Talking back to big bird: Preschool users and a simple speech recognition system

The present study examined the effectiveness of one configuration of automatic speech recognition (ASR) software and hardware with a child sample of 36 three-year-olds and a comparison sample of 20 adults. Subjects used a speaker-dependent, template-based system to play a simple Sesame Street naming game. Results indicated that while the system performed well with adults, it was much less effective with children. An analysis of the children's performances indicates that children's speech is more variable, in both volume and content, than that of adults. The ASR system responded ineffectively to this variability, resulting in inferior performance. Specific behaviors and their effects on the ASR system are identified, and possible system modifications that address these behaviors are noted.     

Unraveling the culture of the mathematics classroom: A video-based study in sixth grade

Changing perspectives on mathematics teaching and learning resulted in a new generation of mathematics textbooks, stressing among others the importance of mathematical reasoning and problem-solving skills and their application to real-life situations. The article reports a study that investigates to what extent the reform-based ideas underlying these mathematical textbooks impact the current teaching of mathematics. Two problem-solving lessons were videotaped in 10 sixth-grade classrooms and a coding scheme was developed to analyze these lessons with regard to three aspects of the classroom culture that are assumed to enhance students’ mathematical beliefs and problem-solving competencies: (1) the classroom norms that are established, (2) the instructional techniques and classroom organization forms, and (3) the set of tasks students are confronted with. Two instruments were administered to measure students’ beliefs about learning mathematical word problem solving, and to assess their problem-solving processes and skills. The results indicate that some reform-based aspects seemed to be easier to implement (e.g., a strong focus on heuristic skills, embedding tasks in a realistic context) than others (e.g., the use of group work, an explicit negotiation of appropriate social norms).     

Associations of Early Developmental Milestones With Adult Intelligence

The study investigated whether age at attainment of 20 developmental milestones within the areas of language, walking, eating, dressing, social interaction, and toilet training was associated with adult intelligence. Mothers of 821 children of the Copenhagen Perinatal Cohort recorded 20 developmental milestones at a 3‐year examination, and all children were administered the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale when they were 20–34 years old. Later attainment of a number of milestones was associated with lower adult IQ with the strongest associations found for those related to language and social interaction. The adjusted full‐scale IQ means were 107.0, 101.8, and 100.6 for being able to form a sentence at less than 24 months, at 24 months, and later than 24 months.     

A tale of two epidemics: Contextual Word2Vec for classifying twitter streams during outbreaks

Unstructured tweet feeds are becoming the source of real-time information for various events. However, extracting actionable information in real-time from this unstructured text data is a challenging task. Hence, researchers are employing word embedding approach to classify unstructured text data. We set our study in the contexts of the 2014 Ebola and 2016 Zika outbreaks and probed the accuracy of domain-specific word vectors for identifying crisis-related actionable tweets. Our findings suggest that relatively smaller domain-specific input corpora from the Twitter corpus are better in extracting meaningful semantic relationship than generic pre-trained Word2Vec (contrived from Google News) or GloVe (of Stanford NLP group). However, domain-specific quality tweet corpora during the early stages of outbreaks are normally scant, and identifying actionable tweets during early stages is crucial to stemming the proliferation of an outbreak. To overcome this challenge, we consider scholarly abstracts, related to Ebola and Zika virus, from PubMed and probe the efficiency of cross-domain resource utilization for word vector generation. Our findings demonstrate that the relevance of PubMed abstracts for the training purpose when Twitter data (as input corpus) would be scant during the early stages of the outbreak. Thus, this approach can be implemented to handle future outbreaks in real time. We also explore the accuracy of our word vectors for various model architectures and hyper-parameter settings. We observe that Skip-gram accuracies are better than CBOW, and higher dimensions yield better accuracy.     

Strategies for internationalisation at technical universities in the Nordic countries

This article investigates strategies for internationalisation at technical universities in the Nordic countries. The study explores the institutional rationales for internationalisation, the stories told in the strategy documents, the importance of leaders, faculty, administration and students for implementation of the strategy, and barriers and key components of successful internationalisation. We studied the strategic work with internationalisation across 27 technical universities in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. This work reflects both global trends of competition and the traditional Nordic model of cooperation. Overall, the universities incorporated internationalisation in their strategies in order to increase quality in research and education, and to establish strategic partnerships and networks. There is a shift in rationales from a more traditional approach of internationalisation to a new integrated form.     

Informal learning: A case study of local curriculum development in Indonesia

Conclusion This paper has examined the informal learning of the Lamaholot people, a relatively small cultural community living in the regency of Flores Timur in eastern Indonesia. The informal learning in Lamaholot areas is different from the formal learning imposed by a central educational board in Jakarta. Informal learning is part of everyday life, and is used to preserve Lamaholot culture, while the formal learning is designed to help students participate in modern economic activities, even though it threatens the survival of the local culture. In order to build a school system that promotes both the acquisition of new knowledge and the preservation of Lamaholot culture, the incorporation of informal approaches into formal learning becomes a necessity. Models and strategies discussed in this paper indicate that it is feasible to implement such an integrated approach. Certainly it is better to try and fuse the traditional with the modern, rather than to perpetuate the imposition of an exclusive national curriculum that is detrimental to the development of local Lamaholot culture. By giving the Lamaholot people the right to preserve their culture within the context of the school, Lamaholot children will be able to acquire modern knowledge without losing their cultural identity. A senior lecturer at the University of Nusa Cendana, Kupang, Nusa Tingara Timur (NTT), Indonesia. At present he is a doctoral candidate in the School of Education at Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia. His thesis focuses on cultures of knowledge and learning, and incorporates a case study of local curriculum development in the regency of Flores Timur, NTT, Indonesia.     

A Contextual Understanding of the Process of Educational Resilience: High Achieving Dominican American Students and the “Resilience Cycle”

This article explores the lives of academically resilient Dominican American college students at a selective private university in the Northeast. The conceptual framework used to guide the inquiry is based on the assumption that there are certain protective factors that play significant roles in the students' defiance of the odds and their ultimate academic achievement. The findings presented here focus on the emergence of a resilience cycle present during these students' academic journeys. The cycle is presented and its practical implications explored.     

Development of Oral Reading Fluency in Young Children at Risk for Failure

The body of knowledge on critical components of reading instruction is broad and deep with phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension serving as building blocks for literacy. The importance of fluent reading (i.e., with speed, accuracy, and proper expression, as well as comprehension) in the formula for success is widely accepted. The purpose of this study was to evaluate oral reading rates in a sample of 2nd-grade children. Using growth curve analysis, we identified models for a combined sample of at-risk and not-at-risk children. Large and important differences in oral reading were evident, but the growth rates remained the same throughout the 2nd- grade; in fact, the gap between at-risk and not-at-risk students remained constant. We discuss the implications of our findings for future research and the improvement of practice.     

Longitudinal Stability of Reading-Related Skills and Their Prediction of Reading Development

Individual differences in word recognition, spelling, and reading comprehension for 324 children at a mean age of 16 were predicted from their reading-related skills (phoneme awareness, phonological decoding, rapid naming, and IQ) at a mean age of 10 years, after controlling the predictors for the autoregressive effects of the correlated reading skills. There were significant and longitudinally stable individual differences for all four reading-related skills that were independent from each of the reading and spelling skills. Yet the only significant longitudinal prediction of reading skills was from IQ at mean age 10 for reading comprehension at mean age 16. The extremely high longitudinal latent-trait stability correlations for individual differences in word recognition (.98) and spelling (.95) left little independent outcome variance that could be predicted by the reading-related skills. We discuss the practical and theoretical importance of these results and why they differ from studies of younger children.