Aural modeling and mental representations to elicit young students' metacognitive responses in developing expressivity at the piano

The purpose of this empirical study, whose theoretical framework is based on Bandura’s (1986) social cognitive theory, was to investigate the effectiveness of including a metacognitive approach in teaching expressivity at the piano. The effect of metacognition, combined with that of aural modeling and aesthetic and stylistic mental representations, was assessed regarding the promotion of a higher-order thinking, one that fosters the development of musical expressivity in young pianists. From a social cognitive theory perspective, metacognition is defined as the aptitude to reflect on one’s own thinking to assess and find the most appropriate course of action to control performance of a task (Bandura, 1986; Flavell, 1979). Equally important in the social cognitive theory is the concept of modeling, which is based on the idea that one can learn new skills by observing another individual’s actions. In turn, the mental representations of the observed tasks function to guide the learner’s performance (Bandura, 1986). Results highlighted the central role played by aural modeling. The aesthetic and stylistic mental representations in the metacognitive process allowed young pianists to elicit an expressive musical idiom through a mental conversion process. The constructs of aural modeling and of aesthetic and stylistic mental representations, along with that of musical phraseology, functioned both independently and in conjunction with each other. They provided students with a mechanism with which to reflect on ways to adjust expressivity in their playing. Results also indicated a positive influence of the above constructs on the overall performance of young pianists

Aligning Technology Education Teaching with Brain Development

This exploratory study was designed to determine if there is a level of alignment between technology education curriculum and theories of intellectual development. The researcher compared Epstein\u27s Brain Growth Theory and Piaget\u27s Status of Intellectual Development with technology education curriculum from Australia, England, and the United States. The researcher hypothesized that there would be alignment between technology education curriculum, brain growth, and intellectual development theories. The results indicate that students could become more technologically literate citizens if technology education was presented to them earlier in their school careers. School systems and students may be missing an opportunity since technology education is not offered in most elementary schools

A review of domain adaptation without target labels

Domain adaptation has become a prominent problem setting in machine learning and related fields. This review asks the question: how can a classifier learn from a source domain and generalize to a target domain? We present a categorization of approaches, divided into, what we refer to as, sample-based, feature-based and inference-based methods. Sample-based methods focus on weighting individual observations during training based on their importance to the target domain. Feature-based methods revolve around on mapping, projecting and representing features such that a source classifier performs well on the target domain and inference-based methods incorporate adaptation into the parameter estimation procedure, for instance through constraints on the optimization procedure. Additionally, we review a number of conditions that allow for formulating bounds on the cross-domain generalization error. Our categorization highlights recurring ideas and raises questions important to further research.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figure

Ontology mapping: the state of the art

Ontology mapping is seen as a solution provider in today's landscape of ontology research. As the number of ontologies that are made publicly available and accessible on the Web increases steadily, so does the need for applications to use them. A single ontology is no longer enough to support the tasks envisaged by a distributed environment like the Semantic Web. Multiple ontologies need to be accessed from several applications. Mapping could provide a common layer from which several ontologies could be accessed and hence could exchange information in semantically sound manners. Developing such mapping has beeb the focus of a variety of works originating from diverse communities over a number of years. In this article we comprehensively review and present these works. We also provide insights on the pragmatics of ontology mapping and elaborate on a theoretical approach for defining ontology mapping

Towards a shared ontology: a generic classification of cognitive processes in conceptual design

Towards addressing ontological issues in design cognition research, this paper presents the first generic classification of cognitive processes investigated in protocol studies on conceptual design cognition. The classification is based on a systematic review of 47 studies published over the past 30 years. Three viewpoints on the nature of design cognition are outlined (search, exploration and design activities), highlighting considerable differences in the concepts and terminology applied to describe cognition. To provide a more unified view of the cognitive processes fundamentally under study, we map specific descriptions of cognitive processes provided in protocol studies to more generic, established definitions in the cognitive psychology literature. This reveals a set of 6 categories of cognitive process that appear to be commonly studied and are therefore likely to be prevalent in conceptual design: (1) long-term memory; (2) semantic processing; (3) visual perception; (4) mental imagery processing; (5) creative output production and (6) executive functions. The categories and their constituent processes are formalised in the generic classification. The classification provides the basis for a generic, shared ontology of cognitive processes in design that is conceptually and terminologically consistent with the ontology of cognitive psychology and neuroscience. In addition, the work highlights 6 key avenues for future empirical research: (1) the role of episodic and semantic memory; (2) consistent definitions of semantic processes; (3) the role of sketching from alternative theoretical perspectives on perception and mental imagery; (4) the role of working memory; (5) the meaning and nature of synthesis and (6) unidentified cognitive processes implicated in conceptual design elsewhere in the literature