540 research outputs found

    Towards a Design Framework for Adaptable Reconfigurable Virtual Learning Environments

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    Technology is giving us new ways to interact with our world and this offers us unprecedented access to knowledge. To benefit from this access, we may need new ways to interact with subject matter, and it may be helpful to match the affordances of technology to the learning affordances of our minds. One possible approach to this problem is to leverage our natural environmental awareness. Humans are a successful species because we adapt so well to our environment, and adaptation is the focus of this research, which uses computer science to design a language teaching tool. The research is intended to further the development of virtual reality teaching environments by proposing a design framework created to manage changes in a virtual world. Subsequently, a virtual world based on the framework was created, and used to teach a language concept, the English preposition “over”. A serious game created on two platforms, one PC, and the other Virtual Reality, was used to deliver the teaching challenges based on the different meanings of the preposition, and tests before and after the use of the game were used to measure improvements in learning outcomes. The PC game had both an adaptive and static environment, and the VR game had an adaptive environment. The research found that the VR game resulted in the strongest effect on learning outcomes. The VR environment challenge which used a “sorting” mechanic resulted in a statistically significant change in test scores as did the “ordering” mechanic in the PC Static environment. Both had a medium effect on scores. The research also found that the actions taken inside the environments were not affected by profile differences such as age, gender, English proficiency, or role. The test scores for the meanings “Cover”, “Excess”, and “Temporal”, all showed improvement in post-test scores, however, the effect size was small, and not likely to be significant. Further study comparing Static VR platforms with adaptive VR platforms as well as mechanic-specific research is needed

    Temporal disambiguation of relative temporal expressions in clinical texts using temporally fine-tuned contextual word embeddings.

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    Temporal reasoning is the ability to extract and assimilate temporal information to reconstruct a series of events such that they can be reasoned over to answer questions involving time. Temporal reasoning in the clinical domain is challenging due to specialized medical terms and nomenclature, shorthand notation, fragmented text, a variety of writing styles used by different medical units, redundancy of information that has to be reconciled, and an increased number of temporal references as compared to general domain texts. Work in the area of clinical temporal reasoning has progressed, but the current state-of-the-art still has a ways to go before practical application in the clinical setting will be possible. Much of the current work in this field is focused on direct and explicit temporal expressions and identifying temporal relations. However, there is little work focused on relative temporal expressions, which can be difficult to normalize, but are vital to ordering events on a timeline. This work introduces a new temporal expression recognition and normalization tool, Chrono, that normalizes temporal expressions into both SCATE and TimeML schemes. Chrono advances clinical timeline extraction as it is capable of identifying more vague and relative temporal expressions than the current state-of-the-art and utilizes contextualized word embeddings from fine-tuned BERT models to disambiguate temporal types, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on relative temporal expressions. In addition, this work shows that fine-tuning BERT models on temporal tasks modifies the contextualized embeddings so that they achieve improved performance in classical SVM and CNN classifiers. Finally, this works provides a new tool for linking temporal expressions to events or other entities by introducing a novel method to identify which tokens an entire temporal expression is paying the most attention to by summarizing the attention weight matrices output by BERT models

    The Interplay Between Child and Maternal Health: Reciprocal Relationships and Cumulative Disadvantage During Childhood and Adolescence

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    While many studies use parental socioeconomic status and health to predict children’s health, this study examines the interplay over time between child and maternal health across childhood and adolescence. Using data from women in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 cohort and their children (N = 2,225), autoregressive cross-lagged models demonstrate a reciprocal relationship between child activity limitations and maternal health limitations in direct effects of child activity limitations on maternal health limitations two years later and vice versa—net of a range of health-relevant time-varying and time-invariant covariates. Furthermore, there are indirect effects of child activity limitations on subsequent maternal health limitations and indirect effects of maternal health limitations on subsequent child activity limitations via intervening health statuses. This study examines how the interplay between child and maternal health unfolds over time and describes how these interdependent statuses jointly experience health disadvantages

    Ill-Timed: The Effect of Early Chronic Illness Onset on Young Adult Psychosocial Development

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    Chronic illness affects nearly half of all American adults, yet this experience is often regarded as socially normative for older adults. In this study, I examined chronic illness onset early in the life course and its effects on mastery, a person’s self-perception as capable of coping with and managing life’s circumstances, and depressive symptoms as informed by the life course perspective and the stress process model. Using multilevel modeling of American Changing Lives Survey (ACLS) data, I examined the following questions: What is the relationship between early onset chronic illness and mastery? Second, what is the relationship between early onset chronic illness and depressive symptoms? Does mastery mediate the relationship between early onset chronic illness and depressive symptoms? Is early onset chronic illness (24-35) more strongly associated with decreased mastery and increased depressive symptoms than illness onset at the more socially normative life stages of mid-life (36-64) and late-life (65 years and older)? Lastly, does mastery mediate or moderate the relationship between timing of illness onset and depressive symptoms? Through this study, I aim to contribute to sociological knowledge of whether and how chronic illness impacts mastery and depression among young adults. I argue that ill-timed chronic illness impacts young adults’ sense of control over their lives, which has enduring psychological and social consequences. Findings support that healthy and chronically ill young adults do not significantly differ on mastery, but ill young adults report significantly higher depressive symptoms than healthy same age peers. Mastery moderates the effects of timing of illness onset on depressive symptoms with older adults reaping greater benefit from mastery against depressive symptoms than young adults with early onset illness. These findings suggest that early onset chronic illness positions people at greater risk for poor mental health outcomes and that the chronic illness experience and its effects are not uniform across the life course. Consequently, work in this area must consider age as an important context in which the life event of chronic illness onset occurs

