What Drives Workers to Learn Online during COVID 19 Pandemics?

One of the common practices during the COVID-19 pandemic is to work or study from home. This study aims to reexamine the factors affecting individual continuance intention of e-learning. During the pandemic, via a survey conducted in 2022, we assessed workers’ continuance intention of e-learning from different sectors in Taiwan. This research brought motivations as mediators in continuance intention to e-learning. Through the statistical analysis, we identified the mediation effect of motivations based on the self-determination theory. The results show that autonomous motivation facilitates the learners’ computer self-efficacy, the quality of the system and content toward continuance intention; controlled motivation could mediate the monetary award in influencing the continuance intention. The internalization of motivation is also an effective mediator. The obtained results not only add new knowledge of what affected the continuance intention of e-learning during the pandemic but also provide guidance for employers to allocate resources to boost e-learning after the pandemic

Uncovering a Connection between the Teachers’ Professional Development Program and Students’ Learning

Most research suggests professional development improves teachers’ knowledge and pedagogy and enhances teachers’ confidence to facilitate a positive attitude about student learning. This study attempted to investigate the connection between teacher professional development program and students’ Learning. This study took Readers’ Theater Teaching Program (RTTP) for professional development as an example to inquiry how participants applied their new knowledge and skills learned from RTTP to their teaching practice and how the impact influenced students’ reading fluency. This study was a two-year project. In the first year, this study focused on designing and implementing RTTP and evaluating participants’ satisfaction of RTTP, what they learned and how they applied it to design their English reading curriculum. In the second year, the study adopted quasi-experimental design approach and evaluated how participants RT instruction influenced their students’ reading fluency. The participants in this study composed two junior high school English teachers and their students. Data was collected from a number of different sources including teaching observation, semi-structured interviews, teaching diary, teachers’ professional development portfolio, pre/post RT content knowledge tests, teacher survey, and students’ reading fluency tests. The results indicated that teachers learned more RT script writing than other specific contents and hold a positive attitude toward RT instruction and considered it as a very wonderful strategy to meet a variety of needs. All of the experimental group students had a big progress in reading fluency after RT instruction.  The evidences from this study indicated that RT English instruction significantly influenced students’ reading fluency and classroom climate. Keywords: Teacher’s Professional Development, Program Evaluation, Readers’ Theater, English Reading Instruction, Reading fluenc

Bayesian Speaker Adaptation Based on a New Hierarchical Probabilistic Model

In this paper, a new hierarchical Bayesian speaker adaptation method called HMAP is proposed that combines the advantages of three conventional algorithms, maximum a posteriori (MAP), maximum-likelihood linear regression (MLLR), and eigenvoice, resulting in excellent performance across a wide range of adaptation conditions. The new method efficiently utilizes intra-speaker and inter-speaker correlation information through modeling phone and speaker subspaces in a consistent hierarchical Bayesian way. The phone variations for a specific speaker are assumed to be located in a low-dimensional subspace. The phone coordinate, which is shared among different speakers, implicitly contains the intra-speaker correlation information. For a specific speaker, the phone variation, represented by speaker-dependent eigenphones, are concatenated into a supervector. The eigenphone supervector space is also a low dimensional speaker subspace, which contains inter-speaker correlation information. Using principal component analysis (PCA), a new hierarchical probabilistic model for the generation of the speech observations is obtained. Speaker adaptation based on the new hierarchical model is derived using the maximum a posteriori criterion in a top-down manner. Both batch adaptation and online adaptation schemes are proposed. With tuned parameters, the new method can handle varying amounts of adaptation data automatically and efficiently. Experimental results on a Mandarin Chinese continuous speech recognition task show good performance under all testing conditions

A second ortho­rhom­bic polymorph of 3,5-diphenyl-4H-1,2,4-triazol-4-amine

The present crystal structure is the second ortho­rhom­bic polymorph of the title compound, C14H12N4. Whereas the structure in Pnma with Z′ = 0.5 is already known [Ikemi et al. (2002 ▶). Heterocycl. Commun. 8, 439–442], the present structure crystallizes in the space group Pbca with Z′ = 1. The dihedral angle between the two phenyl rings is 23.5 (4)° and the dihedral angles between central ring and the phenyl rings are 41.0 (3) and 26.3 (5)°. In the 4-amino-1,2,4-trizole fragment, the C=N distances are 1.321 (3) and 1.315 (3) Å, which are much shorter than the C—N distances of 1.367 (3) and 1.357 (3) Å. In the crystal, adjacent mol­ecules are linked by N—H⋯N hydrogen bonds