2,228 research outputs found

    Is there a Relationship between Parents' Screen Usage and Young Children’s Development?

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    There has been growing concern over the links between children's screen time use and cognitive development (Halton, 2020). However, researchers have generally overlooked the possible impact of parental screen time, which might decrease the opportunities of learning and social interactions for young children. To address this gap, we investigated the relationship between parental screen use and toddlers’ development. However, the start of this thesis coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic, and a few experimental tasks had to be adapted online. Thus, this thesis examined first whether online paradigms can provide valid data (word recognition, word learning and language assessment). Second, the main objective was to explore the relationship between parental screen use and young children’s language skills, and to revisit the link between parental screen time and children’s empathy. Findings from Chapter 2 provide support for the reliability of online testing with children. These experiments point to promising avenues of investigation in early language studies, and to possibilities for reaching out to families around the world. Findings from Chapter 3 revealed no impact of parental phone text on children’s learning in a lab situation. However, they suggest that parental responses to technoference and attitudes towards smartphones may moderate the relationship between parental screen use and children’s development. When examining effects in real life, a first exploratory study indicated an effect of parental screen time (in real life) on children’s language vocabulary when assessed via a parental questionnaire, at least for children aged 16 months and above. A second study was conducted with more objective measures of screen time and children’s vocabulary knowledge, and no association was found between parental screen time and children’s language when assessed via a standardised face-to-face language test. Findings from Chapter 4 showed a negative association between children’s alone screen time and their cognitive empathy abilities. However, parental screen time was not related to children’s cognitive empathy. The experiments and studies reported in this thesis fail to reveal a robust association between parental screen time and early language, at least in the population that we have studied here. Importantly, the findings suggest how parental screen use may be a moderator in children’s development and not a causal factor. They demonstrate the need to investigate more precisely why and how parents use electronic devices such as mobile phones during interactions with their children, might directly influence early language and emotional development

    Collaborative Neural Rendering using Anime Character Sheets

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    Drawing images of characters with desired poses is an essential but laborious task in anime production. Assisting artists to create is a research hotspot in recent years. In this paper, we present the Collaborative Neural Rendering (CoNR) method, which creates new images for specified poses from a few reference images (AKA Character Sheets). In general, the diverse hairstyles and garments of anime characters defies the employment of universal body models like SMPL, which fits in most nude human shapes. To overcome this, CoNR uses a compact and easy-to-obtain landmark encoding to avoid creating a unified UV mapping in the pipeline. In addition, the performance of CoNR can be significantly improved when referring to multiple reference images, thanks to feature space cross-view warping in a carefully designed neural network. Moreover, we have collected a character sheet dataset containing over 700,000 hand-drawn and synthesized images of diverse poses to facilitate research in this area. Our code and demo are available at https://github.com/megvii-research/IJCAI2023-CoNR.Comment: The first three authors contribute equally. In the Arts and Creativity Track of IJCAI202

    A Critical Review Of Post-Secondary Education Writing During A 21st Century Education Revolution

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    Educational materials are effective instruments which provide information and report new discoveries uncovered by researchers in specific areas of academia. Higher education, like other education institutions, rely on instructional materials to inform its practice of educating adult learners. In post-secondary education, developmental English programs are tasked with meeting the needs of dynamic populations, thus there is a continuous need for research in this area to support its changing landscape. However, the majority of scholarly thought in this area centers on K-12 reading and writing. This paucity presents a phenomenon to the post-secondary community. This research study uses a qualitative content analysis to examine peer-reviewed journals from 2003-2017, developmental online websites, and a government issued document directed toward reforming post-secondary developmental education programs. These highly relevant sources aid educators in discovering informational support to apply best practices for student success. Developmental education serves the purpose of addressing literacy gaps for students transitioning to college-level work. The findings here illuminate the dearth of material offered to developmental educators. This study suggests the field of literacy research is fragmented and highlights an apparent blind spot in scholarly literature with regard to English writing instruction. This poses a quandary for post-secondary literacy researchers in the 21st century and establishes the necessity for the literacy research community to commit future scholarship toward equipping college educators teaching writing instruction to underprepared adult learners

    Out of sight, out of mind: accessibility for people with hidden disabilities in museums and heritage sites

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    As of 2020, an estimated 14.1 million residents of the United Kingdom reported a disability (DWP 2020). Within this population, approximately 6.1 million people have a hidden disability (Buhalis and Michopoulou 2011). These hidden disabilities range widely, from neurodiverse conditions like autism and dyslexia to long term chronic conditions such as fibromyalgia and arthritis. Due to the wide range of disabilities and their impact on a disabled person’s life, they have generally been underrepresented in accessibility studies. This thesis uncovers the accessibility needs of people with hidden disabilities, specifically in museums and heritage sites where they have heretofore mostly been overlooked. I utilise semi-structured interviews and correspondence with people with hidden disabilities, as well as participant-led experiences through three case study sites in Northern England, to understand the barriers they face. Their experiences help me expose the importance of passive accessibility – accessibility measures built directly into an exhibition design, such as adequate lighting and personal interpretation boards. Additionally, this thesis aims to understand the cultural forces that prevent or support accessibility-related improvements to such sites from taking place. By studying the cultural make-up of each case study organisation through ethnographic observations of the staff at these sites, institutional roadblocks to enacting accessibility-related adjustments are revealed. Specifically, the lack of communication at these sites presents a significant barrier to enacting accessibility suggestions from disabled visitors. Tying together the themes of active/passive accessibility and lack of communication is the theme of gaps in disability awareness, by which I mean that heritage organisations do not wilfully create these barriers to inclusion, and yet they create them still because they simply do not realise these things. Filling these gaps opens up countless possibilities for improving accessibility not only for people with hidden disabilities but for all visitors and staff at museums and heritage sites

    Social Cognitive Development and Mental Health in Adolescence

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    Adolescence, defined from the age of 10-24, is a key developmental period which is associated with protracted biological, psychological, and social changes. While these neurocognitive changes play an important role in the individual’s social, affective, and cognitive development, adolescence has also been described as a time of “storm and stress”, representing a time of increased vulnerability to mental health problems. This thesis described a series of experimental studies investigating the effects of cognitive training on adolescents’ social cognitive development and mental health. The first experimental chapter (Chapter 2) described a cross-sectional study investigating the effect of age and puberty on susceptibility to prosocial and antisocial influence in 520 adolescents aged 11-18 years. The next two experimental chapters examined the effect of social cognitive training programmes on adolescents’ social cognitive development and mental health. Chapter 3 explored the changes in susceptibility to prosocial and antisocial influence following two 8-week social emotional training programmes in 465 adolescents aged 11-16 years. Chapter 4 described an experimental study examining the effectiveness of an affective control training paradigm (compared to a control training paradigm) in 242 adolescents aged 11-19 years. The study examined the training effect across two training groups, the extent to which training effect varied as a function of age, and how training effect associated with self-reported mental health problems, emotion regulation difficulties, and self-control ability. Finally, Chapter 5 summarised the findings of the empirical studies and discussed how these findings inform the social cognitive development and mental health during adolescence

    Current issues of the Russian language teaching XIV

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    Collection of papers “Current issues of the Russian language teaching XIV” is devoted to issues of methodology of teaching Russian as a foreign language, to issues of linguistics and literary science and includes papers related to the use of online tools and resources in teaching Russian. This collection of papers is a result of the international scientific conference “Current issues of the Russian language teaching XIV”, which was scheduled for 8–10 May 2020, but due to the pandemic COVID-19 took place remotely
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