Language Learning in Interactive Environments

Natural language communication has long been considered a defining characteristic of human intelligence. I am motivated by the question of how learning agents can understand and generate contextually relevant natural language in service of achieving a goal. In pursuit of this objective, I have been studying Interactive Narratives, or text-adventures: simulations in which an agent interacts with the world purely through natural language—"seeing” and “acting upon” the world using textual descriptions and commands. These games are usually structured as puzzles or quests in which a player must complete a sequence of actions to succeed. My work studies two closely related aspects of Interactive Narratives: operating in these environments and creating them in addition to their intersection—each presenting its own set of unique challenges. Operating in these environments presents three challenges: (1) Knowledge representation—an agent must maintain a persistent memory of what it has learned through its experiences with a partially observable world; (2) Commonsense reasoning to endow the agent with priors on how to interact with the world around it; and (3) Scaling to effectively explore sparse-reward, combinatorially-sized natural language state-action spaces. On the other hand, creating these environments can be split into two complementary considerations: (1) World generation, or the problem of creating a world that defines the limits of the actions an agent can perform; and (2) Quest generation, i.e. defining actionable objectives grounded in a given world. I will present my work thus far—showcasing how structured, interpretable data representations in the form of knowledge graphs aid in each of these tasks—in addition to proposing how exactly these two aspects of Interactive Narratives can be combined to improve language learning and generalization across this board of challenges.Ph.D

Natural Language Processing: Emerging Neural Approaches and Applications

This Special Issue highlights the most recent research being carried out in the NLP field to discuss relative open issues, with a particular focus on both emerging approaches for language learning, understanding, production, and grounding interactively or autonomously from data in cognitive and neural systems, as well as on their potential or real applications in different domains

FROM MY SIDE OF THE SCREEN: A HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGICAL STUDY OF OLDER TEACHERS, ADMINISTRATORS, TECHNOLOGY COORDINATORS, AND THEIR EXPERIENCES WITH THE IMPLEMENTATION OF TECHNOLOGY IN RURAL WEST TENNESSEE SCHOOLS

This hermeneutic phenomenological study centered on the lived experiences of older teachers, administrators, and technology coordinators as they navigate the acquiring, teaching, learning, using, and evaluating of technological resources in the classroom. In particular, this study sought to understand this phenomenon through the eyes of the participants as they interact with teachers with 20 or more years of teaching experience in two rural West Tennessee school districts. Using social learning theory as the backbone of analysis, I had nine participants engage in three in-depth interviews each. The first interview acquired background and foundational knowledge in relation to the use of technology and its use in education by the participants; the second interview looked more closely at the experiences that participants have in relation to the phenomenon; and the third interview gave the participants the opportunity to reflect on their experiences in order to expose deeper meaning for analysis. I also kept a journal of notes and thoughts throughout the process, and participants had opportunities to review transcripts and annotation and make changes to ensure clarity and accuracy of voice.Data was input into NVivo 11 and was coded using the participants own thoughts. Through this process four major themes emerged: (a) the need for connection and understanding, (b) the availability of resources and training, (c) the catalyst of pressure and expectation, and (d) the importance of time. Afterward, these themes were linked with existing literature to explore gaps in the research and potential for future exploration

Leading, learning, and teaching: an exploration of instructor leadership in a retention intervention program

There is a distressing dilemma in higher education concerning the increase in student attrition rates (Angelino, Williams, & Natvig, 2007; Hagedorn, 2006; Kramer, 2007; Lau, 2003, Seidman, 2005; Tinto, 2006). The seminal query of this study asks what higher education institutions are doing to effectively retain these students and secure student success. At a public university in the southeastern part of the United States, appreciative advising is utilized as a teaching strategy in a retention intervention program to answer this question. Developed as a theoretical framework by academic advisors where focus is on a student's strengths instead of on weaknesses (Bloom & Martin, 2002), appreciative advising was integrated into a curriculum designed to empower students to recover and retain academic good standing (Bloom, Hutson, & He, 2008; Bloom, Hutson, He, & Robinson, 2011; Hutson, 2006). This empowerment suggests a relationship between classroom instructor leadership and student self-leadership. The purpose of this study was to explore the perceptions of classroom instructors and how they describe their teaching experiences in this retention intervention program. The researcher desired to know how these classroom instructors perceived their role, experienced instructional leadership, and sought to facilitate self-leadership in their students. Specifically, how an appreciative mindset inspired transformational leadership, encouraged transformational teaching, and aspired to impact transformational learning. Utilizing a qualitative instrumental case study design and applying an interpretivist research paradigm, a total of eleven past and current instructors were interviewed employing online Email and Instant Messaging (IM)/Chat as a means of data collection (Briggs & Coleman, 2007). Unfortunately, the data analyses revealed 9 of the 11 instructors were neither familiar with the core principles of appreciative advising nor understand its relevancy to the retention intervention program. However, the data analyses also indicated the majority of instructors did perceive their role as influencing positive change in the attitudes and behaviors of their students regardless of this deficiency in their knowledge base. This evidenced an intuitive and deductive acknowledgment of appreciative advising in the instructors' teaching experience that innately supported an appreciative mindset. It is through the participants' appreciative mindset that appreciative advising and instructor leadership are explored. Several themes emerged from the data relative to leading, learning, teaching, and the appreciative mindset. These themes reflect the instructors' perceptions of their teaching experiences and student learning: (a) a sense of responsibility central to their desire to impact student success; (b) leadership defined as guiding versus influencing: (c) engaging with students in reflection a primary teaching strategy; (d) belief that student self-awareness contributes to empowerment resulting in self-appreciation; (e) opinion that owning the circumstances of their academic probationary status allows students to practice self-leadership. However, one major theme emerged: leading, learning, and teaching are all relational. This study suggests the integration of appreciative advising with instructional leadership may contribute to enhanced learning experiences for students in pedagogical contexts and increase undergraduate student retention

