Moral Turbulence and the Infusion of Multimodal Character Education Strategies in American Elementary Schools

Pockets of American society are marked by increase in violent crime with concurrent decline in moral character. This phenomenon is infiltrating the nation’s school system as evidenced by growing numbers of aggressive incidents in the classroom. As a result, there is an increasingly accepted need for effective character education programs in the schools as a means to help change the décolleté trajectory of the behavior of the nation’s school children. While more money and growing numbers of legislation have been put forth to support such an endeavor, research is still lacking as to what activities, skills, goals, and approaches would be best incorporated for optimal outcomes. This article makes a case for assessing the effectiveness of a multimodal approach incorporating cognitive, social, and sociocultural learning elements is than a single approach using cognitive elements alone, and considers the complexity of a Christian perspective on character education in schools

ProsocialLearn: D2.3 - 1st system requirements and architecture

This document present the first version of the ProsocialLearn architecture covering the principle definition, the requirement collection, the “business”, “information system”, “technology” architecture as defined in the TOGAF methodology

Creative engagement: multimodal digital games in children's learning environment in Macau S.A.R.

One of the biggest challenges that we have encountered, when trying to encourage digital games in schools, is trying to explain what its benefits are in teaching and learning environments. In this pilot experimental study we explore how multimodal audio and visual games can be used in learning environments for children, specifically by fostering creative behaviors through User-Centered design approaches. To achieve this objective, a framework is being developed with multimodal experiences based on flexible design patterns that exploits basic visual and audio elements, allowing children from three to six years of age to play and learn through fun and subsequently trigger creative behaviors. These studies are making use of tangible objects, digital games and mobile platforms. We are making use of commercial digital games to understand and discuss the affordances of these games in an educational environment and how they support creativity in learning.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Convergence of Gamification and Machine Learning: A Systematic Literature Review

Recent developments in human–computer interaction technologies raised the attention towards gamification techniques, that can be defined as using game elements in a non-gaming context. Furthermore, advancement in machine learning (ML) methods and its potential to enhance other technologies, resulted in the inception of a new era where ML and gamification are combined. This new direction thrilled us to conduct a systematic literature review in order to investigate the current literature in the field, to explore the convergence of these two technologies, highlighting their influence on one another, and the reported benefits and challenges. The results of the study reflect the various usage of this confluence, mainly in, learning and educational activities, personalizing gamification to the users, behavioral change efforts, adapting the gamification context and optimizing the gamification tasks. Adding to that, data collection for machine learning by gamification technology and teaching machine learning with the help of gamification were identified. Finally, we point out their benefits and challenges towards streamlining future research endeavors.publishedVersio

ProsocialLearn: D2.5 evaluation strategy and protocols

This document describes the evaluation strategy for the assessment of game effectiveness, market value impact and ethics procedure to drive detailed planning of technical validation, short and longitudinal studies and market viability tests

DeepTMH: Multimodal Semi-supervised framework leveraging Affective and Cognitive engagement for Telemental Health

To aid existing telemental health services, we propose DeepTMH, a novel framework that models telemental health session videos by extracting latent vectors corresponding to Affective and Cognitive features frequently used in psychology literature. Our approach leverages advances in semi-supervised learning to tackle the data scarcity in the telemental health session video domain and consists of a multimodal semi-supervised GAN to detect important mental health indicators during telemental health sessions. We demonstrate the usefulness of our framework and contrast against existing works in two tasks: Engagement regression and Valence-Arousal regression, both of which are important to psychologists during a telemental health session. Our framework reports 40% improvement in RMSE over SOTA method in Engagement Regression and 50% improvement in RMSE over SOTA method in Valence-Arousal Regression. To tackle the scarcity of publicly available datasets in telemental health space, we release a new dataset, MEDICA, for mental health patient engagement detection. Our dataset, MEDICA consists of 1299 videos, each 3 seconds long. To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first method to model telemental health session data based on psychology-driven Affective and Cognitive features, which also accounts for data sparsity by leveraging a semi-supervised setup

The effect of different scripting methods on the process and outcomes of game-based collaborative language learning

Abstract. There has been growing interest in game-based language learning but instead of communicative skills, it mainly targeted vocabulary and grammar which are superficial linguistic skills. On the other hand, collaboration has also been seen as pedagogically beneficial though there is still a question as to what extent teacher’s support in the form of scripting is optimal. Addressing the gaps, this mainly quasi-experimental study was implemented in an English as a second language lesson to examine whether or not role assigning (microscripting) in a game-based collaboration would yield superior results than the condition without such method (macroscripting). To be specific, a narratively rich role-playing game (RPG) was utilized in the game-based learning phase due to its compatibility for language learning, proceeded by literature circle collaboration which had been renowned for its capability to foster not only reading skill but also the affective dimension of learning. Inferential statistics showed that groups treated with microscripting achieved superior reading comprehension, collaborative learning interest and empathy scores. Meanwhile, content analysis revealed that groups assisted by macroscripting could reach higher levels of knowledge construction in their collaboration. Findings, discussion and conclusion in this study have extended the field of game-based collaborative language learning and brought implications for similar future research

