15,927 research outputs found

    Annual report of the officers of the town of Jackson, New Hampshire for the fiscal year ending December 31, 2022.

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    This is an annual report containing vital statistics for a town/city in the state of New Hampshire

    Bridging technology and educational psychology: an exploration of individual differences in technology-assisted language learning within an Algerian EFL setting

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    The implementation of technology in language learning and teaching has a great influence onthe teaching and learning process as a whole and its impact on the learners’ psychological state seems of paramount significance, since it could be either an aid or a barrier to students’ academic performance. This thesis therefore explores individual learner differences in technology-assisted language learning (TALL) and when using educational technologies in higher education within an Algerian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) setting. Although I initially intended to investigate the relationship between TALL and certain affective variables mainly motivation, anxiety, self-confidence, and learning styles inside the classroom, the collection and analysis of data shifted my focus to a holistic view of individual learner differences in TALL environments and when using educational technologies within and beyond the classroom. In an attempt to bridge technology and educational psychology, this ethnographic case study considers the nature of the impact of technology integration in language teaching and learning on the psychology of individual language learners inside and outside the classroom. The study considers the reality constructed by participants and reveals multiple and distinctive views about the relationship between the use of educational technologies in higher education and individual learner differences. It took place in a university in the north-west of Algeria and involved 27 main and secondary student and teacher participants. It consisted of focus-group discussions, follow-up discussions, teachers’ interviews, learners’ diaries, observation, and field notes. It was initially conducted within the classroom but gradually expanded to other settings outside the classroom depending on the availability of participants, their actions, and activities. The study indicates that the impact of technology integration in EFL learning on individual learner differences is both complex and dynamic. It is complex in the sense that it is shown in multiple aspects and reflected on the students and their differences. In addition to various positive and different negative influences of different technology uses and the different psychological reactions among students to the same technology scenario, the study reveals the unrecognised different manifestations of similar psychological traits in the same ELT technology scenario. It is also dynamic since it is characterised by constant change according to contextual approaches to and practical realities of technology integration in language teaching and learning in the setting, including discrepancies between students’ attitudes and teacher’ actions, mismatches between technological experiences inside and outside the classroom, local concerns and generalised beliefs about TALL in the context, and the rapid and unplanned shift to online educational delivery during the Covid-19 pandemic situation. The study may therefore be of interest, not only to Algerian teachers and students, but also to academics and institutions in other contexts through considering the complex and dynamic impact of TALL and technology integration at higher education on individual differences, and to academics in similar low-resource contexts by undertaking a context approach to technology integration

    Strategies for Early Learners

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    Welcome to learning about how to effectively plan curriculum for young children. This textbook will address: • Developing curriculum through the planning cycle • Theories that inform what we know about how children learn and the best ways for teachers to support learning • The three components of developmentally appropriate practice • Importance and value of play and intentional teaching • Different models of curriculum • Process of lesson planning (documenting planned experiences for children) • Physical, temporal, and social environments that set the stage for children’s learning • Appropriate guidance techniques to support children’s behaviors as the self-regulation abilities mature. • Planning for preschool-aged children in specific domains including o Physical development o Language and literacy o Math o Science o Creative (the visual and performing arts) o Diversity (social science and history) o Health and safety • Making children’s learning visible through documentation and assessmenthttps://scholar.utc.edu/open-textbooks/1001/thumbnail.jp

    Teacher's Beliefs about Teaching Reading Skill A Case Study in Madrasah Aliyah Negeri 1 Tanjung Jabung Barat

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    Tujuan dari penelitian ini adalah untuk mendeskripsikan keyakinan guru dan untuk menyelidiki bagaimana praktik guru dalam mengajar membaca di kelas”. Metode penelitian yang digunakan adalah deskriptif kualitatif. Subjek penelitian ini adalah guru bahasa Inggris yang berpengalaman mengajar bahasa Inggris di Madrasah Aliyah Negeri 1 Tanjung Jabung Barat. Instrumen yang digunakan adalah wawancara, observasi, dan dokumen. Teknik analisis data menggunakan model Miles dan Huberman (1993). Berdasarkan hasil penelitian data menunjukkan bahwa guru percaya bahwa membaca itu penting karena untuk menebak arti dari kosakata yang ambigu, untuk menjelaskan item kosakata, untuk memindai teks dan untuk mengajukan pertanyaan untuk memeriksa pemahaman teks. Ditemukan lima keyakinan tentang pengajaran membaca yaitu keyakinan mengajar tujuan membaca, keyakinan keterampilan kelas, keyakinan peran guru, keyakinan peran siswa dan keyakinan komponen membaca

