Helping behaviour during cooperative learning and learning gains

Is helping behaviour (i.e., solicited help and peer tutoring) during cooperative learning (CL) related to subsequent learning gains? And can teachers influence pupils’ helping behaviour? One hundred one 5th grade pupils from multiethnic schools, 10-12 years old, participated in the study. Forty two pupils (31 immigrant) worked in an experimental condition, characterized by the stimulation of solicited high quality help and 59 (24 immigrant) worked in a control condition. It was found that learning gains were predicted positively by pupils’ unsolicited helping behaviour (i.e., peer tutoring) and negatively by solicited help. Furthermore, teachers were able to affect pupils’ low quality solicited help only. Lastly, immigrant pupils used less helping behaviour than local pupils, irrespective of CL setting

Towards long-term social child-robot interaction: using multi-activity switching to engage young users

Social robots have the potential to provide support in a number of practical domains, such as learning and behaviour change. This potential is particularly relevant for children, who have proven receptive to interactions with social robots. To reach learning and therapeutic goals, a number of issues need to be investigated, notably the design of an effective child-robot interaction (cHRI) to ensure the child remains engaged in the relationship and that educational goals are met. Typically, current cHRI research experiments focus on a single type of interaction activity (e.g. a game). However, these can suffer from a lack of adaptation to the child, or from an increasingly repetitive nature of the activity and interaction. In this paper, we motivate and propose a practicable solution to this issue: an adaptive robot able to switch between multiple activities within single interactions. We describe a system that embodies this idea, and present a case study in which diabetic children collaboratively learn with the robot about various aspects of managing their condition. We demonstrate the ability of our system to induce a varied interaction and show the potential of this approach both as an educational tool and as a research method for long-term cHRI

Towards the Italian CSLU Toolkit

The “digits ” small-vocabulary task is important for many telephone-based applications such as computer-assisted long-distance dialing or credit-card billing, requires extremely high accuracy, and focuses research on acoustic-level processing. On the other hand, in many other tasks a speaker-independent domain-specific vocabulary (such as “collect call”, “calling card”, “operator”, or “help”) needs to be recognized. For such tasks, a “general-purpose ” (gp) recognizer that is capable of recognizing all permissible phoneme strings in a language is required. The more recent results obtained by the application of the CSLU Toolkit framebased hybrid HMM/ANN architecture on these recognition tasks for the Italian language are described. This work is inserted in a project whose aim is to contribute to the “Italianization ” of the CSLU Toolkit and to support the dissemination of these tools and technologies. 1

Imagined futures: why business studies dominate the higher education choices of second-generation Turks in the Netherlands

Relying on in-depth interviews with higher education students and young graduates the study investigates the factors underpinning the participation patterns of second-generation Turks in the Dutch higher education system. The paper highlights how ethnic minority students accommodate the constraints faced by the Dutch educational system by rationalizing economics at professional colleges as a suitable alternative to studying medicine at university, an alternative that will meet both their aspirations for a more successful and secure life than their parents’ while maintaining the traditional family ties in line with the work-life balance offered by a ‘nine-to-five job’