Different Methods of Embodied Cognition in Pedagogy and its Effectiveness in Student Learning

The Mathematical Ideas Analysis hypothesizes that abstract mathematical reasoning is unconsciously organized and integrated with sensory-motor experience. Basic research testing movement, language, and perception during math problem solving supports this hypothesis. Applied research primarily measures students’ performance on math tests after they engage in analogous sensory-motor tasks, but findings show mixed results. Sensory-motor tasks are dependent on several moderators (e.g., instructional guidance, developmental stage) known to help students learn, and studies vary in how each moderator is implemented. There is little research on the effectiveness of sensory-motor tasks without these moderators. This study compares different approaches to working with an interactive application designed to emulate how people intrinsically solve algebraic equations. A total of 130 participants (84 females, 54 males) were drawn from a pool of Introductory Psychology students attending San Jose State University. Participants were placed in three different learning environments, and their performance was measured by comparing improvement between a pre-test and a post-test. We found no difference between participants who worked alone with the application, were instructed by the experimenter while using the application, or who instructed the experimenter on how to solve equations using the application. Further research is needed to examine how and whether analogous sensory-motor interfaces are a useful learning tool, and if so, what circumstances are ideal for sensory-motor interfaces to be used

Enhancing web-based learning resources with quizzes through an Authoring Tool and an Audience Response System

Quizzes are among the most widely used resources in web-based education due to their many benefits. However, educators need suitable authoring tools that can be used to create reusable quizzes and to enhance existing materials with them. On the other hand, if teachers use Audience Response Systems (ARSs) they can get instant feedback from their students and thereby enhance their instruction. This paper presents an online authoring tool for creating reusable quizzes and enhancing existing learning resources with them, and a web-based ARS that enables teachers to launch the created quizzes and get instant feedback from the class. Both the authoring tool and the ARS were evaluated. The evaluation of the authoring tool showed that educators can effectively enhance existing learning resources in an easy way by creating and adding quizzes using that tool. Besides, the different factors that assure the reusability of the created quizzes are also exposed. Finally, the evaluation of the developed ARS showed an excellent acceptance of the system by teachers and students, and also it indicated that teachers found the system easy to set up and use in their classrooms

Emerging Trends in Science Education in a Dynamic Academic Environment

Emerging Trends in Science Education in a Dynamic Academic Environment highlights the changes that have occurred in science education particularly in institutions of higher learning in southern Nigeria. Impelled by the fact that most Nigerian Universities and Colleges of Education still adhere to the practices and teaching methodologies of the teacher-centered classroom teaching approach. Four research Questions and Hypotheses were raised. A total of 96 respondents were selected at random from the Faculty of Science and Education from seven (7) different Institutions of learning (3 Universities and 4 Colleges of Education) in Delta State. An internal consistency with a coefficient of 0.88 was established using Cronbach alph. A mean was used to answer the research questions. T-test statistics was used to test each hypothesis at 0.05 level of significance. The study revealed that there was an apparent upgrade from the chalk and board system to the use of the Magnetic White Board system, the use of slide projector based tutoring (SPBT) increases students understanding in science education, and that there is no significant difference between the attainments of teaching objectives when web-based training is administered by male science education tutors or by female science education tutors. The researcher recommends that Nigerian Government should embark on deliberate technological ventures that will not only develop the nation but also affect the academic environment positively. Keywords: Emerging Trends, Dynamic, Academic Environment

Music Technology in the Classroom

The last twenty years have exhibited unprecedented growth of music technology in the fields of commercial music, professional recording studios, personal home studios, and music education in the public school music classroom. With the establishment of school district programs providing students with access to computer technology from state lottery monies, music classrooms are now receiving their own computers and music software. Music software in the marketplace provides challenges to teachers and their efforts to integrate technology to their classroom instruction. How music educators determine what software is needed, what is appropriate, effective, and within their music budget is still a daunting and questioning effort. This can be a deterrent to those band and choral educators, who are initially reticent about music technology from acquiring, learning, and using music technology in their classrooms. This project will address these issues, the changing roles of teachers, music technology\u27s effect on learning, use in the classroom instruction, National Standards, and philosophical viewpoints

