Integration of Reciprocal Teaching-ICT Model To Improve Students’Mathematics Critical Thinking Ability

This research examines the effectiveness on how mathematics teachers have begun to integrate information and communication technology (ICT) with reciprocal teaching model to improve students’ mathematics critical thinking ability into seventh junior high school classroom practice. This study was experimental research with a quasi-experimental design. The samples of the study are 36 students for classroom experiments and 36 students for classroom control. The instruments employed in this study were pre-test and post-test. All the instruments are made in essays forms. The data were analyzed by using descriptive statistics. Based on the research findings, it was gotten that (1) the development of teaching instructional multimedia of the seven grade students of junior high school; (2) the improvement of students’ mathematics critical thinking ability in experimental class; (3) the aspect of attractiveness shows that the developed instructional multimedia was very interesting; and (4) reciprocal learning has good impact on students’ mathematics critical thinking ability

Enhancing Free-text Interactions in a Communication Skills Learning Environment

Learning environments frequently use gamification to enhance user interactions.Virtual characters with whom players engage in simulated conversations often employ prescripted dialogues; however, free user inputs enable deeper immersion and higher-order cognition. In our learning environment, experts developed a scripted scenario as a sequence of potential actions, and we explore possibilities for enhancing interactions by enabling users to type free inputs that are matched to the pre-scripted statements using Natural Language Processing techniques. In this paper, we introduce a clustering mechanism that provides recommendations for fine-tuning the pre-scripted answers in order to better match user inputs

Multimedia Development of English Vocabulary Learning in Primary School

In this paper, we describe a prototype of web-based intelligent handwriting education system for autonomous learning of Bengali characters. Bengali language is used by more than 211 million people of India and Bangladesh. Due to the socio-economical limitation, all of the population does not have the chance to go to school. This research project was aimed to develop an intelligent Bengali handwriting education system. As an intelligent tutor, the system can automatically check the handwriting errors, such as stroke production errors, stroke sequence errors, stroke relationship errors and immediately provide a feedback to the students to correct themselves. Our proposed system can be accessed from smartphone or iPhone that allows students to do practice their Bengali handwriting at anytime and anywhere. Bengali is a multi-stroke input characters with extremely long cursive shaped where it has stroke order variability and stroke direction variability. Due to this structural limitation, recognition speed is a crucial issue to apply traditional online handwriting recognition algorithm for Bengali language learning. In this work, we have adopted hierarchical recognition approach to improve the recognition speed that makes our system adaptable for web-based language learning. We applied writing speed free recognition methodology together with hierarchical recognition algorithm. It ensured the learning of all aged population, especially for children and older national. The experimental results showed that our proposed hierarchical recognition algorithm can provide higher accuracy than traditional multi-stroke recognition algorithm with more writing variability

ICS Materials. Towards a re-Interpretation of material qualities through interactive, connected, and smart materials.

The domain of materials for design is changing under the influence of an increased technological advancement, miniaturization and democratization. Materials are becoming connected, augmented, computational, interactive, active, responsive, and dynamic. These are ICS Materials, an acronym that stands for Interactive, Connected and Smart. While labs around the world are experimenting with these new materials, there is the need to reflect on their potentials and impact on design. This paper is a first step in this direction: to interpret and describe the qualities of ICS materials, considering their experiential pattern, their expressive sensorial dimension, and their aesthetic of interaction. Through case studies, we analyse and classify these emerging ICS Materials and identified common characteristics, and challenges, e.g. the ability to change over time or their programmability by the designers and users. On that basis, we argue there is the need to reframe and redesign existing models to describe ICS materials, making their qualities emerge

A complex systems approach to education in Switzerland

The insights gained from the study of complex systems in biological, social, and engineered systems enables us not only to observe and understand, but also to actively design systems which will be capable of successfully coping with complex and dynamically changing situations. The methods and mindset required for this approach have been applied to educational systems with their diverse levels of scale and complexity. Based on the general case made by Yaneer Bar-Yam, this paper applies the complex systems approach to the educational system in Switzerland. It confirms that the complex systems approach is valid. Indeed, many recommendations made for the general case have already been implemented in the Swiss education system. To address existing problems and difficulties, further steps are recommended. This paper contributes to the further establishment complex systems approach by shedding light on an area which concerns us all, which is a frequent topic of discussion and dispute among politicians and the public, where billions of dollars have been spent without achieving the desired results, and where it is difficult to directly derive consequences from actions taken. The analysis of the education system's different levels, their complexity and scale will clarify how such a dynamic system should be approached, and how it can be guided towards the desired performance

ASYMMETRY INFORMATION: INVESTORS TRUST REFLECTION TOWARD QUALITY OF EARNINGS

This article aims to describe the investors' trust toward quality of earnings reflection proxied by earnings response coeffisient (ERC). The study was conducted on 296 manufacturing companies that meet the criteria of observations in 2011 to 2015. The variables used in this research is the board of directors, audit comitee, the independent board as exogenous variables, information asymmetry as an intervening variable and earnings response coeffisient (ERC) as an endogenous variable by means of persistency as control variables. The board of directors and the independent board in this article as a proxy of corporate governance show the effect on the information gap represented by information asymmetry, while the audit comitee Showed the opposite effect. Information gaps provide explanatory power on the reflection of investor confidence in the quality of earnings that are Reported company

Locals, New-locals, Non-locals: (Re)mapping people and food in post-disaster Ishinomaki, Japan

This thesis is an ethnographically informed analysis of the transformations undergone by the practices of consumption, distribution, and discourse production of local seafood after the Great East Japan Disaster of 2011 in the municipality of Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. Drawing from data collected during a 12 month fieldwork in Miyagi and Tōkyō, I individuate three classes of actors (locals, new-locals, non-locals) whose activities contribute to the changes in the imagery about seafood and its producers; and two movements: one centrifugal, along which food leaves Ishinomaki to reach Tōkyō, the capital, and one centripetal, followed by visitors and tourists who come to Ishinomaki to experience its food, among the other attractions. In this thesis the study of disasters and their consequences on human society, and the study of food as a fundamental instrument of signification and negotiation of locality, converge to produce a novel interpretative frame through which I look at the transformations of Ishinomaki as a dialogic process that embeds the 2011 disaster in the wider historical perspective of the Japanese Northeast (Tōhoku) as a politically subaltern region. Locals, new-locals and non-locals inscribe in this stratified horizon their values, projects and hopes, creatively re-negotiating the meanings of locality, sociality, and civic subjectivity through seafood such as oysters (kaki), scallops (hotate) and sea-squirts (hoya). This intensive work of inscription, in turn, causes the lives and experiences of individuals to ‘stick’ to the seafood as it circulates, generating a network from which emerges images of young, enterprising fishermen and domestic immigrants, striving against a conservative past in order to build new social spaces out of the tsunami debris