Undergraduates’ Perceptions of Ideal Learning Environments

Four hundred and fifty three undergraduate students were surveyed at one CCCU institution regarding perceptions of what “exists” and what they “value” related to university pedagogy, learning activities, assessments, and learning relationships. Researchers ranked students’ values and examined gaps in students’ perceptions of what students say exists at the university as compared to what they value. The highest ranked values primarily related to learning relationships, including “demonstrates Christian ethics in interactions with others” and “integrates Christian worldview in the teaching of course content.” The factor that most explained satisfaction with teaching practices was the “Methods Factor” and the single item that most explained student satisfaction with teaching practices was, “provides interesting lessons.

Continuance theory and teacher education

Continuance theory is usually related to the regular use of technology in the business/industry area. It attempts to explain why people either continue to use specific technologies in their work, or not. Essentially, it links to the perceived value to individuals‟ ability to work effectively, however that is understood in their workplace. In the profession of education, particularly schools and teacher education, the perceived value of continued use is not about individuals and their work, but about individuals‟ work with groups of students and what happens to learning when these digital technologies are used. Continued use is contingent on their students‟ positive responses to these technologies supporting learning. I examine, in the light of continuance theory, what happens when student teachers in an initial secondary teacher education programme report on including digital technologies on practicum. This includes reporting on the effect students‟ responses have on their subsequent attitudes and practices regarding digital technologies in learning contexts

Making real the learning to learn (L2L) rhetoric embedded in an ITE learning and teaching strategy

Building on current research at Chester into the promotion of reflection as a tool for helping students to become more strategically aware of their learning, the project explores the value of introducing college tutors to ideas about learning to learn in its broader sense. Emphasis will be placed upon Claxton's 4Rs: resilience; resourcefulness; reflectiveness and reciprocity as a model of what good learning does look like (Smith, 2004

Deciding What to Model: Value-Equivalent Sampling for Reinforcement Learning

The quintessential model-based reinforcement-learning agent iteratively refines its estimates or prior beliefs about the true underlying model of the environment. Recent empirical successes in model-based reinforcement learning with function approximation, however, eschew the true model in favor of a surrogate that, while ignoring various facets of the environment, still facilitates effective planning over behaviors. Recently formalized as the value equivalence principle, this algorithmic technique is perhaps unavoidable as real-world reinforcement learning demands consideration of a simple, computationally-bounded agent interacting with an overwhelmingly complex environment, whose underlying dynamics likely exceed the agent's capacity for representation. In this work, we consider the scenario where agent limitations may entirely preclude identifying an exactly value-equivalent model, immediately giving rise to a trade-off between identifying a model that is simple enough to learn while only incurring bounded sub-optimality. To address this problem, we introduce an algorithm that, using rate-distortion theory, iteratively computes an approximately-value-equivalent, lossy compression of the environment which an agent may feasibly target in lieu of the true model. We prove an information-theoretic, Bayesian regret bound for our algorithm that holds for any finite-horizon, episodic sequential decision-making problem. Crucially, our regret bound can be expressed in one of two possible forms, providing a performance guarantee for finding either the simplest model that achieves a desired sub-optimality gap or, alternatively, the best model given a limit on agent capacity.Comment: Accepted to Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 202

Profiling the educational value of computer games

There are currently a number of suggestions for educators to include computer games in formal teaching and learning contexts. Educational value is based on claims that games promote the development of complex learning. Very little research, however, has explored what features should be present in a computer game to make it valuable or conducive to learning. We present a list of required features for an educational game to be of value, informed by two studies, which integrated theories of Learning Environments and Learning Styles. A user survey showed that some requirements were typical of games in a particular genre, while other features were present across all genres. The paper concludes with a proposed framework of games and features within and across genres to assist in the design and selection of games for a given educational scenari

Enhancing the design curriculum through pedagogic research

Pedagogic research is becoming increasingly recognised as an important aspect of academic life. Many generic studies (Marton, Saljo, Entwistle, Biggs, Gibbs, Prosser, Trigwell et al), focusing on broad concepts of student learning, have found a purchase within particular disciplines. Concepts of 'deep' and 'surface' approaches to learning are now commonplace within subject-based rationales. Approaches to assessment have also benefited from research of this kind. The value of this kind of research is most pertinent when it is used at subject level to explore the learning and teaching axis. Subject-focused research, using these established frameworks and methodologies, is only just beginning to emerge. Inevitably, the application of this new research is not so widespread. Subject-based research asks the questions about what it is that is characteristic about learning and teaching a particular subject. Recent research in creative subjects (Reid A, 1998 and Reid A and Davies A, 2000) has revealed that the quality of learning is predicated on how both students and teachers conceptualise the subject of study. In design, for instance, what teachers think design is determines how they frame the curriculum and how they go about teaching. Equally, students beliefs about what design is underpin their intentions when they go about learning. The research reveals that there are significant qualitative differences amongst teachers as well as students as to what design is. This has an impact on the quality of the outcomes of learning design. This paper explores the implications of the outcomes of thi

CURIOUS: Intrinsically Motivated Modular Multi-Goal Reinforcement Learning

In open-ended environments, autonomous learning agents must set their own goals and build their own curriculum through an intrinsically motivated exploration. They may consider a large diversity of goals, aiming to discover what is controllable in their environments, and what is not. Because some goals might prove easy and some impossible, agents must actively select which goal to practice at any moment, to maximize their overall mastery on the set of learnable goals. This paper proposes CURIOUS, an algorithm that leverages 1) a modular Universal Value Function Approximator with hindsight learning to achieve a diversity of goals of different kinds within a unique policy and 2) an automated curriculum learning mechanism that biases the attention of the agent towards goals maximizing the absolute learning progress. Agents focus sequentially on goals of increasing complexity, and focus back on goals that are being forgotten. Experiments conducted in a new modular-goal robotic environment show the resulting developmental self-organization of a learning curriculum, and demonstrate properties of robustness to distracting goals, forgetting and changes in body properties.Comment: Accepted at ICML 201