    The Social Costs of Gender Nonconformity for Transgender Adults: Implications for Discrimination and Health

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    Research suggests that transgender people face high levels of discrimination in society, which may contribute to their disproportionate risk for poor health. However, little is known about whether gender nonconformity, as a visible marker of one’s stigmatized status as a transgender individual, heightens trans people’s experiences with discrimination and, in turn, their health. Using data from the largest survey of transgender adults in the United States, the National Transgender Discrimination Survey (N = 4,115), we examine the associations among gender nonconformity, transphobic discrimination, and health-harming behaviors (i.e., attempted suicide, drug/alcohol abuse, and smoking). The results suggest that gender nonconforming trans people face more discrimination and, in turn, are more likely to engage in health-harming behaviors than trans people who are gender conforming. Our findings highlight the important role of gender nonconformity in the social experiences and well-being of transgender people

    Understanding Depressive Symptoms among High-Risk Pregnant African American Women

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    Much has been written about depression and its risk factors, particularly among women. However, a growing body of literature on prenatal depression has begun to emerge, given that depression during pregnancy presents a major public health concern, since it is found to be a common experience among childbearing aged women (Gaynes et al., 2005; Marcus, 2009). In fact, the onset of depressive symptoms is most likely to occur between 20 to 40 years of age, the range when most women become pregnant (Marcus & Heringhausen, 2009). Further, prior studies have found rates of depression among pregnant women to range from ten to thirty percent (Gotlieb et al., 1989; Kurki et al., 2002). Importantly, depression during pregnancy can have adverse effects not only for the mother, but the unborn child as well. For example, it has been noted that depressive symptoms can lead to an increased risk for negative birth outcomes such as low birth weight and preterm delivery (Marcus, 2009; Marcus & Heringhausen, 2009), and can also result in serious effects after pregnancy, including the mother’s own psychosocial functioning, poor mother-child relation, and the psychosocial development of the child (Boyd, Zayas, & McKee, 2006; Cicchetti, Rogosch, & Toth, 1998; Downey & Coyne, 1990). Therefore, the goal of this paper was to examinesociodemographic, psychosocial, and behavioral factors that influence depressive symptoms among high-risk African American pregnant women

    Financial strain and worry about retirement income adequacy

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    Doctor of PhilosophySchool of Family Studies and Human ServicesMaurice M. MacDonaldWorry about running out of money in retirement (hereinafter referred to as retirement worry) is Americans’ number one financial worry since 2001 (Gallup, 2018a, 2018b, 2019). Increasing frequency and intensity of worry is associated with negative psychological outcomes and impaired cognitive functioning. The overall aim of the present study was to advance the conceptual and empirical understanding of retirement worry. Drawing from worry and stress literature, and theoretically grounded in the Tallis and Eysenck (1994) worry model, the present study utilized partial proportional-odds cumulative logit models and positioned financial strain, financial resources, personal resources, coping strategies (i.e., calculating retirement savings and foregoing medical care), and “coping strategy × financial strain” interactions as key variables in understanding the psychological mechanisms behind retirement worry. Cross-sectional data consisted of survey responses from a nationally representative sample of 13,919 non-retired adults, aged 18 to 64 drawn from the 2018 National Financial Capability Study State-by-State survey. The results surprisingly indicated that financial resources were positively associated with retirement worry while personal resources were negatively associated with retirement worry. Coping strategies had significant but mixed associations with retirement worry. Specifically, calculating retirement savings was negatively associated with retirement worry while foregoing medical care was positively associated with retirement worry. The results underscored the moderating role of coping strategies in the retirement worry process. First, calculating retirement savings exacerbated the effects of financial strain on retirement worry at higher levels of financial strain and mitigated the effects of financial strain on retirement worry at lower levels of financial strain. Second, foregoing medical care exacerbated the effects of financial strain on retirement worry at all levels of financial strain. The conceptual model for retirement worry developed was largely supported which helps to advance the conceptual and empirical understanding of retirement worry. Results from the present study contribute to the literature on retirement worry and financial well-being and should be of interest to policymakers, financial and mental health professionals, companies, and other researchers
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