The Effect of Teaching Laboratory Work Using Computer Simulation in the Achievement of Tenth Grade Students in the Field of Physics in the Soil Directorate of the Southern Mazar District

This study aimed to investigate the effect of teaching laboratory work using computer simulation on the achievement of tenth grade students in physics, and to find out whether there are differences due to the gender variable. The experimental sample (40) male and female students and the female control (39) male and female students from the Directorate of Education of the Southern Mazar Brigade for the academic year (2010/2011) AD, and they were divided into four groups, two experimental and two controlling, so that there were two divisions for females, one control and the other experimental, as well as for males. A computer simulation program and an achievement test were built, the significance of the test validity and stability were verified, and the equivalence of the experimental and control groups was confirmed by applying a pre-test. The study concluded that there were differences between the two groups in the achievement of tenth grade students in physics due to the method of teaching and in favor of the experimental group (which was taught by computer simulation). Keywords: computer simulation, laboratory work DOI: 10.7176/JEP/13-19-08 Publication date:June 30th 202

The Development of a Valid and Reliable Instrument to Assess Constructivist Practices in Primary Classrooms

This study investigates the development of an instrument to measure teachers\u27 constructivist practices in their classrooms. The Department of Education Curriculum Framework for Western Australia is based on a constructivist learning environment, and this study has sought to develop an instrument for exploring individual Western Australian teachers utilisation of a constructivist learning environment in their classrooms. While there are a number of studies relating to constructivist classroom practices, the literature review indicates that there is little research about actual practice in a Western Australian primary school context. The instrument was developed from an extensive review of the literature. Key theorists and their primary concepts were identified and tabulated, and from 24 key concepts defined, survey questions were developed. Various validity checks were performed, and in order to further improve and assess reliability, data was gathered from 36 teachers over 8 schools. Analysis of the pilot survey data suggests that the instrument developed is a valid and reliable tool for measuring teachers constructivist practices in their classroom. The thesis concludes with recommendations for further research and suggested uses for the instrument

Greenhouse Monitoring and Automation Using Arduino: a Review on Precision Farming and Internet of Things (IoT)

The 21st century became the beginning of the development of information technology, where one of the revolutions was the presence of the Internet of Things. Internet of Things or abbreviated as IoT is a technology that combines electronic devices, sensors, and the internet to manage data and applications. The Internet of Things can be adopted in agriculture for crop management as a media for monitoring and controlling, especially in greenhouses and is called Precision Farming. The application of precision farming will be more effective in a greenhouse because it is easier to engineer similar environmental conditions. IoT development in greenhouses is using Arduino Microcontroller or Raspberry Pi Microcomputer. These devices are used because the price is low and easy to get on the market and can be designed so that technicians who have limited information technology knowledge can run it. To be able to manage greenhouses with IoT requires sensors as five senses that can detect changes that occur in the greenhouse. By using sensors, the hardware can detect what is happening in the greenhouse and make decisions based on the data acquired. Some sensors that are often used in Precision Farming are temperature and humidity sensors, soil moisture sensors, and light sensors. In the Internet of Things, the data that has been acquired by the hardware will then be transmitted wirelessly. The wireless connections used are Bluetooth, ZigBee Protocol, and Wi-Fi, where Bluetooth and Zigbee connections have a short distance between 10 - 100 meters, while Wi-Fi has a longer distance especially when connected to the Internet. The purpose of this paper is to understand the advantages and challenges of adopting IoT-based Precision Farming for monitoring and automation