    TEACHING STRATEGIES AND THE PROBLEM FACED BY EFL TEACHER DURING COVID-19 OUTBREAK AT JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL

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    The education system have to switch from face-to-face to online teaching due to the pandemic. This situation is considered new in Indonesia, the teachers have to adapt their self with this situation. An example is learning to use technology in online teaching and making a lesson plan that can make students interested in online learning.This research aimed to know what are teaching strategies used by EFL teachers and what are the teacher problems in online teaching at the Junior High School 98 during Pandemic. This research used qualitative as a design and narrative descriptive as the approach. The technique to collect the data researcher used in this research is observation, interview, and documentation. In addition, the object of this research is EFL teachers, the researcher interviewed 5 EFL teachers. The results of this research are: 1)The teacher strategies used in online teaching during a pandemic is synchronous, while teacher used platform WhatsApp, Google Classroom, and Google Meet for online classes. In addition, to create the task the teacher gives chance to the students to useanother platform such as Canva, Youtube, Video Maker, etc. On the other hand, the teacher have some strategies to overcome the problems when teaching online, such as when the students have a problem in the following class online through the platform Google Meet, the teacher shared the material in Google Classroom. While, the researcher found in students motivation the teacher do teamwork with students’ parents in control the students at home; 2) the teaching online problems that researcher found in this research are: lack of quota package, lack of internet access, lack of motivation, and lack of facilities

    Early Sibling Play Interactions as a Source of Developmental Support for Toddlers: Observation of Young Children\u27s Developmental Support During Play with Toddler Siblings

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    The sibling relationship is a unique and important context for infant and early child development. Despite the important role of siblings and the unique aspects of the sibling relationship, sibling interactions are largely overlooked by scholars as a resource of potential developmental support. Identifying and fostering developmentally supportive interaction (DSI) behaviors in sibling relationships may expand available supports for children’s early development and may also support family well-being. This study used a sample of 15 child-toddler sibling pairs to identify DSI behaviors in interactions between young children and their toddler-aged siblings, determine if and how well DSI behaviors could be observed, determine the similarities and differences between DSIs in child-toddler and caregiver-child interactions, and identify child factors that were associated with DSI behaviors. Caregivers completed a questionnaire online in Qualtrics, answering questions about their children and family, their children’s sibling relationship, and their children’s play skills. Caregivers then recorded and submitted 10-minute videos of their young children playing together, these videos were coded by research assistants who were trained to identify DSI behaviors using an established measure of caregiver-child interaction quality, the Parenting Interactions with Children: Checklist of Observations Linked to Outcomes (PICCOLO). Older siblings across the 15 sibling pairs were observed engaging in each DSI behavior and research assistants were able to reliably code videos for behaviors in the Affection, Responsiveness, and Encouragement domains. When compared to an adult comparison sample, DSI behaviors in young sibling interactions were less frequent, less complex, and lower quality than in adult-child interactions. Younger brothers received more encouragement support from older siblings than younger sisters. Older children who were older siblings provided more developmental support than younger children who were older siblings. Older siblings interacted with more warmth when the age gap was larger than when it was smaller. Older siblings reported by their caregivers to have higher levels of empathy/concern engaged in fewer DSI behaviors and older siblings reported by their caregivers to have higher levels of conflict/aggression engaged in more DSI behaviors. These results may provide guidance for supporting developmentally supportive sibling interactions at home and in intervention

    Towards a sociology of conspiracy theories: An investigation into conspiratorial thinking on DĂśnmes