THE EFFECT OF DIGITAL STORYTELLING ON ATTITUDES OF THE 7TH GRADERS AT SECONDARY SCHOOL TOWARDS STORY WRITING

The purpose of this study was to seek into the effect of digital storytelling on the attitude towards story writing of 7th graders at secondary school. The quasi-experimental design among quantitative methods was employed and two groups were designed through simple random sampling. Since the pre-test was planned to be used before the experiment, the study was maintained with a pre-test/post-test matched control group design. The study group was composed of 35 students in Grade 7 at a private secondary school in the Central District of Kars. The study was carried out in Turkish lessons for 7th graders in the 2018-2019 education year. The experiment group consisted of the students in Class 7-A (18 students) in a private school in the Central District of Kars while the control group was of Class 7-B (17 students) in the same school. Before starting the research, permissions of the ethics committee and governorship were obtained for the scale to be used in the research. The purpose of the study and process of the study were explained in detail to the school administration and related teachers. Attitude Scale Towards Story Writing and personal information form were used as data collection tools. The data obtained was first recorded in the excel program, and then in the SPSS program. Because the data did not follow a normal distribution, Mann Whitney U-Test for intergroup analysis and Wilcoxon signed-rank test for intragroup analysis among non-parametrical statistics were used. As a result of analysis; it was found that there is a significant difference in favour of the experiment group in terms of post-test scores of attitude towards story writing among the groups after the experiment. At the same time; it was found that there is a significant difference in favor of the post-test between the pre-test and post-test scores of the experimental group. These findings revealed that the digital storytelling creation process contributed to the students' positive attitude towards story writing. Accordingly, it is suggested that the effects of digital storytelling at different grades of education can be investigated, different methods and techniques can be used, and digital storytelling can be included in curriculums. Article visualizations

The Effects of Mobile Devices & Maker Projects on Middle School African American Students’ STEM Knowledge Base & Interest

The nature of future employment is rooted in the sciences, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Educating the current and future workers will require the inclusion of STEM education, especially in the K-12 classrooms. African Americans run the risk of being left behind in future STEM jobs due to their poor STEM representation throughout institutional education. In general, African American students have a poor attitude towards and poor academic performance in STEM. This research was explored using ubiquitous smartphones and a unique form of student-centered learning called maker education to increase the attitude and STEM knowledge of African American middle schoolers. A mixed method approach was utilized through a pre- post- questionnaire, comprised of three Likert-type scales for Attitude: Interest, Difficulty, and Importance, and a knowledge base multiple-choice portion to investigate the study quantitatively, supplemented by direct observation and focus groups to investigate it qualitatively. Twenty-nine African American students from four St. Louis, Mo., middle schools were divided into two groups, one of 24 treatment and one of five control participants. The research setting for both groups was a local Boys and Girls club. The treatment group completed two maker-ed interventions with smartphones, while the control participants completed two similar interventions without smartphones or maker activities (see Appendix F). The qualitative data were thematically coded, and the quantitative data were statistically analyzed for significance. The knowledge base of both the treatment and control groups showed no statistically significant difference, either before or after the interventions, which supported the null hypothesis H1o. The Likert-scales suggested a slight increase in African American middle schoolers\u27 attitudes in both treatment and control groups, but it was not statistically significant, supporting null hypothesis H2o. The thematic analysis of the observation and focus group data was logically inconsistent with the Likert-scales data in that it suggested a strong increase in attitude in both groups. More research is warranted in this area to increase African Americans in STEM

Using the instructional computing design process to introduce and incorporate the Boys Town social skills

The following paper takes an inside look on how to use the Instructional Computing Design process to create instructional software that focuses on the Boys Town Social Skills. Within the planning, designing, and development of this multimedia project, the paper will also concentrate on the projects standards, management of the project, and an ongoing evaluation of the project. A great amount of discussion in the paper focuses on how to develop software that is used to instruct and guide learners using the Boys Town Social Skills. Each step of the ICD process will be described to reveal how the Boys Town Social Skills Model was implemented into the curriculum effectively and efficiently as a software program. The project will then be described by taking a tour within the program, and finish off with insights gained from the ICD process and the description of possible future projects

Reading tutors using the iPod to enhance and motivate struggling literacy learners\u27 reading ability

The rationale behind this thesis is to investigate the numerous influences of the iPod on the language skills of elementary students including oral fluency, reading, comprehension and oral expressions. This research additionally aims to analyze the attitude of students along with in-service teachers towards the benefits of the iPod as a new tool of instruction. The results illustrated in the research will enable the readers to acquire a deeper understanding about the potential use of the iPod in elementary school Language Arts classes. This research could also possibly facilitate in-service teachers to discover how to incorporate new technology into the classroom environment by gaining valuable insight regarding students\u27 reactions toward this tool

Knowledge extraction from unstructured data and classification through distributed ontologies

