Formative assessment of inquiry skills for Responsible Research and Innovation using 3D Virtual Reality Glasses and Face Recognition

This paper examines the experience and views of learners on technological innovations with a novel pedagogical model to enhance formative online assessment of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) skills with e-authentication. The authors developed the OER “virtual classroom” app based on the famous “Bletchley Park” and also an activity for learners exploring this museum in pairs with individual assessment. Participants practiced RRI skills and shared their views about their VR experience in an e-assessment activity with e-authentication through the TeSLA face recognition system. Participants were students from the UK and Brazil. Our research questions include whether the 3DVRG activities in pairs in the same physical environment support peer-learning with assessment-in-context. Findings revealed that activities that enabled physical interactions in pairs enriched the virtual interactions in the museum. The combination of authentic scenario, interactive tasks and assessment-in-context helped learners acquire new information and connect with existing knowledge. These interactions enhanced the immersive learning experience, particularly for those who did not experienced sickness with 3DVRG. Three types of interactions with the virtual space, their peer and the topic respectively enabled the virtual, social and cognitive presence

Judging Time-to-Passage of looming sounds: evidence for the use of distance-based information

Perceptual judgments are an essential mechanism for our everyday interaction with other moving agents or events. For instance, estimation of the time remaining before an object contacts or passes us is essential to act upon or to avoid that object. Previous studies have demonstrated that participants use different cues to estimate the time to contact or the time to passage of approaching visual stimuli. Despite the considerable number of studies on the judgment of approaching auditory stimuli, not much is known about the cues that guide listeners’ performance in an auditory Time-to-Passage (TTP) task. The present study evaluates how accurately participants judge approaching white-noise stimuli in a TTP task that included variable occlusion periods (portion of the presentation time where the stimulus is not audible). Results showed that participants were able to accurately estimate TTP and their performance, in general, was weakly affected by occlusion periods. Moreover, we looked into the psychoacoustic variables provided by the stimuli and analysed how binaural cues related with the performance obtained in the psychophysical task. The binaural temporal difference seems to be the psychoacoustic cue guiding participants’ performance for lower amounts of occlusion, while the binaural loudness difference seems to be the cue guiding performance for higher amounts of occlusion. These results allowed us to explain the perceptual strategies used by participants in a TTP task (maintaining accuracy by shifting the informative cue for TTP estimation), and to demonstrate that the psychoacoustic cue guiding listeners’ performance changes according to the occlusion period.This study was supported by: Bial FoundationGrant 143/14 (https://www.bial.com/en/bial_foundation.11/11th_symposium.219/ fellows_preliminary_results.235/fellows_ preliminary_results.a569.html); FCT PTDC/EEAELC/112137/2009 (https://www.fct.pt/apoios/projectos/consulta/vglobal_projecto?idProjecto=112137&idElemConcurso=3628); and COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2013.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Handwriting Kinematic Differences Between Copying and Dictation

Handwriting is a human activity that may be affected by the modality used as input of the information to be written, mainly copying or dictation. Many processes at different levels are involved to produce motor planning and graphomotor automation of handwriting. In order to quantify possible kinematic differences due to the influence of auditory or visual input modalities to these processes, three different tests were proposed to a sample of 101 young students and several kinematics parameters measuring handwriting characteristics were evaluated. The tests required to copy as accurate (CA) and as fast (CF) as possible an Italian sentence and to write the same sentence under dictation (DF). All parameters showed significant differences between each pair of the three tests. The best performance was obtained in the CF test followed by the DF and CA tests; in the latter the greater accuracy required to produce writing yielded lower velocity and automation as well as a longer motor planning time. On the other hand, the dictation response was more similar to that of CF than CA showing a larger planning time, probably due to a different time necessary to correctly identify the words to reproduce. The combination of the two tests could be useful to study the impairment of either visual or auditory input