Comparing Action-Oriented Language in the Assessment of EFL Writing

This thesis compares the extent to which instruction and assessment in the Finnish National Curriculum (FNC) and International Baccalaureate (IB) at one Finnish high school align with the pedagogical approach to language instruction recommended in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR; Council of Europe 2001, 2018). Comparison of the two curricula will be used to inform curriculum development at the school, where the aim is to combine pre–Diploma Program (DP)—i.e., instruction of first-year students who have been provisionally accepted to the DP program—and FNC instruction in the first year of high school. Action-oriented language is envisioned in CEFR as a pedagogical approach that (1) treats language as a tool rather than an object for mastery and (2) recommends the instruction, assessment, and learning of the broad range of social contexts in which communication occurs. The first point draws largely on Focus on Form (FonF) approaches, developed in SLA research, while the second point draws largely on task-based language teaching (TBLT), developed in pedagogical research. While CEFR is regularly used today for benchmarking student language mastery, its uneven application in curriculum, course instruction, and course and exam assessment in the IB and FNC leave much to be desired, calling into question whether CEFR benchmarking can really be used for EFL students graduating from the IB and FNC. This thesis uses a school in Espoo, Finland as a case study to compare the IB and FNC instruction of first-year students, the assessment practices of EFL teachers based on the marking of a common essay and a subsequent interview, and quantitative analysis of IB and FNC exam results and essay scores for first-year pre-DP and FNC students in academic year 2019–2020. The mixed methods research (MMR) approach of the thesis is designed to account for the broad set of data (i.e., curriculum, European language policy, academic literature, local needs) that are taken into consideration when developing curriculum at the school level. The results of this thesis indicate that FNC assessment is more closely aligned with CEFR but that both FNC and IB in Finland, especially pre-DP education, are still lagging behind in implementing the framework developed already two decades ago. At least some of this lag, as indicated in the qualitative data, seem to originate from the continuation of outdated practices of language assessment (esp. in its focus on language mastery rather than action-oriented language use) regardless of changes in CEFR and the Finnish curriculum. In the case of assessment in FNC, the mixed use of continuum criterion-referenced assessment of written production in an exam designed for mastery norm-referenced assessment is an already imperfect combination that is further undermined by lack of transparency around how to apply criterion-referenced assessment to written production as well as how essays marked by teachers have been moderated by sensors. While the IB is much better at enabling communication between moderators and teachers, EFL instruction in the IB offers a very limited set of communicative language activities, partly due to the broad language profile of students in the international program. For the purposes of students in Finland, however, especially at the school studied, EFL instruction in IB omits an alarmingly wide range of communicative activities in course and exam assessment, an absence that should threaten to invalidate CEFR benchmarking of students graduating from EFL courses, given that most communicative language activities are never taught or assessed. Many of the issues that arise in this thesis are indicative of systematic issues in the curriculum and examination process, which have a negative washback effect on instruction and assessment at the school level. Nevertheless, some suggestions are made at the end of the thesis for how teachers can mitigate problems with validity in the FNC and IB curricula, though changes in FNC assessment is difficult without transparency from the Finnish Matriculation Board. The results of the thesis also indicate that areas of action-oriented language missing in one curriculum are often well explored in the other, such that serious consideration should be given to closer alignment of pre-DP and first-year FNC English instruction at Finnish schools that offer both programs, an effort towards which this master’s thesis is intended to contribute. The comparative weaknesses of EFL instruction and assessment in FNC discussed in this thesis can also be used to inform curricular development of the FNC

