172 research outputs found
Uncovering the Myths of Shared Reading English Picture Books for Chinese Families: A Narrative Inquiry
This doctoral research explored the experiences of Chinese parents in parent-child shared reading on English picture books (EPBs). It was unique in its approach, taking the perspective and standpoint of the parents as the research stance, and was one of the few studies in the existing literature to do so. The Narrative Inquiry proposed by Polkinghorne (1995) was adopted to explore Chinese parents\u27 voices, especially the unspoken ones. The study aimed to learn from Chinese parents\u27 experiences, provided valuable insights into their reflections and expectations of their family literacy activities, and contributed to the limited research on English family literacy in the Chinese context.
The findings of this study suggest that, in the current Chinese context, parent-child shared reading practices on EPBs were influenced by their beliefs about literacy, which were highly shaped by their own literacy experiences, as well as the socio-cultural environment, SES, and educational level in which they were situated. The results contributed to a better understanding of how Chinese parents explore their literacy beliefs to reflect their experience of the parent-child shared EPBs reading by making these activities unique, relevant, and meaningful. In addition, the study revealed that these parents showed open-mindedness and inclusiveness towards topics, such as language skills and pedagogical framework, related to shared reading and had a solid learning awareness and motivation to implement family literacy practices. However, the study also highlighted the deficiencies in their socialized family literacy support system. And the impact of the unregulated commercialized environment of education on their implementation of English family literacy activities.
The study provided more background literature for future research on English family literacy in China and further insight into future exploration of parent-child shared reading on EPBs and English family literacy in the Chinese context
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Social Addictive Gameful Engineering (SAGE): A Game-based Learning and Assessment System for Computational Thinking
At an unrivaled and enduring pace, computing has transformed the world, resulting in demand for a universal fourth foundation beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic: computational thinking (CT). Despite increasingly widespread acceptance of CT as a crucial competency for all, transforming education systems accordingly has proven complex. The principal hypothesis of this thesis is that we can improve the efficiency and efficacy of teaching and learning CT by building gameful learning and assessment systems on top of block-based programming environments. Additionally, we believe this can be accomplished at scale and cost conducive to accelerating CT dissemination for all.
After introducing the requirements, approach, and architecture, we present a solution named Gameful Direct Instruction. This involves embedding Parsons Programming Puzzles (PPPs) in Scratch, which is a block-based programming environment currently used prevalently in grades 6-8. PPPs encourage students to practice CT by assembling into correct order sets of mixed-up blocks that comprise samples of well-written code which focus on individual concepts. The structure provided by PPPs enable instructors to design games that steer learner attention toward targeted learning goals through puzzle-solving play. Learners receive continuous automated feedback as they attempt to arrange programming constructs in correct order, leading to more efficient comprehension of core CT concepts than they might otherwise attain through less structured Scratch assignments. We measure this efficiency first via a pilot study conducted after the initial integration of PPPs with Scratch, and second after the addition of scaffolding enhancements in a study involving a larger adult general population.
We complement Gameful Direct Instruction with a solution named Gameful Constructionism. This involves integrating with Scratch implicit assessment functionality that facilitates constructionist video game (CVG) design and play. CVGs enable learner to explore CT using construction tools sufficiently expressive for personally meaningful gameplay. Instructors are enabled to guide learning by defining game objectives useful for implicit assessment, while affording learners the opportunity to take ownership of the experience and progress through the sequence of interest and motivation toward sustained engagement. When strategically arranged within a learning progression after PPP gameplay produces evidence of efficient comprehension, CVGs amplify the impact of direct instruction by providing the sculpted context in which learners can apply CT concepts more freely, thereby broadening and deepening understanding, and improving learning efficacy. We measure this efficacy in a study of the general adult population.
Since these approaches leverage low fidelity yet motivating gameful techniques, they facilitate the development of learning content at scale and cost supportive of widespread CT uptake. We conclude this thesis with a glance at future work that anticipates further progress in scalability via a solution named Gameful Intelligent Tutoring. This involves augmenting Scratch with Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) functionality that offers across-activity next-game recommendations, and within-activity just-in-time and on-demand hints. Since these data-driven methods operate without requiring knowledge engineering for each game designed, the instructor can evolve her role from one focused on knowledge transfer to one centered on supporting learning through the design of educational experiences, and we can accelerate the dissemination of CT at scale and reasonable cost while also advancing toward continuously differentiated instruction for each learner
Novel Datasets, User Interfaces and Learner Models to Improve Learner Engagement Prediction on Educational Videos
With the emergence of Open Education Resources (OERs), educational content creation has rapidly scaled up, making a large collection of new materials made available. Among these, we find educational videos, the most popular modality for transferring knowledge in the technology-enhanced learning paradigm. Rapid creation of learning resources opens up opportunities in facilitating sustainable education, as the potential to personalise and recommend specific materials that align with individual users’ interests, goals, knowledge level, language and stylistic preferences increases. However, the quality and topical coverage of these materials could vary significantly, posing significant challenges in managing this large collection, including the risk of negative user experience and engagement with these materials. The scarcity of support resources such as public datasets is another challenge that slows down the development of tools in this research area. This thesis develops a set of novel tools that improve the recommendation of educational videos. Two novel datasets and an e-learning platform with a novel user interface are developed to support the offline and online testing of recommendation models for educational videos. Furthermore, a set of learner models that accounts for the learner interests, knowledge, novelty and popularity of content is developed through this thesis. The different models are integrated together to propose a novel learner model that accounts for the different factors simultaneously. The user studies conducted on the novel user interface show that the new interface encourages users to explore the topical content more rigorously before making relevance judgements about educational videos. Offline experiments on the newly constructed datasets show that the newly proposed learner models outperform their relevant baselines significantly
Development of an Augmented Reality Interface for Intuitive Robot Programming
As the demand for advanced robotic systems continues to grow, the need for new technologies and techniques that can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of robot programming is imperative. The latter relies heavily on the effective communication of tasks between the user and the robot.
