The efficacy of parent-facilitated phonological awareness tutoring for kindergartners at-risk for reading difficulties

In the fall of 2004 Kindergarten students in a southwestern Ohio elementary school were screened for early literacy skills using the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS). Those parents whose children scored below the 20th percentile on initial sound fluency— determined to be at-risk for reading difficulties—were offered training on how to tutor their children. Parents (N=8) were taught games and activities from Phonemic Awareness in Young Children: A Classroom Curriculum by Marilyn Adams (1998). Those children considered at-risk whose parents chose not to participate formed the comparison group (N=7). The study used the logic of a multiple baseline across participant groups design. Visual analysis and the percentage of nonoverlapping data points indicate that positive effects were documented only during the intervention phase and only for those children receiving parent facilitated phonological awareness tutoring. The study offers a model for schools to utilize parent-facilitated intervention as a means of providing additional support to students at-risk for reading difficulties

Standard State Space Models of Unawareness

The impossibility theorem of Dekel, Lipman and Rustichini has been thought to demonstrate that standard state-space models cannot be used to represent unawareness. We first show that Dekel, Lipman and Rustichini do not establish this claim. We then distinguish three notions of awareness, and argue that although one of them may not be adequately modeled using standard state spaces, there is no reason to think that standard state spaces cannot provide models of the other two notions. In fact, standard space models of these forms of awareness are attractively simple. They allow us to prove completeness and decidability results with ease, to carry over standard techniques from decision theory, and to add propositional quantifiers straightforwardly

Reasoning About Knowledge of Unawareness

Awareness has been shown to be a useful addition to standard epistemic logic for many applications. However, standard propositional logics for knowledge and awareness cannot express the fact that an agent knows that there are facts of which he is unaware without there being an explicit fact that the agent knows he is unaware of. We propose a logic for reasoning about knowledge of unawareness, by extending Fagin and Halpern's \emph{Logic of General Awareness}. The logic allows quantification over variables, so that there is a formula in the language that can express the fact that ``an agent explicitly knows that there exists a fact of which he is unaware''. Moreover, that formula can be true without the agent explicitly knowing that he is unaware of any particular formula. We provide a sound and complete axiomatization of the logic, using standard axioms from the literature to capture the quantification operator. Finally, we show that the validity problem for the logic is recursively enumerable, but not decidable.Comment: 32 page

Evaluating the impact of serious games: the effect of gaming on entrepreneurial intent

Purpose - Serious games are playing an increasingly significant role across a range of educational contexts. Business focused serious games can provide students with an authentic learning experience and their use has been increasingly taken up by business school faculty, including those delivering entrepreneurship education. This paper seeks to evaluate the impact of participation in a serious business game on the Entrepreneurial Intent of undergraduate students. Design/methodology/approach - The study adopts a pre-test / post-test quasi-experimental design. It employs a modified version of Linan et al.’s (2011) Entrepreneurial Intent model in the form of a questionnaire survey completed by 263 undergraduate business and management students. Findings – A logic regression model was used to analyse the survey responses. The research findings indicate that the serious game used in this study has a significant negative impact on Entrepreneurial Intent. Gender and role model effects are also identified from the analysis. Originality/value - The paper contributes to the literature in two ways. Firstly, it demonstrates the impact of serious business games on Entrepreneurial Intent during the enterprise awareness stage of a student’s entrepreneurship education. Secondly, it provides a foundation for exploring the role that serious games can play in educating the potential entrepreneurs of the future

Extensive Games with Possibly Unaware Players

Standard game theory assumes that the structure of the game is common knowledge among players. We relax this assumption by considering extensive games where agents may be unaware of the complete structure of the game. In particular, they may not be aware of moves that they and other agents can make. We show how such games can be represented; the key idea is to describe the game from the point of view of every agent at every node of the game tree. We provide a generalization of Nash equilibrium and show that every game with awareness has a generalized Nash equilibrium. Finally, we extend these results to games with awareness of unawareness, where a player i may be aware that a player j can make moves that i is not aware of, and to subjective games, where payers may have no common knowledge regarding the actual game and their beliefs are incompatible with a common prior.Comment: 45 pages, 3 figures, a preliminary version was presented at AAMAS0

Preference-Dependent Unawareness

Morris (1996, 1997) introduced preference-based definitions of knowledge of belief in standard state-space structures. This paper extends this preference-based approach to unawareness structures (Heifetz, Meier, and Schipper, 2006, 2008). By defining unawareness and knowledge in terms of preferences over acts in unawareness structures and showing their equivalence to the epistemic notions of unawareness and knowledge, we try to build a bridge between decision theory and epistemic logic. Unawareness of an event is behaviorally characterized as the event being null and its negation being null.Unawareness, awareness, knowledge, preferences, subjective expected utility theory, decision theory, null event

Tailored gamification and serious game framework based on fuzzy logic for saving energy in connected thermostats

Connected thermostats (CTs) often save less energy than predicted because consumers may not know how to use them and may not be engaged in saving energy. Additionally, several models perform contrary to consumers’ expectations and are thus not used the way they are intended to. As a result, CTs save less energy and are underused in households. This paper reviews aspects of gamification and serious games focused on engaging consumers. A gamification and serious games framework is proposed for saving energy that is tailored by a fuzzy logic system to motivate connected thermostat consumers. This intelligent gamification framework can be used to customize the gamification and serious game strategy to each consumer so that fuzzy logic systems can be adapted according to the requirements of each consumer. The framework is designed to teach, engage, and motivate consumers while helping them save electrical energy when using their thermostats. It is described the proposed framework as well as a mockup that can be run on a cellphone. Although this framework is designed to be implemented in CTs, it can be translated to their energy devices in smart homes

Preference-Based Unawareness

Morris (1996, 1997) introduced preference-based definitions of knowledge of belief in standard state-space structures. This paper extends this preference-based approach to unawareness structures (Heifetz, Meier, and Schipper, 2006, 2008). By defining unawareness and knowledge in terms of preferences over acts in unawareness structures and showing their equivalence to the epistemic notions of unawareness and knowledge, we try to build a bridge between decision theory and epistemic logic. Unawareness of an event is behaviorally characterized as the event being null and its negation being null.unawareness, awareness, knowledge, preferences, subjective expected utility theory, decision theory, null event