The teaching of interpersonal relationship skills by using the programmed instructional method : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Education at Massey University

This thesis examines the acquisition of interpersonal skills by a sample of undergraduate students enrolled in the education course at Massey University. A programmed text developed by the experimenter, was used to train the subjects in these skills. Three groups, two experimental and one control, with eight subjects each served as the sample for the study. The first experimental group worked with a programmed text, a tutor and audio-visual materials. The second experimental group, worked with the programmed text alone. The third, acting as a control group, did not have any materials or training sessions. It was expected that the second experimental group with only a programmed text would develop as effective interpersonal skills as the first group, without the addition of audio-visual resources and a tutor. Analysis of the data revealed that the subjects in the first experimental group showed the greatest improvement in interpersonal skills. The second experimental group had significantly better results than the control group but nevertheless was inferior to the first experimental group. It was concluded that whilst the most productive means of inculcating communication skills was by the interaction of a programmed text, a tutor and audio-visual materials, a programmed text alone was of value in developing interpersonal skills

The influence of banner advertisements on attention and memory: human faces with averted gaze can enhance advertising effectiveness

Research suggests that banner advertisements used in online marketing are often overlooked, especially when positioned horizontally on webpages. Such inattention invariably gives rise to an inability to remember advertising brands and messages, undermining the effectiveness of this marketing method. Recent interest has focused on whether human faces within banner advertisements can increase attention to the information they contain, since the gaze cues conveyed by faces can influence where observers look. We report an experiment that investigated the efficacy of faces located in banner advertisements to enhance the attentional processing and memorability of banner contents. We tracked participants’ eye movements when they examined webpages containing either bottom-right vertical banners or bottom-centre horizontal banners. We also manipulated facial information such that banners either contained no face, a face with mutual gaze or a face with averted gaze. We additionally assessed people’s memories for brands and advertising messages. Results indicated that relative to other conditions, the condition involving faces with averted gaze increased attention to the banner overall, as well as to the advertising text and product. Memorability of the brand and advertising message was also enhanced. Conversely, in the condition involving faces with mutual gaze, the focus of attention was localised more on the face region rather than on the text or product, weakening any memory benefits for the brand and advertising message. This detrimental impact of mutual gaze on attention to advertised products was especially marked for vertical banners. These results demonstrate that the inclusion of human faces with averted gaze in banner advertisements provides a promising means for marketers to increase the attention paid to such adverts, thereby enhancing memory for advertising information

Designing Khom Thai Letterforms for Accessibility

This practice-led research aimed to design letterforms for an ancient Thai script known as Khom Thai, to aid learning of the script by today’s Thai population. Khom is a script that was developed in Thailand around the 15th century. It was widely used as the country’s official script for historical documents and records in Pali, Sanskrit, and Thai until 1945. Now, very few members of younger generations can read the script, which poses a major obstacle for preserving the knowledge of Khom Thai and severely limits access to the country’s historical documents and heritage. Although there are some relationships between contemporary Thai letters and Khom Thai letters, the unfamiliar letterforms constitute the largest hurdle for Thai readers learning to read the Khom Thai script. This study’s goal was to resolve this problem by creating three new Khom Thai letterform designs for use as learning materials and writing models for beginners. This study investigated whether Khom Thai letterforms could be redesigned so that modern Thai readers could recognise them more easily. To explore this possibility, three letterform designs, TLK Deva, TLK Brahma and TLK Manussa, were developed. This practice-led research employed mixed methods, including interviews, a questionnaire, and a letter recognition study. The first section of the research discusses the theoretical framework regarding familiarity in enhancing letter recognition. Additionally, analyses on Thai, Khom Thai, and Khmer letterforms were also included in this part. The second section is about the design process resulted in three designs. Among the three, TLK Brahma and TLK Deva maintain a close connection to the proportions and writing style of the traditional script, and could potentially be used as writing models for those learning the script. By contrast, TLK Manussa is adapted to characteristics and proportions of the present-day Thai script and is intended to look more familiar to Thai readers. One potential use of TLK Manussa is as a mnemonic aid for learning Khom Thai characters. Interviews were conducted with Khom Thai palaeographic experts to gather opinions on the designs. A questionnaire was also used with 102 participants to establish which of the three TLK designs had most familiar characteristics for Thai readers. The results showed that TLK Manussa was the most familiar among the three. After further refinement of the designs, the third section describes the data collection procedures. A short-exposure technique was used with 32 participants who already had some knowledge of Khom Thai, to compare letter recognition. This method was used for gathering reader feedback on the designs. In general, the findings did not indicate any significant differences between the three designs regarding the accuracy rate of letter identification. However, certain individual letters that more closely resembled the Thai script received higher scores than did unfamiliar characters. The three TLK designs constitute the primary contribution to knowledge. However, further contributions made by this research are its analyses of Khom Thai characters and its systematic guidelines for developing Khom Thai letterforms, the guidelines will aid future type designers of Khom Thai on letterform design. The study contributes to the field of research in non-Latin type design by endorsing the role of design in enabling contemporary audiences to learn ancient Thai scripts

Parsing Thai Social Data: A New Challenge for Thai NLP

Dependency parsing (DP) is a task that analyzes text for syntactic structure and relationship between words. DP is widely used to improve natural language processing (NLP) applications in many languages such as English. Previous works on DP are generally applicable to formally written languages. However, they do not apply to informal languages such as the ones used in social networks. Therefore, DP has to be researched and explored with such social network data. In this paper, we explore and identify a DP model that is suitable for Thai social network data. After that, we will identify the appropriate linguistic unit as an input. The result showed that, the transition based model called, improve Elkared dependency parser outperform the others at UAS of 81.42%.Comment: 7 Pages, 8 figures, to be published in The 14th International Joint Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing (iSAI-NLP 2019

Cultures of of Aspiration and Poverty? Aspirational Inequalities in Northeast and Southern Thailand

The paper provides micro-level evidence of rising inequality in Thailand, using data from an intensive study of seven communities in Northeast and Southern Thailand. This inequality affects participants’ material and subjective wellbeing, their aspirations, and the extent to which they feel these are realised. The paper argues that adaptation, expressed as reduced aspirations, could explain why the effect of material poverty on people’s satisfaction with their lives is small. The reduction in attainment of aspirations linked to socio-economic status suggests that a small, but constant group of people are being excluded from a shift in the societal consensus over what constitutes a good life