Making the Case for the Systematic Observation of Language and Reading: A Reading Comprehension Measure Inclusive of Students with Disabilities

The purpose of this literature synthesis is to examine the empirical literature on comprehension measures used in studies of reading interventions for students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and low IQ. Sixteen studies met inclusion criteria for this review. All studies were experimental, included a measure of reading comprehension, and sampled participants with ASD and low IQ (i.e., at least one standard deviation below the mean). The focus of this synthesis is on the comprehension measures used in the interventions, including type of measure and comprehension construct assessed through the measure. Results indicate that most of the studies included measures of comprehension that the researchers created for their study, while a few researchers relied on published measures. Additionally, among the assessments, five different comprehension behaviors were assessed: passage reading comprehension, supported passage reading comprehension, sentence/phrase comprehension, listening comprehension, and literacy engagement. The measures and the comprehension behaviors they assessed are discussed in detail. Implications for research and practice involving reading comprehension measures to inform research on reading interventions for individuals with ASD and low IQ are also discussed. Key words: autism spectrum disorder, low IQ, reading comprehension, comprehension measure(s), comprehension behavior(s

‘Searching for District 9 in the Archives: archaeology of a transmedia Campaign’

Film marketing materials have conventionally been regarded as both ephemera and ephemeral but in a digital environment they have become increasingly significant colonising the spaces before, between and beyond the film itself. Indeed the distinctions between promotion and content have become so blurred that, arguably, marketing campaigns have become as entertaining as the films they promote, raising questions about the cultural value of such ephemera. This project set out to examine what transmedia contributes to the narrative ecology of the film and took the award winning campaign designed by the marketing agency, Trigger for Neil Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009) as a starting point. But the research did not get off to an auspicious start because shortly after the project began, the site disappeared. This paper will give an account of a media archaeological excavation to find for District 9’s web campaign. During the search archival sites encountered included institutions set up with the aim of preservation such as the Internet Archive, commercial archives such as the Webby awards as well the ‘new’ generation of web 2.0 archives – a personal blog, YouTube and social media sites. In the light of this, the paper will then reflect on what the German media theorist Wolfgang Ernst referred to as the ‘machine perspective’ and how the mechanisms of the digital archives condition the way we know things about the recent digital past. It will conclude by suggesting that these archival encounters in this research project revealed as much about the nature of digital archives as the film transmediation.Non peer reviewe

How do short videos influence users’ behavioral intentions?

Short videos have become an essential tool for marketing tourism destinations. However, the impact of the characteristics of characters appearing in short videos on viewers\u27 travel intentions has not been adequately explored. To address this research gap, this study uses narrative transportation theory, self-congruity theory, and place attachment theory to investigate the impact of short tourism videos on tourist behavioral intentions. The study employs the SEM method to analyze the influence paths empirically. The results indicate that the vlogger-self congruity and role-self congruity significantly impact the destination image at the person-person relationship construction level. At the human-place relationship construction level, destination image-self congruity directly influences the behavioral intentions of potential tourists. Furthermore, place attachment mediates this effect and creates two influence paths. This study provides a new framework for understanding short-video intention research and enriches studying the human-place relationship in the new media era

Designing Professional Learning Tasks for Mathematics Learning Trajectories

In this paper, we present an emerging set of learning conjectures and design principles to be used in the development of professional learning tasks that support elementary teachers’ learning of mathematics learning trajectories. We outline our theoretical perspective on teacher knowledge of learning trajectories, review the literature concerning mathematics professional learning tasks, offer a set of initial conjectures about teacher learning of learning trajectories, and articulate a set of principles to guide the design of tasks. We conclude with an example of one learning trajectory professional learning task taken from our current research project

Object, space and the museum : a semiotic approach

This paper discusses the object in a museum context and the different ways in which space is used within the museum paradigm. The aim of the paper is to enable a wide vision of the different ways in which a museum signifies.peer-reviewe

Learning to communicate computationally with Flip: a bi-modal programming language for game creation

Teaching basic computational concepts and skills to school children is currently a curricular focus in many countries. Running parallel to this trend are advances in programming environments and teaching methods which aim to make computer science more accessible, and more motivating. In this paper, we describe the design and evaluation of Flip, a programming language that aims to help 11–15 year olds develop computational skills through creating their own 3D role-playing games. Flip has two main components: 1) a visual language (based on an interlocking blocks design common to many current visual languages), and 2) a dynamically updating natural language version of the script under creation. This programming-language/natural-language pairing is a unique feature of Flip, designed to allow learners to draw upon their familiarity with natural language to “decode the code”. Flip aims to support young people in developing an understanding of computational concepts as well as the skills to use and communicate these concepts effectively. This paper investigates the extent to which Flip can be used by young people to create working scripts, and examines improvements in their expression of computational rules and concepts after using the tool. We provide an overview of the design and implementation of Flip before describing an evaluation study carried out with 12–13 year olds in a naturalistic setting. Over the course of 8 weeks, the majority of students were able to use Flip to write small programs to bring about interactive behaviours in the games they created. Furthermore, there was a significant improvement in their computational communication after using Flip (as measured by a pre/post-test). An additional finding was that girls wrote more, and more complex, scripts than did boys, and there was a trend for girls to show greater learning gains relative to the boys

Motivation and Learning in an Online Collaborative Project Using Gamification

In 2012, there were 2.9 million students enrolled in graduate degrees and 22% were taking strictly online courses (Kena et al., 2014). Many students are not motivated to participate in collaborative learning experiences in online courses (Dirkx & Smith, 2004). Gamification, the inclusion of game elements in non-game contexts, has been shown to have a positive impact on motivation (Deterding, 2012; Kapp, 2012). Prior work has focused on structural gamification including elements such as points, levels, and badges as extrinsic motivators to traditional course activities. The current study explored content gamification including narrative, role-play, interactivity, and feedback in an online collaborative learning environment. Thirty-nine master’s degree students enrolled in an online educational technology program participated in a six-week, collaborative project as part of their online research methods course. Within two sections of a research methods course, students were randomly assigned to either a collaborative project with no gamification or a collaborative project with gamification. Outcome measures included motivation, learning, and student perceptions. Results were not statistically significant but indicated a trend for increased motivation, higher levels of satisfaction with the collaborative experience, and greater improvement from pre- to posttest scores among those experiencing the gamified treatment. Discussion will focus on considerations for utilizing specific types of gamification in online collaborative projects

Studying soap operas

This present issue of Communication Research Trends will focus on research about soap operas published in the last 15 years, that is, from the year 2000 to the present. This more recent research shows one key difference: the interest in soap opera has become worldwide. This appears in the programs that people listen to or watch and in communication researchers who themselves come from different countries