Impact Of The Future Project On Student Motivation: Meeting Basic Psychological Needs To Improve Academic Dispositions

Student motivation in high school is a long-standing topic of interest considering the widespread problem of low academic engagement and relatively high dropout rates, which are predicted by low attendance. This prevailing problem is indicative that previous interventions have not been sufficient. One hypothesis is that interventions may be too targeted towards outcomes and neglect what motivation researchers in psychology have learned over decades. Motivation researchers, specifically self-determination theorists, have identified three underlying psychological needs (autonomy, competence, relatedness) that are critical to fostering intrinsic motivation. This study hypothesizes that these needs are not being met in the school setting even when academic interventions are present. This study will explore how a new intervention, The Future Project, that is not directly academic in nature but as a Positive Youth Development program may proactively foster these psychological needs and could be more effective in enhancing high school student academic motivation. The programming includes four facets: building one-on-one relationships between a student and mentor, exposing students to skill building courses, supporting students individually to design projects that they are passionate about and that have an impact on the world in some way, and it develops an intimate team of students who serve as collaborative leaders in their schools to support each other and their peers in self-reflection or personal project development. This is a mixed methods phenomenological study using secondary data analysis of student and alumni interviews, principal and teacher surveys, and teacher interviews. All data was collected by The Future Project in Spring 2016 to explore the student experience when participating in The Future Project programming and to gather feedback from students, teachers, and administrators. This study will use this data to explore how participating in The Future Project may contribute to fulfilling students’ needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness; and how that influences student academic motivation and engagement, which have previously been determined as precursors to academic achievement; and to illustrate the mechanisms that connect autonomy, competence, and relatedness with academic motivation and engagement

Research portfolio

1. The contextual analysis and curriculum evaluation. This paper ... aims to investigate the Upper Primary Education Curriculum with specific emphasis on the subject syllabus for English Grades 5- 7. The paper shall attempt to look at the rationale, goals and aims as well as the learning content located in this subject curriculum. It will further investigate the sociohistoric and economic context in which this curriculum has been designed; the learners for whom the curriculum is designed and the learning environment in which the curriculum is presented. 2. The epistemological foundation of the reform process. This paper attempts to explore the theory of knowledge that underpins the practices of behaviourism and constructivism. 3. The literature review. The purpose of this literature review is to examine the effect of methodology in teaching English as a second language in primary schools. It is to find out the ways of teaching English that can produce good results. It is also to find the styles of teaching English as a second language that make some teachers less effective so that such teaching styles can be discouraged. When English was introduced as the medium of instruction in Namibian schools, primary school teachers were retrained and upgraded. 4. The research proposal. The aim of the proposed study is to explore a selection of learners' perceptions of ESL classroom teaching and learning activities. Through this it is hoped to cause greater illumination on the nature of learning and teaching English. 5. The empirical study (research paper). This interpretative case study hoped to find out from learners themselves about their perceptions of ESL classroom teaching and learning activities. A variety of research tools were used, including questionnaires, interviews, observations, interactive workshops and focus group discussions, all of which provided a rich source of data for interpretation. The research findings of this study clearly indicated that there is a mismatch between the teachers and learners' perceptions about the language skills and tasks encountered in the classrooms. From what was gained from the participants in this research, tentative suggestions are made

Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Production Systems and Logistics (CPSL 2021)

Proceedings of the CPSL 202