Teachers’ perceptions of personal program plan requirements and school team collaboration

The purpose of the study was to explore the overall perceptions that resource room teachers had of the required SMART goals, rubric outcome sampling, and the collaborative effort of Personal Program Planning team. This study included a descriptive, embedded single-case study having three sub-units. Each subunit consisted of one resource room teacher who was teaching in a central Saskatchewan urban school division at the elementary level. Each resource room teacher was asked to select one student with a cognitive, behavioural, or multiple disability and a previous PPP document written for him or her (i.e., this is not the student’s first year of meeting the criteria for Intensive Supports) by that particular resource room teacher. Each resource room teacher participated in three separate focus open-ended interviews designed to explore their perceptions of SMART goals, rubric outcome sampling, and the collaborative nature of the PPP process. Pattern-matching and exploration building were the two analytic techniques used in this study. Numerous themes were identified in the data. The themes present in data collected from at least two of the participants included: the need to be flexible with parents; resource room teachers have large workloads; concern over EAs not being able to attend PPP meetings; the need for rubrics to be discussed within the context of a PPP meeting; the effect of having different knowledge bases and levels of expertise represented in a PPP team; the use of visual aides during the PPP meeting; and working with the dual role of resource room teacher and vice principal

Protutor : a pronunciation tutor that uses historic open learner models

Second language learners face many challenges when learning a new language. To determine which challenges learners needed additional support in overcoming, we conducted a needs assessment of the Russian language program at the University of Saskatchewan and found that their students needed the most help with speaking in Russian. As a result, we designed an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) to help students learn how to pronounce Russian properly. We hoped to alleviate some of the challenges that learners face when learning to pronounce words in a second language by building an ITS that uses a Historic Open Learner Model (HOLM) to encourage learner reflection and to help maintain learner motivation. We designed, built, and performed a formative evaluation of a system, called ProTutor, using beginner learners of Russian as a second language at the University of Saskatchewan. This evaluation showed that learners have a positive perception of HOLMs and of the system as a whole. However, ProTutor needs further evaluation in order to determine its effectiveness as a learning aide

Migrants and Mobile Technology Use: Gaps in the Support Provided by Current Tools

Our current understanding of how migrants use mobile tools to support their communication and language learning is inadequate. This study, therefore, explores the learner-initiated use of technologies to support their comprehension, production, and acquisition of English following migration to Canada. Information about migrant use of technologies and experiences was collected by interviews. The interview data was analysed through the complementary lenses of noticing, from language learning, and appropriation, from human-computer interaction. Combining these lenses enabled the identification of unmet migrant communication, support, and learning needs. The manner in which migrants employed mobile and other tools to facilitate their learning and communication were identified through the application of these theories. This analysis indicates that migrants can use existing tools to access information. However, they need additional support if they are to take full advantage of existing mobile tools. Moreover, there is a need for tools that support larger gaps in their knowledge and skills. Migrant experiences indicate that they need additional social, meta-cognitive, and emotional support. These needs suggest opportunities for creating mobile tools that scaffold the development of new skills that include the learner’s ability to monitor and plan his or her learning and understand language produced by those who speak different varieties of English or who have non-majority accents

Visualising alignment to support students’ judgment of confidence in open learner models

Knowledge monitoring is a component of metacognition which can help students regulate their own learning. In adaptive learning software, the system’s model of the student can be presented as an open learner model (OLM) which is intended to enable monitoring processes. We explore how presenting alignment, between students’ self-assessed confidence and the system’s model of the student, supports knowledge monitoring. When students can see their confidence and their performance (either combined within one skill meter or expanded as two separate skill meters), their knowledge monitoring and performance improves, particularly for low-achieving students. These results indicate the importance of communicating the alignment between the system’s evaluation of student performance and student confidence in the correctness of their answers as a means to support metacognitive skills

