Addressing the student: Voice elements in educational texts

Voice elements are those elements of educational texts that authors use to interact with students, such as questions, evaluations, or direct address forms (‘you’). These elements are intended to enhance students’ engagement and comprehension, but we know little about the extent to which they are used in present-day educational texts. Using a corpus of Dutch biology, geography, and history texts for grade 5 and grade 8 (N = 1055), this study shows that voice elements are barely differentiated over grade levels. Conversely, voice elements are generally varied over school subjects, as they are less frequent in history texts – which convey readily imaginable and relatable content – compared to biology and geography texts – which discuss less relatable content for which students need to exert more effort to connect it to their own world. This finding suggests that authors of educational texts have intuitions about the conditions under which voice elements are a desirable attribute

Why or when to include narrative and voice elements in educational texts?: Dutch publishers’ opinions and policies

This study presents the results of two focus group sessions and a group interview on the opinions and policies of Dutch educational publishers regarding the use of narrative and voice elements in educational texts for biology, geography, and history. This gives insight into the perceived advantages, disadvantages, and additional considerations publishers take into account during decision making concerning these elements. It appears that publishers’ motives for including narrative and voice elements are not influenced by educational level (primary vs. secondary education) but do depend on school subject (biology vs. geography vs. history). For instance, publishers strategically add narrative elements to history texts, in order to distinguish different historical perspectives and to stimulate students to imagine themselves in another time period. For biology and geography, however, publishers experience a tension between adding such elements and keeping the texts short and goal-oriented. In addition, publishers are torn between including narrative texts because these are favored by teachers and leaving them out because of a lack of convincing empirical effects on reading and learning outcomes

Semantic Web Service Discovery Using Natural Language Processing Techniques

This paper proposes a Semantic Web Service Discovery framework for finding Semantic Web services by making use of natural language processing techniques. The framework allows searching through a set of semantic Web services in order to find a match with a user query consisting of keywords. By specifying the search goal using keywords, end-users do not need to have knowledge about semantic languages, which makes it easy to express the desired semantic Web services. For matching keywords with semantic Web service descriptions given in WSMO, techniques like part-of-speech tagging, lemmatization, and word sense disambiguation are used. After determining the senses of relevant words gathered from Web service descriptions and the user query, a matching process takes place. The performance evaluation shows that the three proposed matching algorithms are able to effectively perform matching and approximate matching

A Lexico-Semantic Pattern Language for Learning Ontology Instances from Text

The Semantic Web aims to extend the World Wide Web with a layer of semantic information, so that it is understandable not only by humans, but also by computers. At its core, the Semantic Web consists of ontologies that describe the meaning of concepts in a certain domain or across domains. The domain ontologies are mostly created and maintained by domain experts using manual, time-intensive processes. In this paper, we propose a rule-based method for learning ontology instances from text that helps domain experts with the ontology population process. In this method we define a lexico-semantic pattern language that, in addition to the lexical and syntactical information present in lexico-syntactic rules, also makes use of semantic information. We show that the lexico-semantic patterns are superior to lexico-syntactic patterns with respect to efficiency and effectivity. When applied to event relation recognition in text-based news items in the domains of finance and politics using Hermes, an ontology-driven news personalization service, our approach has a precision and recall of approximately 80% and 70%, respectively

Zaakvakteksten voor groep 5-8 : Een doorgaande leeslijn?

Middelbare scholieren moeten vaak zelfstandig informatie uit zaakvakteksten verwerken. Idealiter worden ze daar goed op voorbereid en krijgen ze op de basisschool gaandeweg steeds moeilijkere teksten te lezen. Maar gebeurt dat ook? Is er bij de zaakvakteksten sprake van een doorgaande leeslijn? In deze bijdrage bespreken we onderzoek naar teksten uit documentatieboekjes en uit veelgebruikte methodes voor geschiedenis en natuur & techniek. Hierbij besteden we specifiek aandacht aan de mate waarin deze teksten persoonlijk dan wel zakelijk geformuleerd zijn. Uitgevers blijken op dit vlak nauwelijks verschil aan te brengen tussen teksten voor groep 5-6 en teksten voor groep 7-8. Wel zijn inleidende hoofdstukken van documentatieboekjes meer verhalend van aard dan latere hoofdstukken. We bespreken enkele implicaties voor onderwijs en onderzoek

Effecten van narrativiteit in educatieve teksten : Wat zeggen onderzoeksresultaten (nog niet)?

This study aims to gain more insight into narrativity in the educational domain. Based on earlier research, we define three prototypical narrative elements (i.e., the presence of particularized events, an experiencing character, and a landscape of consciousness), and present an analytic model that illustrates how varying combinations of these elements occur in Dutch educational materials for Social Studies and Science. Using this model, we then analyze experimental texts from previous studies on the effects of narrativity on text comprehension and recall. We demonstrate that experimental narrative texts nearly always exhibit all prototypical narrative elements, while their expository counterparts also contain some narrative elements and thus are not purely expository. In addition, we show that no consistent patterns can be found in the results of the selected experimental studies, and that the data at hand therefore do not allow for strong conclusions about the effects of narrativity in educational texts. Finally, we discuss the limitations of previous as well as the present research and the implications for future research