Multimodal Dialogue Management for Multiparty Interaction with Infants

We present dialogue management routines for a system to engage in multiparty agent-infant interaction. The ultimate purpose of this research is to help infants learn a visual sign language by engaging them in naturalistic and socially contingent conversations during an early-life critical period for language development (ages 6 to 12 months) as initiated by an artificial agent. As a first step, we focus on creating and maintaining agent-infant engagement that elicits appropriate and socially contingent responses from the baby. Our system includes two agents, a physical robot and an animated virtual human. The system's multimodal perception includes an eye-tracker (measures attention) and a thermal infrared imaging camera (measures patterns of emotional arousal). A dialogue policy is presented that selects individual actions and planned multiparty sequences based on perceptual inputs about the baby's internal changing states of emotional engagement. The present version of the system was evaluated in interaction with 8 babies. All babies demonstrated spontaneous and sustained engagement with the agents for several minutes, with patterns of conversationally relevant and socially contingent behaviors. We further performed a detailed case-study analysis with annotation of all agent and baby behaviors. Results show that the baby's behaviors were generally relevant to agent conversations and contained direct evidence for socially contingent responses by the baby to specific linguistic samples produced by the avatar. This work demonstrates the potential for language learning from agents in very young babies and has especially broad implications regarding the use of artificial agents with babies who have minimal language exposure in early life

“I am most grateful...” using gratitude to improve the sense of relatedness and motivation for online volunteerism

Volunteering benefits those who receive and those who provide help. Yet barriers can inhibit engagement with and motivation for volunteering activities. Online environments on one hand help to lower some of these barriers, but on the other hand they can introduce new obstacles specially when the medium transforms the social interactions important to volunteers. We study the motivational drivers of online volunteering, and how those are affected by design. Specifically, we focus on relatedness as a source of motivation. We describe two studies with volunteers that help medical students to learn and improve their communication skills through mock interviews in an educational program. The volunteers can participate in the program face-to-face or through an online platform. The first study consisted of a survey (n = 66 volunteers), two workshops and one interview (n = 12 volunteers) in which we explored volunteer demographics, motivations, psychological needs, and experiences. Findings suggested relatedness can be an important indicator of volunteer motivations. In the second study, we added a feature to the online platform to display personal gratitude messages from student beneficiaries to the volunteers in order to improve the experience of relatedness between them. In total, n = 30 volunteers completed 196 sessions. We used survey and system data to assess the impact of gratitude on perceived relatedness, motivation, and behavior (immediate, booked, and completed appointments). Results showed that the expression of gratitude by the beneficiary significantly affected the volunteer’s experience of relatedness which then correlated with immediate appointments booking behavior by each volunteer. The implications for design of online volunteering systems are discussed

Enhancing Students’ Motivation in the EFL Classroom Through Life is Strange: A Digital Game-Based Learning Scenario Proposal

Màster Universitari de Formació del Professorat de Secundària Obligatòria i Batxillerat, Facultat d'Educació, Universitat de Barcelona. Curs: 2022-2023. Tutora: Gemma López[eng] This research study introduces a learning scenario integrating the video game Life is Strange (DontNod, 2015) into the English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom. It explores the viability and practicality of incorporating digital game-based instruction into English language learning and investigates its impact on student motivation and engagement. The development and partial implementation of the learning scenario in the 4th of ESO classroom are guided by design principles that align with language learning objectives and follow the task-based supported language teaching (TSLT) methodology. Results indicate that the integration of the video game in the instruction generates a substantial learning experience. Students exhibit increased motivation and engagement, actively participating in the tasks. In conclusion, incorporating the video game Life is Strange into instruction effectively fosters student motivation in English language learning. Further research is needed to explore long-term effects, but video games in education promise to enhance student motivation and create engaging learning experiences.[cat] Aquest estudi de recerca presenta una situació d’aprenentatge que integra el videojoc Life is Strange (DontNod, 2015) a l'aula d'anglès com a llengua estrangera. L'objectiu és explorar la viabilitat per incorporar l'ensenyament basat en jocs digitals en l'aprenentatge de la llengua anglesa i investigar el seu impacte en la motivació dels estudiants. El desenvolupament i la implementació parcial de l'escenari d'aprenentatge a l'aula de 4t d'ESO es guien per uns principis de disseny que s'alineen amb els objectius d'aprenentatge, tot i seguint la metodologia TSLT (task-based language teaching). Els resultats indiquen que la integració del videojoc a la classe genera una experiència d'aprenentatge substancial. Els estudiants mostren una major motivació i compromís, participant activament en les activitats d'aprenentatge. En conclusió, la incorporació del videojoc Life is Strange a l’aula fomenta de manera efectiva la motivació dels estudiants en l'aprenentatge de la llengua anglesa. Es necessiten més investigacions per explorar els efectes a llarg termini, però l'ús de videojocs a l'educació és prometedor per millorar la motivació dels estudiants i crear experiències d'aprenentatge atractives