A Reading Tutor for Low-Literacy Adults

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the mean proficiency in literacy among adults in the US and Canada is at Level 2. Adults at this level cannot process dense texts, eliminate irrelevant information, perform multi-step operations, or evaluate the reliability of a source. The Reading Tutor is a website that was created to help low-literacy adults improve their English. It will be free to use the website that is personalized to the literacy level of every user. Creating a website allows people to increase their literacy levels without facing the stigma that comes with attending a class in person. Adults are inclined to improve their English because it often affects their career potential, socio-economic status, and health. The Reading Tutor has two major components: the passages and the scenarios. Passages are stories that the user can read and answer questions about. Scenarios are plots with questions that the user must answer to move on. In recent work, the information for each scenario was organized into spreadsheets to simplify the process of entering data into the code.  The system architecture consists of HTML, CSS, Javascript, MySQL, Python, and Django. The newest development in this project was the improvement of the user intake experience. Before starting the passages and scenarios, the website collects information from each adult. The user "interests" pages are the latest additions to the site and these pages ask about the user’s hobbies. That data will then be used to incorporate their interests into later questions. It was important to add this feature to the website because relevance is a motivator for the user demographic. The next steps for the website are to log the user’s interests into the database. Future enhancements also include the creation of more scenarios to accommodate to the different user interests. &nbsp

Supporting English Language Learners with an Adaptive Mobile Application

English language learners (ELL) have dedicated considerable time and effort to the development of their language proficiency. This has included the use of a variety of mobile assisted language learning (MALL) tools that are either unproven or that have undergone limited evaluations of their effectiveness. The majority of these evaluations have been performed with beginner foreign-language learners at the post-secondary level. Moreover, dedicated MALL tools rarely support the learner’s ability to communicate in English. I propose and demonstrate the feasibility of an adaptive MALL approach that aims to scaffold ELL vocabulary and communication needs. This scaffolding recommends learning materials to ELLs by employing the ecological approach to dynamically reason over logs of learner interactions with a MALL tool. The highly personalized approach to supporting learners that is operationalized through this tool was developed following user-centered design principles. The development of the learning content generation and recommendation mechanisms that are included as part of this approach to supporting English language learners was validated through two studies. An additional exploratory evaluation of this adaptive approach to supporting ELL communication and learning activities was performed before evaluating its influence on ELL vocabulary knowledge, communication, and affect through two studies. These studies considered the effectiveness of the proposed MALL approach from multiple perspectives. The first took place in a Japanese high school and focused on the relationship between student vocabulary knowledge and system usage. The second involved advanced English language learners and took place in the greater Toronto area. This study aimed to determine the relationships among system usage, user communicative success, and user affect. The work presented in this thesis shows that the use of the proposed approach can support ELL communication, vocabulary development, and affect. The evaluation of this approach allowed the creation of models that predict learning outcomes based on learners’ MALL usage and knowledge. Combining the results of these studies with those of the formative evaluations, indicates that a mobile tool that employs the ecological approach to learner modeling can support the learning activities, vocabulary learning outcomes, affect, and communication of English language learners.Ph.D

Increasing the Stability and Turnover Number of a Highly Active Iron Catalyst for the Asymmetric Transfer Hydrogenation of Ketones

A highly active iron catalyst for the asymmetric transfer hydrogenation (ATH) of ketones was reported by the Morris group in 2013. This catalyst surpassed the activity of platinoid metals by reaching TOFs up to 200 per second, but the highest reported turnover number (TON) was only 6060. To compete with the platinoid metals industrially, the focus of this thesis was to increase the TON of the iron catalyst through mechanistic investigation of potential deactivation pathways, switching to potassium formate and water as the hydride and proton source to obtain quantitative conversion, as well as the heterogenization of the precatalyst for eventual use in a continuous flow system. The orthophenylene catalysts in Chapter 3 displayed lower activity due to the rigidity of the triphenylphosphine donor, which places a phenyl group into the active site of the catalyst. Despite this hindrance, one catalyst achieved a TON of 8821 while retaining a remarkably high ee of 90%. The maximum TON of this catalyst was 150 000 which was achieved by heating the reaction at 75 °C with sequential injections of acetophenone and isopropanol (iPrOH). Unfortunately, since the ATH with iPrOH is an equilibrium process, the product alcohol racemized over time. The ATH in water using potassium formate as the hydride source lead to decreased activity due to the mass-transfer limitations caused by the formation of a biphasic reaction mixture. The maximum TON was 199, which rivals platinoid metal catalysts in similar biphasic systems. Finally, a variant of the iron catalyst was successfully covalently bonded to polystyrene, silica gel, and polyethylene glycol for use in batch chemistry. While maintaining a pH of 12.6, the iron catalyst remained covalently bonded to the polymeric support and could be recycled one time to achieve a total turnover number (TTN) of 164. Further studies are required to optimize the batch chemistry reaction for later use in a continuous flow system.Ph.D