Psychophysiological analysis of a pedagogical agent and robotic peer for individuals with autism spectrum disorders.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by ongoing problems in social interaction and communication, and engagement in repetitive behaviors. According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated 1 in 68 children in the United States has ASD. Mounting evidence shows that many of these individuals display an interest in social interaction with computers and robots and, in general, feel comfortable spending time in such environments. It is known that the subtlety and unpredictability of people’s social behavior are intimidating and confusing for many individuals with ASD. Computerized learning environments and robots, however, prepare a predictable, dependable, and less complicated environment, where the interaction complexity can be adjusted so as to account for these individuals’ needs. The first phase of this dissertation presents an artificial-intelligence-based tutoring system which uses an interactive computer character as a pedagogical agent (PA) that simulates a human tutor teaching sight word reading to individuals with ASD. This phase examines the efficacy of an instructional package comprised of an autonomous pedagogical agent, automatic speech recognition, and an evidence-based instructional procedure referred to as constant time delay (CTD). A concurrent multiple-baseline across-participants design is used to evaluate the efficacy of intervention. Additionally, post-treatment probes are conducted to assess maintenance and generalization. The results suggest that all three participants acquired and maintained new sight words and demonstrated generalized responding. The second phase of this dissertation describes the augmentation of the tutoring system developed in the first phase with an autonomous humanoid robot which serves the instructional role of a peer for the student. In this tutoring paradigm, the robot adopts a peer metaphor, where its function is to act as a peer. With the introduction of the robotic peer (RP), the traditional dyadic interaction in tutoring systems is augmented to a novel triadic interaction in order to enhance the social richness of the tutoring system, and to facilitate learning through peer observation. This phase evaluates the feasibility and effects of using PA-delivered sight word instruction, based on a CTD procedure, within a small-group arrangement including a student with ASD and the robotic peer. A multiple-probe design across word sets, replicated across three participants, is used to evaluate the efficacy of intervention. The findings illustrate that all three participants acquired, maintained, and generalized all the words targeted for instruction. Furthermore, they learned a high percentage (94.44% on average) of the non-target words exclusively instructed to the RP. The data show that not only did the participants learn nontargeted words by observing the instruction to the RP but they also acquired their target words more efficiently and with less errors by the addition of an observational component to the direct instruction. The third and fourth phases of this dissertation focus on physiology-based modeling of the participants’ affective experiences during naturalistic interaction with the developed tutoring system. While computers and robots have begun to co-exist with humans and cooperatively share various tasks; they are still deficient in interpreting and responding to humans as emotional beings. Wearable biosensors that can be used for computerized emotion recognition offer great potential for addressing this issue. The third phase presents a Bluetooth-enabled eyewear – EmotiGO – for unobtrusive acquisition of a set of physiological signals, i.e., skin conductivity, photoplethysmography, and skin temperature, which can be used as autonomic readouts of emotions. EmotiGO is unobtrusive and sufficiently lightweight to be worn comfortably without interfering with the users’ usual activities. This phase presents the architecture of the device and results from testing that verify its effectiveness against an FDA-approved system for physiological measurement. The fourth and final phase attempts to model the students’ engagement levels using their physiological signals collected with EmotiGO during naturalistic interaction with the tutoring system developed in the second phase. Several physiological indices are extracted from each of the signals. The students’ engagement levels during the interaction with the tutoring system are rated by two trained coders using the video recordings of the instructional sessions. Supervised pattern recognition algorithms are subsequently used to map the physiological indices to the engagement scores. The results indicate that the trained models are successful at classifying participants’ engagement levels with the mean classification accuracy of 86.50%. These models are an important step toward an intelligent tutoring system that can dynamically adapt its pedagogical strategies to the affective needs of learners with ASD

Aspects of language in a standard five science class

M.Ed. (Teaching Studies)Please refer to full text to view abstrac

The Catholic Marian Spirituality Scale: Conceptualization and measurement

The specific context of the current research is Catholic Marian Spirituality (CMS), which embodies a set of beliefs and practices intended to make its adherents closely connected to Jesus Christ by imitating the virtues of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This research project aimed to conceptualize and to develop a measurement of CMS. It also aimed to establish content validity through expert review and the refining of the items based on Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), and to establish internal reliability of the CMS Scale using reliability analysis. The study adopted both qualitative and quantitative methods to develop the questionnaire. The questionnaire was tested for content, construct and face validity through interview and pilot study. Six experts in the field of different dimensions of the CMS and scale development were requested to review the draft questionnaire for content validity of the research construct. The scale developed in the pilot study was tested among selected participants. The initial scale consisted of 44 items developed from Marian Spirituality literature and the feedback from both experts and eight non-experts (Catholic lay people among whom the survey was conducted). One hundred and forty Catholics were recruited to complete the 44 item CMS Questionnaire for the pilot study. The samples for the pilot and main study were separately recruited. The main study was conducted on a convenience sample of 853 Church-attending Catholic lay people over the age of eighteen. Overall, the study reported strong reliability with coefficient alphas ranging from .79 to .95. Thus, the present study has sought to identify and explore the underlying factors in Catholic Marian Spirituality and to develop a measurement for the same

Revisiting Politics in Political CSR: How coercive and deliberative dynamics operate through institutional work in a Colombian company

This article analyses the political dynamics taking place within a Colombian supplier company during the implementation of a client’s global Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programme, which radically transformed the local understandings of the supplier’s social responsibilities. We distinguish two forms of politics in political CSR – coercive and deliberative politics – and examine how they unfold through lower-level managers’ institutional work. Our longitudinal case study identifies four types of institutional work, which combine into three political configurations – irreconcilable politics, complementary politics and aligned deliberative politics – resulting in the hybridization of explicit and implicit CSR. By analysing how local managers from emerging countries and at the bottom of the supply chain cope with the new political role of MNCs, we expand the political microfoundations of CSR and highlight the interactive and political nature of institutional work aimed at addressing major societal challenges

An Evolutionary Upgrade of Cognitive Load Theory: Using the Human Motor System and Collaboration to Support the Learning of Complex Cognitive Tasks

Cognitive load theory is intended to provide instructional strategies derived from experimental, cognitive load effects. Each effect is based on our knowledge of human cognitive architecture, primarily the limited capacity and duration of a human working memory. These limitations are ameliorated by changes in long-term memory associated with learning. Initially, cognitive load theory's view of human cognitive architecture was assumed to apply to all categories of information. Based on Geary's (Educational Psychologist 43, 179-195 2008; 2011) evolutionary account of educational psychology, this interpretation of human cognitive architecture requires amendment. Working memory limitations may be critical only when acquiring novel information based on culturally important knowledge that we have not specifically evolved to acquire. Cultural knowledge is known as biologically secondary information. Working memory limitations may have reduced significance when acquiring novel