Informed design of educational technology for teaching and learning? Towards an evidence-informed model of good practice

The aim of this paper is to model evidence-informed design based on a selective critical analysis of research articles. We draw upon findings from an investigation into practitioners’ use of educational technologies to synthesise and model what informs their designs. We found that practitioners’ designs were often driven by implicit assumptions about learning. These shaped both the design of interventions and the methods sought to derive evaluations and interpret the findings. We argue that interventions need to be grounded in better and explicit conceptualisations of what constitutes learning in order to have well-informed designs that focus on improving the quality of student learning

Weighing up Exercises on Phrasal Verbs: Retrieval Versus Trial-And-Error Practices

EFL textbooks and internet resources exhibit various formats and implementations of exercises on phrasal verbs. The experimental study reported here examines whether some of these might be more effective than others. EFL learners at a university in Japan were randomly assigned to four treatment groups. Two groups were presented first with phrasal verbs and their meaning before they were prompted to retrieve the particles from memory. The difference between these two retrieval groups was that one group studied and then retrieved items one at a time, while the other group studied and retrieved them in sets. The two other groups received the exercises as trial-and-error events, where participants were prompted to guess the particles and were subsequently provided with the correct response. One group was given immediate feedback on each item, while the other group tackled sets of 14 items before receiving feedback. The effectiveness of these exercise implementations was compared through an immediate and a 1-week delayed post-test. The best test scores were obtained when the exercises had served the purpose of retrieval, although this advantage shrank in the delayed test (where scores were poor regardless of treatment condition). On average 70% of the post-test errors produced by the learners who had tackled the exercises by trial-and-error were duplicates of incorrect responses they had supplied at the exercise stage, which indicates that corrective feedback was often ineffective

Cross-language influences in L2 pre-lexical and lexical processing and acquisition

We review how second language (L2) printed and spoken word recognition is affected by first language (L1) characteristics. First, sublexical word properties in bilingual word recognition are considered, in particular diacritical marks and Capital Letters in a script, script-specific letters, language-sensitive bigrams, and grapheme to phoneme correspondences (GPCs). Next, we focus on cross-language effects for words varying in orthographic neighborhoods and morphological family size, cognates, and interlingual homographs. For both sublexical and lexical aspects, we examine if language membership information might be used to facilitate processing. Finally, we describe how cross-language similarities and differences play out during second language acquisition. A summary of sublexical and lexical cross-linguistic effects in L2 processing and acquisition concludes the chapter

Cross-language influences in L2 visual word processing: A localist connectionist modelling perspective

Over the last decades, a variety of verbal models have been proposed to account for empirical findings on bilingual word processing and second language (L2) acquisition. However, in these domains only a small number of computational models have seen the light, including localist connectionist models like the Bilingual Interactive Activation (BIA) model (Dijkstra & van Heuven, 1998; van Heuven et al., 1998), the Bilingual Interactive Activation + (BIA+) model (Dijkstra & van Heuven, 2002), and Multilink(+) (Dijkstra et al., 2019; 2022a). In this chapter, we review structural and processing characteristics of these models, such as input coding, lateral inhibition, word frequency, language nodes, and task demands. Finally, advantages and limitations of current computational models are discussed

Functional repurposing revealed by comparing S. pombe and S. cerevisiae genetic interactions.

We present a genetic interaction map of pairwise measures including ∼40% of nonessential S. pombe genes. By comparing interaction maps for fission and budding yeast, we confirmed widespread conservation of genetic relationships within and between complexes and pathways. However, we identified an important subset of orthologous complexes that have undergone functional "repurposing": the evolution of divergent functions and partnerships. We validated three functional repurposing events in S. pombe and mammalian cells and discovered that (1) two lumenal sensors of misfolded ER proteins, the kinase/nuclease Ire1 and the glucosyltransferase Gpt1, act together to mount an ER stress response; (2) ESCRT factors regulate spindle-pole-body duplication; and (3) a membrane-protein phosphatase and kinase complex, the STRIPAK complex, bridges the cis-Golgi, the centrosome, and the outer nuclear membrane to direct mitotic progression. Each discovery opens new areas of inquiry and-together-have implications for model organism-based research and the evolution of genetic systems