To address this issue, we developed an Augmented Reality (AR) interface that incorporates Head Mounted Display (HMD) capabilities, and integrated it with an active learning framework for intuitive programming of robots. This integration enables the execution of conditional tasks, bridging the gap between user and robot knowledge. The active learning model with the user's guidance incrementally programs a complex task and after encoding the skills, generates a high level task graph. Then the holographic robot is visualising individual skills of the task in order to increase the user's intuition of the whole procedure with sensory information retrieved from the physical robot in real-time. The interactive aspect of the interface can be utilised in this phase, by providing the user the option of actively validating the learnt skills or potentially changing them and thus generating a new skill sequence. Teaching the real robot through teleoperation by using the HMD is also possible for the user to increase the directness and immersion factors of teaching procedure while safely manipulating the physical robot from a distance.
The evaluation of the proposed framework is conducted through a series of experiments employing the developed interface on the real system. These experiments aim to assess the degree of intuitiveness provided by the interface features to the user and to determine the extent of similarity between the virtual system's behavior during the robot programming procedure and that of its physical counterpart
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The Impacts of Small-Scale Gold Mining on Food Security in Ghana
Small-scale gold mining has expanded in many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and other parts of the world including Peru and the Philippines, over the last two decades. Numerous factors, including rising gold prices, agricultural poverty, and administrative difficulties, have been cited as explanations for the rapid growth. The rapid growth of small-scale gold mining has a plethora of implications for agriculture, particularly smallholder farming. This is because the primary resource (land) on which mining, and agriculture are based is scarce, and mineral deposits frequently coincide with land suitable for agriculture. Additionally, mining and agriculture both consume large amounts of water and are labour intensive. Thus, a direct link between the expansion of small-scale gold mining and its impact on smallholder agriculture has been established in various countries throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, though opinions vary on whether the relationship is complementary or competitive. Additionally, the impacts of these connections on food security have received relatively little attention, and they are heavily underrepresented in the literatures on small-scale mining and food security. This thesis closes this knowledge gap by shedding light on the impact of small-scale gold mining on food security and contributing to the debate over the relationship between small-scale gold mining and smallholder farming. I argue, using a mixed method case study in Ghana, that mining has a negative impact on food security and that women and children bear a disproportionate share of the burden. Additionally, I demonstrated how competitive and conflict-ridden the relationship between small-scale mining and smallholder farming is.
This study was guided by a novel synthesis of the capability approach and a political ecology perspective. I begin by examining how structural and economic reforms have influenced mining and agricultural activities in Ghana over time, as well as the consequences of these reforms, with a particular emphasis on the often-overlooked ecological footprints. Second, I quantify and predict the pattern of land use and land cover change that would occur under various scenarios, as well as the factors that would cause these changes. Thirdly, I examine the factors affecting miners and smallholder farmers' access to critical resources (land, water, and labour), as well as the key actors in the mining and smallholder farming subsectors, as well as their power hierarchy and relationship. Finally, I examine the relationships between mining and smallholder farming and the state of individual food security (availability, access, utilisation, and stability).
The key findings are as follows: first, that the promotion of export-oriented commodities such as gold and cash crops such as cocoa and oil palm at the expense of peasant farmers' food crops is associated with severe ecological impacts that remain shielded in the absence of required environmental legislation until they exacerbate. There are also flashpoints of conflict between mining and smallholder farming, which has been aggravated by recent reforms and lays the groundwork for future conflicts. Second, four distinct periods of land use and land cover dynamics for mining footprints were identified using a combination of social science and geospatial methods: periods of none to limited increase, gradual to accelerated increase, sharp increase, and gradual decrease in mining footprints. These land use and land cover dynamics were found to be associated with three major ecological impacts of mining: land degradation, deforestation, and water pollution. Over a 34-year period, a total of 27,333 ha (36% of forest cover) was lost, along with severe land degradation and water pollution. If mining activities continue at their current pace, the study predicts increased ecological impacts. Third, the previously coexisting mining and smallholder farming subsectors are now fiercely competing for access to critical resources (land, labour, and water), a situation shaped by unequal power relations between the two subsectors' key actors. Finally, small-scale gold mining significantly contributes to food insecurity and, as a result, to the poor health and well-being of many people, particularly women and children. Half of the study participants experienced moderate food insecurity, while 13% experienced severe food insecurity. Additionally, 79% of women of reproductive age (15 to 49) were unable to meet the Minimum Dietary Diversity (MDD) requirements, a measure of micronutrient adequacy and, thus, food quality. Furthermore, local challenges with food availability, as well as associated challenges with food access and utilisation, erode food stability over time, forcing more people to adopt alternative coping strategies.
The findings of this study provide novel empirical evidence on the impacts of small-scale gold mining on food security and highlight the importance of integrating mixed and geospatial methods. Additionally, the findings demonstrate the value of combining political ecology and capability approaches in natural resource governance and food security research
Maine State Government Administrative Report 1987-1988
https://digitalmaine.com/me_annual_reports/1014/thumbnail.jp
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