Teaching multimodal literacies with digital technologies and augmented reality : a cluster analysis of Australian teachers' TPACK

Despite the proliferation of augmented reality (AR) apps, Australian primary teachers have yet to use them widely for the teaching of multimodal literacies. Conceptualising teachers’ knowledge of using digital technologies to teach multimodal literacies as a form of technological pedagogical content knowledge or TPACK(ML), this study examined teacher differences through a cluster analysis of survey responses collected from a sample of 142 Australian primary school teachers. Two distinct clusters of teachers were derived. The first cluster with lower TPACK(ML) comprised teachers with lower self-reported confidence in facilitating new cultures of learning that are participatory and technology-driven in nature. In their open-ended survey responses, these teachers shared their unfamiliarity with AR, as well as concerns about their personal technical competency and how AR could be integrated into the curriculum. The second cluster of teachers rated themselves higher in TPACK(ML) and in how they used technology to support language learning pedagogies. They were able to propose different pedagogical strategies to engage students’ multimodal literacies meaningfully with AR in their open-ended survey responses. The implications of the study’s findings were discussed, and recommendations were proposed for designing and sustaining differentiated forms of teacher professional development for teaching multimodal literacies with emergent digital technologies

Reading and spelling Chinese among beginning readers: What skills make a difference?

The contributions of six important reading-related skills (phonological awareness, rapid naming, orthographic skills, morphological awareness, listening comprehension, and syntactic skills) to Chinese word and text reading were examined among 290 Chinese first graders in Hong Kong. Rapid naming, but not phonological awareness, was a significant predictor of Chinese word reading and writing to dictation (i.e., spelling) in the context of orthographic skills and morphological awareness. Commonality analyses suggested that orthographic skills and morphological awareness each contributed significant amount of unique variance to Chinese word reading and spelling. Syntactic skills accounted for significant amount of unique variance in reading comprehension at both sentence and passage levels after controlling for the effects of word reading and the other skills, but listening comprehension did not. A model on the interrelationships among the reading-related skills and Chinese reading at both word and text levels was proposed. © 2011 Society for the Scientific Study of Reading.postprin

Reading and spelling Chinese among beginning readers: What skills make a difference?

The contributions of six important reading-related skills (phonological awareness, rapid naming, orthographic skills, morphological awareness, listening comprehension, and syntactic skills) to Chinese word and text reading were examined among 290 Chinese first graders in Hong Kong. Rapid naming, but not phonological awareness, was a significant predictor of Chinese word reading and writing to dictation (i.e., spelling) in the context of orthographic skills and morphological awareness. Commonality analyses suggested that orthographic skills and morphological awareness each contributed significant amount of unique variance to Chinese word reading and spelling. Syntactic skills accounted for significant amount of unique variance in reading comprehension at both sentence and passage levels after controlling for the effects of word reading and the other skills, but listening comprehension did not. A model on the interrelationships among the reading-related skills and Chinese reading at both word and text levels was proposed. © 2011 Society for the Scientific Study of Reading.postprin

Syntactic skills in sentence reading comprehension among Chinese elementary school children

The present study examined the role of syntactic skills for reading comprehension in Chinese. Two hundred and seventy-two Chinese children were tested on their phonological processing, orthographic, morphological, syntactic, and literacy skills at Grades 1 and 2. Hierarchical multiple regression results showed that syntactic skills, in terms of word order, connective usage, and knowledge of morphosyntactic structure (measured by an oral cloze task) in Grade 1, significantly predicted sentence reading comprehension in Grade 2 after controlling for the children's age, IQ, and word level reading-related cognitive skills in Grade 1, and word reading in Grade 2. As in alphabetic languages, syntactic skills are essential for reading comprehension in Chinese. The unique roles of individual syntactic skills for understanding sentences in Chinese are discussed. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.postprin

Enhanced localization with adaptive normal distribution transform Monte Carlo localization for map based navigation robot

Map-based navigation is the common navigation method used among the mobile robotic application. The localization plays an important role in the navigation where it estimates the robot position in an environment. Monte Carlo Localization (MCL) is found as the widely used estimation algorithm due to it non-linear characteristic. There are classifications of MCL such as Adaptive MCL (AMCL), Normal Distribution Transform MCL (NDT-MCL) which can perform better than the MCL. However, AMCL is adaptive to particles but the position estimation accuracy is not optimized. NDT-MCL has good position estimation but it requires higher number of particles which results in higher computational effort. The objective of the research is to design and develop a localization algorithm which can achieve better performance in term of position estimation and computational effort. The new MCL algorithm which is named as Adaptive Normal Distribution Transform Monte Carlo Localization (ANDT-MCL) is then designed and developed. It integrates Kullback–Leibler divergence, Normal Distribution Transform and Systematic Resampling into the algorithm. Three experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of proposed ANDT-MCL in simulated environment. These experiments include evaluating the performance of ANDT-MCL with different path shape, distance and velocity. In the end of the research work, the proposed ANDT-MCL is successfully developed. It is adaptive to the number of particles used, higher position estimation and lower computational effort than existing algorithms. The algorithm can produce better position estimation with less computational effort in any kind paths and is consistent in long journey as well as can outperform in high speed navigation

Dielectric spectroscopy on mixture of rice husk, rice husk ash and rice bran from 4 Hz to 1 MHz

In this study, mixtures of rice husk/rice husk ashes (RHA) with RB on different ratios were prepared. Dielectric permittivity (ε'), loss factor (ε") and AC conductivity (σ') were measured in the frequency range of 4 Hz to 1 MHz in ambient temperature. Results for mixture of RHA and RB indicate that a dipolar relaxation occurring between 103 - 105 Hz and the peak is depressed and shifted to lower frequency as the RB content increases in the mixture. Moreover, AC conductivity decreases as the RB content increase. This may attributed to production of natural oil content from RB. In contrast, a dielectric characteristic for RH is generally not affected by the RB contents. This study explore dielectric characteristic of mixture between RH/RHA and RB in low frequency range because lack of literature is reported on low frequency response. Additionally, the potential application of RH/RHA and RB could be explored in effort to diminish waste disposal and enhance environmental protection

Learning beyond the classroom: students’ attitudes towards the integration of CLIL and museum-based pedagogies

In the last two decades, several studies have reported on the benefits of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) on students’ affective and cognitive gains. These studies, however, have mainly concentrated on the implementation of CLIL within the formal (school) context, with very little research on its impact in non-formal (out-of-school) contexts. Thus, the present article addresses this gap by describing an action research project aimed at understanding secondary school students’ attitudes towards the integration of CLIL and museum-based pedagogies. The project involved 284 students (14–16 years old) in northern Italy, who participated in a CLIL museum visit on Animal Classification through English at the Natural History Museum in Venice. A mixed-method research design was implemented and data was collected through students’ questionnaires and focus groups. Results reveal that students showed very positive attitudes towards taking part in a CLIL museum visit based on the interaction among the following dimensions: engagement with museum objects, use of English beyond the classroom, methodology and students’ interests, self-concept and career plans

The running coupling of 8 flavors and 3 colors

We compute the renormalized running coupling of SU(3) gauge theory coupled to N_f = 8 flavors of massless fundamental Dirac fermions. The recently proposed finite volume gradient flow scheme is used. The calculations are performed at several lattice spacings allowing for a controlled continuum extrapolation. The results for the discrete beta-function show that it is monotonic without any sign of a fixed point in the range of couplings we cover. As a cross check the continuum results are compared with the well-known perturbative continuum beta-function for small values of the renormalized coupling and perfect agreement is found.Comment: 15 pages, 17 figures, published versio