Factors involved in the pathogenesis of human uveal melanoma

Trabalho final de mestrado integrado em Medicina (Otorrinolaringologia), apresentado à Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de Coimbra.Introdução: A presbiacusia é a causa mais comum de défice auditivo em adultos e está na origem de muitas outras alterações que comprometem a qualidade de vida dos doentes, entre as quais se destaca a maior incidência de patologia do foro depressivo e a correlação com perda de funções cognitivas que pode vir a culminar em quadros demenciais. No entanto, a maior parte dos indivíduos desvaloriza a situação e são poucos os que procuram ajuda médica. A vida social do indivíduo desempenha um papel essencial neste processo e na decisão de utilizar ou não uma prótese auditiva. Objetivos: Precisar o número de doentes seguidos no Centro Hospitalar e Universitário de Coimbra (CHUC) por presbiacusia e qual a percentagem destes que utiliza prótese auditiva. Simultaneamente, pretendemos apreciar o impacto que esta patologia tem na vertente social destes doentes. Materiais e métodos: Foram analisados todos os processos clínicos do serviço de Otorrinolaringologia (ORL) do CHUC que datassem do ano civil de 2010 em diante. Paralelamente, foi aplicado um questionário a 50 destes doentes. As perguntas em causa foram selecionadas a partir do Hearing Handicap Inventory for the Elderly (HHIE) Portuguese short version. Resultados: Este estudo revelou um total de 2643 indivíduos com diagnóstico de presbiacusia corroborado por audiograma tonal típico. Apenas 3,14% utilizam prótese auditiva, dos quais 67,45% são do sexo feminino. A análise dos questionários mostrou que 74% dos indivíduos apresenta scores que indicam que a patologia em causa prejudica a sua qualidade de vida. Conclusões: Perante um elevado número de pacientes com queixas de hipoacusia, só uma pequena fração recorre a medidas de reabilitação auditiva, sendo a utilização de próteses substancialmente superior no sexo feminino. A perda auditiva da maior parte dos indivíduos em estudo tem repercussões na sua vida social. A gravidade dessas repercussões é maior no sexo feminino, principalmente para idades inferiores a 75 anos.Introduction: Presbycusis is the most common cause of auditory deficit in adults and it’s also the root of many other pathological processes that compromise the patient’s quality of life, such as the augmented incidence of depression and the connection to the loss of cognitive functions that may culminate in dementia. However, the majority of these individuals devalues the situation and only a few seek medical help. The social life of the individual plays an essential role in this process and in the decision to use or not a hearing aid. Objectives: Specify the number of patients followed at the Centro Hospitalar e Universitário de Coimbra (CHUC) due to presbycusis and the percentage of those who use hearing aids. Simultaneously, we aim to assess the impact that this disease has on the social life of these patients. Methods: All clinical files present in the department of Otorhinolaryngology (ORL) dating from 2010 onwards were analyzed. Simultaneously, a questionnaire was administered to 50 of these patients. The questions composing this questionnaire were selected from the Hearing Handicap Inventory for the Elderly (HHIE) Portuguese short version. Results: This study revealed a total of 2643 individuals diagnosed with presbycusis corroborated by a typical tonal audiogram. Only 3.14% use hearing aids, of which 67.45% are female. Analysis of the questionnaires showed that 74% of the individuals present scores that indicate this pathology adversely affects their quality of life. Conclusions: Given the large number of patients with complaints of hearing loss, only a small fraction uses measures of auditory rehabilitation, with the use of hearing aids being substantially higher in females. The hearing loss of most of the individuals in this study has repercussions in their social life. The severity of these effects is higher in females, especially for the age group ‘younger than 75 years’

Not to Hide a Light Under a Bushel : Manichaean Missionary Practices in the Roman West

