning. The results underscore Ada-Instruct's superiority, evidencing its improvements over its base models, current self-instruct methods, and other state-of-the-art models

Adapting Basal Instruction to Improve Content Area Reading

Expanding basal reading instruction so that students will develop the ability to read effectively in the content areas is a recognized concern and legitimate goal of middle school teachers. This article offers suggestions on how teachers can achieve that goal by adapting the procedures recommended in their present basal manuals. Specifically, adaptations are suggested in three common basal procedures: setting the purpose, developing a vocabulary, and discussing the selection. Each adaptation can serve as a bridge for helping students apply what they learn in basal reading instruction to content area reading

Frameworking CRAAP: How We\u27re Correlating the ACRL Framework to Content Evaluation with the CRAAP Test in Our Instruction Practices

For years, we have used the CRAAP Test as an information evaluation mechanism in our instruction sessions. We apply it to everyday, real-life stories, and to complex research as needed. Currently, we are adapting our practices of CRAAP Test instruction by expanding the evaluation to include the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. Specifically, we have given each CRAAP letter a frame for discussion when evaluating. This presentation will cover what frames we have assigned to each letter, why, and the assessment of the instruction using these concepts