The World Wide Web has changed the way humans use and share any kind of information. The Web removed several access barriers to the information published and has became an enormous space where users can easily navigate through heterogeneous resources (such as linked documents) and can easily edit, modify, or produce them. Documents implicitly enclose information and relationships among them which become only accessible to human beings. Indeed, the Web of documents evolved towards a space of data silos, linked each other only through untyped references (such as hypertext references) where only humans were able to understand. A growing desire to programmatically access to pieces of data implicitly enclosed in documents has characterized the last efforts of the Web research community. Direct access means structured data, thus enabling computing machinery to easily exploit the linking of different data sources. It has became crucial for the Web community to provide a technology stack for easing data integration at large scale, first structuring the data using standard ontologies and afterwards linking them to external data. Ontologies became the best practices to define axioms and relationships among classes and the Resource Description Framework (RDF) became the basic data model chosen to represent the ontology instances (i.e. an instance is a value of an axiom, class or attribute). Data becomes the new oil, in particular, extracting information from semi-structured textual documents on the Web is key to realize the Linked Data vision. In the literature these problems have been addressed with several proposals and standards, that mainly focus on technologies to access the data and on formats to represent the semantics of the data and their relationships. With the increasing of the volume of interconnected and serialized RDF data, RDF repositories may suffer from data overloading and may become a single point of failure for the overall Linked Data vision. One of the goals of this dissertation is to propose a thorough approach to manage the large scale RDF repositories, and to distribute them in a redundant and reliable peer-to-peer RDF architecture. The architecture consists of a logic to distribute and mine the knowledge and of a set of physical peer nodes organized in a ring topology based on a Distributed Hash Table (DHT). Each node shares the same logic and provides an entry point that enables clients to query the knowledge base using atomic, disjunctive and conjunctive SPARQL queries. The consistency of the results is increased using data redundancy algorithm that replicates each RDF triple in multiple nodes so that, in the case of peer failure, other peers can retrieve the data needed to resolve the queries. Additionally, a distributed load balancing algorithm is used to maintain a uniform distribution of the data among the participating peers by dynamically changing the key space assigned to each node in the DHT. Recently, the process of data structuring has gained more and more attention when applied to the large volume of text information spread on the Web, such as legacy data, news papers, scientific papers or (micro-)blog posts. This process mainly consists in three steps: \emph{i)} the extraction from the text of atomic pieces of information, called named entities; \emph{ii)} the classification of these pieces of information through ontologies; \emph{iii)} the disambigation of them through Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) identifying real world objects. As a step towards interconnecting the web to real world objects via named entities, different techniques have been proposed. The second objective of this work is to propose a comparison of these approaches in order to highlight strengths and weaknesses in different scenarios such as scientific and news papers, or user generated contents. We created the Named Entity Recognition and Disambiguation (NERD) web framework, publicly accessible on the Web (through REST API and web User Interface), which unifies several named entity extraction technologies. Moreover, we proposed the NERD ontology, a reference ontology for comparing the results of these technologies. Recently, the NERD ontology has been included in the NIF (Natural language processing Interchange Format) specification, part of the Creating Knowledge out of Interlinked Data (LOD2) project. Summarizing, this dissertation defines a framework for the extraction of knowledge from unstructured data and its classification via distributed ontologies. A detailed study of the Semantic Web and knowledge extraction fields is proposed to define the issues taken under investigation in this work. Then, it proposes an architecture to tackle the single point of failure issue introduced by the RDF repositories spread within the Web. Although the use of ontologies enables a Web where data is structured and comprehensible by computing machinery, human users may take advantage of it especially for the annotation task. Hence, this work describes an annotation tool for web editing, audio and video annotation in a web front end User Interface powered on the top of a distributed ontology. Furthermore, this dissertation details a thorough comparison of the state of the art of named entity technologies. The NERD framework is presented as technology to encompass existing solutions in the named entity extraction field and the NERD ontology is presented as reference ontology in the field. Finally, this work highlights three use cases with the purpose to reduce the amount of data silos spread within the Web: a Linked Data approach to augment the automatic classification task in a Systematic Literature Review, an application to lift educational data stored in Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) data silos to the Web of data and a scientific conference venue enhancer plug on the top of several data live collectors. Significant research efforts have been devoted to combine the efficiency of a reliable data structure and the importance of data extraction techniques. This dissertation opens different research doors which mainly join two different research communities: the Semantic Web and the Natural Language Processing community. The Web provides a considerable amount of data where NLP techniques may shed the light within it. The use of the URI as a unique identifier may provide one milestone for the materialization of entities lifted from a raw text to real world object