The details of the mission of Manichaeism—a religion that rose out of a Jewish-Christian milieu in Roman Babylonia in the 3rd century CE—emerge from both polemical sources and genuine Manichaean sources, the latter of which have been greatly expanded in the past century with a number of discoveries. This thesis presents a comparative study that critically evaluates the sources for and identifies the practices of the Manichaean mission in the Roman West between the 3rd century CE, when the religion was founded, and the 6th century CE, when the religion was persecuted off the face of the Western Roman Empire. By comparing the corpus of Augustine (who was himself a Manichaean for 9 years) and Manichaean sources, the thesis identifies a total of eight Manichaean practices that can be tied to the Roman West: (1) the undertaking of polemical treatises and doctrinal debates; (2) the command of a broad range of languages; (3) exegesis of the New Testament to unearth Manichaean beliefs; (4) the comparison of Old and New Testament passages (= disputations) to demonstrate the falseness of the Old Testament, which no true Christian should believe in; (5) missions in the guise of merchant trade; (6) the appeal to similarities with the disciples of Jesus; (7) sensationalist appeals to the appearances of poverty and association with women; and (8) the donation of children by lay Manichaeans to become missionaries. Among those identified here, practices (6)–(8) seem to be unique contributions to the field; chapter 3 furthermore reconstructs the theological underpinning of practice (8). Previous scholarship has not focused specifically on a critical examination of the Manichaean mission. In using a comparative method, this thesis compares attestation of Manichaean missionary practices internally (i.e., within, for instance, Augustine’s corpus to see if he is consistent in his attestation of the same practice) and externally (i.e., to see if polemical reports match up with genuine Manichaean reports). When making external comparisons, if attestation is found in Augustine but not in Manichaean sources, it is surmised that the practice is likely a heresiological invention; if in Manichaean but not in Augustinian sources, then perhaps a missionary practice that was not used or else simply not attested in the Roman West. The standard is generally, at any rate, to seek attestation in both sources and thus to verify that the practice was indeed used and witnessed in the Roman West. Finally, the appendices present the first English translation of a recently discovered sermon by Augustine (Serm. 350F) and two tables compiling Manichaean disputations

An Ensemble of Knowledge Sharing Models for Dynamic Hand Gesture Recognition

The focus of this paper is dynamic gesture recognition in the context of the interaction between humans and machines. We propose a model consisting of two sub-networks, a transformer and an ordered-neuron long-short-term-memory (ON-LSTM) based recurrent neural network (RNN). Each sub-network is trained to perform the task of gesture recognition using only skeleton joints. Since each sub-network extracts different types of features due to the difference in architecture, the knowledge can be shared between the sub-networks. Through knowledge distillation, the features and predictions from each sub-network are fused together into a new fusion classifier. In addition, a cyclical learning rate can be used to generate a series of models that are combined in an ensemble, in order to yield a more generalizable prediction. The proposed ensemble of knowledge-sharing models exhibits an overall accuracy of 86.11% using only skeleton information, as tested using the Dynamic Hand Gesture-14/28 datasetComment: Accepted at International Joint Conference on Neural Networ

Causal Models Applied to the Patterns of Human Migration due to Climate Change

The impacts of mass migration, such as crisis induced by climate change, extend beyond environmental concerns and can greatly affect social infrastructure and public services, such as education, healthcare, and security. These crises exacerbate certain elements like cultural barriers, and discrimination by amplifying the challenges faced by these affected communities. This paper proposes an innovative approach to address migration crises in the context of crisis management through a combination of modeling and imbalance assessment tools. By employing deep learning for forecasting and integrating causal reasoning via Bayesian networks, this methodology enables the evaluation of imbalances and risks in the socio-technological landscape, providing crucial insights for informed decision-making. Through this framework, critical systems can be analyzed to understand how fluctuations in migration levels may impact them, facilitating effective crisis governance strategies.Comment: submitted to IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligenc

Multi-Metric Evaluation of Thermal-to-Visual Face Recognition

In this paper, we aim to address the problem of heterogeneous or cross-spectral face recognition using machine learning to synthesize visual spectrum face from infrared images. The synthesis of visual-band face images allows for more optimal extraction of facial features to be used for face identification and/or verification. We explore the ability to use Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for face image synthesis, and examine the performance of these images using pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The features extracted using CNNs are applied in face identification and verification. We explore the performance in terms of acceptance rate when using various similarity measures for face verification