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    This thesis investigates the social and political significance of conspiracy theories, which has been an academically neglected topic despite its historical relevance. The academic literature focuses on the methodology, social significance and political impacts of these theories in a secluded manner and lacks empirical analyses. In response, this research provides a comprehensive theoretical framework for conspiracy theories by considering their methodology, political impacts and social significance in the light of empirical data. Theoretically, the thesis uses Adorno's semi-erudition theory along with Girardian approach. It proposes that conspiracy theories are methodologically semi-erudite narratives, i.e. they are biased in favour of a belief and use reason only to prove it. It suggests that conspiracy theories appear in times of power vacuum and provide semi-erudite cognitive maps that relieve alienation and ontological insecurities of people and groups. In so doing, they enforce social control over their audience due to their essentialist, closed-to-interpretation narratives. In order to verify the theory, the study analyses empirically the social and political significance of conspiracy theories about the DĂśnme community in Turkey. The analysis comprises interviews with conspiracy theorists, conspiracy theory readers and political parties, alongside a frame analysis of the popular conspiracy theory books on DĂśnmes. These confirm the theoretical framework by showing that the conspiracy theories are fed by the ontological insecurities of Turkish society. Hence, conspiracy theorists, most readers and some political parties respond to their own ontological insecurities and political frustrations through scapegoating DĂśnmes. Consequently, this work shows that conspiracy theories are important symptoms of society, which, while relieving ontological insecurities, do not provide politically prolific narratives

    Data-to-text generation with neural planning

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    In this thesis, we consider the task of data-to-text generation, which takes non-linguistic structures as input and produces textual output. The inputs can take the form of database tables, spreadsheets, charts, and so on. The main application of data-to-text generation is to present information in a textual format which makes it accessible to a layperson who may otherwise find it problematic to understand numerical figures. The task can also automate routine document generation jobs, thus improving human efficiency. We focus on generating long-form text, i.e., documents with multiple paragraphs. Recent approaches to data-to-text generation have adopted the very successful encoder-decoder architecture or its variants. These models generate fluent (but often imprecise) text and perform quite poorly at selecting appropriate content and ordering it coherently. This thesis focuses on overcoming these issues by integrating content planning with neural models. We hypothesize data-to-text generation will benefit from explicit planning, which manifests itself in (a) micro planning, (b) latent entity planning, and (c) macro planning. Throughout this thesis, we assume the input to our generator are tables (with records) in the sports domain. And the output are summaries describing what happened in the game (e.g., who won/lost, ..., scored, etc.). We first describe our work on integrating fine-grained or micro plans with data-to-text generation. As part of this, we generate a micro plan highlighting which records should be mentioned and in which order, and then generate the document while taking the micro plan into account. We then show how data-to-text generation can benefit from higher level latent entity planning. Here, we make use of entity-specific representations which are dynam ically updated. The text is generated conditioned on entity representations and the records corresponding to the entities by using hierarchical attention at each time step. We then combine planning with the high level organization of entities, events, and their interactions. Such coarse-grained macro plans are learnt from data and given as input to the generator. Finally, we present work on making macro plans latent while incrementally generating a document paragraph by paragraph. We infer latent plans sequentially with a structured variational model while interleaving the steps of planning and generation. Text is generated by conditioning on previous variational decisions and previously generated text. Overall our results show that planning makes data-to-text generation more interpretable, improves the factuality and coherence of the generated documents and re duces redundancy in the output document

    TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF EFFORTFUL FUNDRAISING EXPERIENCES: USING INTERPRETATIVE PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS IN FUNDRAISING RESEARCH

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    Physical-activity oriented community fundraising has experienced an exponential growth in popularity over the past 15 years. The aim of this study was to explore the value of effortful fundraising experiences, from the point of view of participants, and explore the impact that these experiences have on people’s lives. This study used an IPA approach to interview 23 individuals, recognising the role of participants as proxy (nonprofessional) fundraisers for charitable organisations, and the unique organisation donor dynamic that this creates. It also bought together relevant psychological theory related to physical activity fundraising experiences (through a narrative literature review) and used primary interview data to substantiate these. Effortful fundraising experiences are examined in detail to understand their significance to participants, and how such experiences influence their connection with a charity or cause. This was done with an idiographic focus at first, before examining convergences and divergences across the sample. This study found that effortful fundraising experiences can have a profound positive impact upon community fundraisers in both the short and the long term. Additionally, it found that these experiences can be opportunities for charitable organisations to create lasting meaningful relationships with participants, and foster mutually beneficial lifetime relationships with them. Further research is needed to test specific psychological theory in this context, including self-esteem theory, self determination theory, and the martyrdom effect (among others)
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