The Enhanced Reading Opportunities Study: Early Impact and Implementation Findings

This report presents early findings from a demonstration and random assignment evaluation of two supplemental literacy programs that aim to improve the reading comprehension skills and school performance of struggling ninth-grade readers. On average, the programs produced a positive, statistically significant impact on reading comprehension among students

The Enhanced Reading Opportunities Study: Findings from the Second Year of Implementation

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a majority of ninth-graders in low-performing high schools begin their freshman year with significant reading difficulties. Poor reading ability is a key predictor of academic disengagement and, ultimately, dropping out. This report presents findings from the second year of the Enhanced Reading Opportunities (ERO) study, a demonstration and random assignment evaluation of two supplemental literacy programs -- Reading Apprenticeship Academic Literacy and Xtreme Reading -- that aim to improve the reading comprehension skills and school performance of struggling ninth-grade readers

Promoting the Well-Being of Immigrant Youth

The well-being of immigrant youth — of the first or second generation — is intimately tied up with their socio-economic status and success; in turn, their success and how immigrant youth relate to the society around them are important elements of social cohesion and well-being for those societies. Institutional settings, in relation to immigrants and to Welfare State structures more broadly, as well as the policies adopted within those settings, vary greatly from one developed country to the next. This opens up the potential for studying key outcomes for immigrant youth in a comparative perspective, and learning about which settings and policies appear to be more versus less effective in promoting their well-being and capitalizing on their potential. This paper sets out a framework for such an analytical exercise, drawing on recent research and monitoring efforts in the related areas of multidimensional well-being, social inclusion/exclusion, and child well-being. It then seeks to place some key findings from the disparate social science research literature on immigration and youth (principally drawing on economics and sociology) within that framework. This serves to bring out both the potential and the difficulties associated with this approach to teasing out “what works” for immigrant youth. In conclusion, the paper points to the major gaps in knowledge and what is required to make progress in learning from disparate country experiences about how best to promote the well-being on immigrant youth.

Human Apprenticeship Learning via Kernel-based Inverse Reinforcement Learning

It has been well demonstrated that inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is an effective technique for teaching machines to perform tasks at human skill levels given human demonstrations (i.e., human to machine apprenticeship learning). This paper seeks to show that a similar application can be demonstrated with human learners. That is, given demonstrations from human experts inverse reinforcement learning techniques can be used to teach other humans to perform at higher skill levels (i.e., human to human apprenticeship learning). To show this two experiments were conducted using a simple, real-time web game where players were asked to touch targets in order to earn as many points as possible. For the experiment player performance was defined as the number of targets a player touched, irrespective of the points that a player actually earned. This allowed for in-game points to be modified and the effect of these alterations on performance measured. At no time were participants told the true performance metric. To determine the point modifications IRL was applied on demonstrations of human experts playing the game. The results of the experiment show with significance that performance improved over the control for select treatment groups. Finally, in addition to the experiment, we also detail the algorithmic challenges we faced when conducting the experiment and the techniques we used to overcome them.Comment: 31 pages, 23 figures, Submitted to Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, "for source code, see https://github.com/mrucker/kpirl-kla

Knowledge transfer: Benefits of playing MMORPGS towards enhancing IT managerial skills

This study is concerned with the positive effects, learnability and real-life skill knowledge transfer of commercial off-the-shelf video games.While extensive studies being carried out in exploring skill transfer from virtual world to real world in domains such as education and healthcare, it is felt that further study is needed to explore if these skills can be applied towards enhancing IT managerial skills.The focus of this study is on Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs).MMORPGs are 3D online virtual worlds that allow players to interact with millions of other players through avatars.On the other hand, IT managerial skills definitions are determined by referencing the Skills Framework for Information Age (SFIA), a comprehensive ICT competency framework of nearly 100 IT professional skills.Thus this study is framed around answering the following question: What are the perceptions on the benefits of playing MMORPGs towards enhancing IT managerial skills