Does Physical Activity Enhance Learning Performance?: Learning Effectiveness of Game-based Experiential Learning for University Library Instruction

This paper reports research results of the proposed experiential learning using a game-based educational material. The educational material was an application running on a mobile device and was supported for learners to study university library instruction. During the experiential learning, the learners answered several quizzes provided from the educational material. The quizzes were including experiential contents such as actually to find an academic journal or to reserve a learning room. In order to evaluate learning effectiveness of the experiential learning, this research made a comparative experiment. The experimental group used the educational material and the control group used another educational material of e-learning (non-experiential) but the contents was almost same as the contents of the experiential learning. The comparative experiment took several evaluation elements such as pre-/post-test scores, delayed-test scores and learning motivation scores based on IMMS of ARCS model. The experimental results revealed that experiential learning was superior for the several elements of these metrics. This research, furthermore, analyzed learner's operation data to the educational material and learner's behavior data during the learning in the experimental group. The analyzing results showed three types of the learning behaviors and indicated that an instructor needs to adopt suitable instructional design to each type to bring superior learning effectiveness.     

(2) The Role of the National Diet Library in Sharing National Library Resources

Abstract

This article outlines several significant features of reading in Russia today. First the change of the cultural hierarchy is addressed: no longer is the reading of the classics a status symbol, indicating the reader’s adherence to traditional norms of culture. The classics have been abandoned as readers unashamedly pursue light entertainment in the form of detective stories, romances, etc. Second, there has emerged a new system of cultural organization as a result of the collapse of central state direction. So far these new forms of organization have proven totally inadequate: much of publishing is beyond the reach of both bibliographic control mechanisms and libraries, which are gradually ceasing to function as sites where high culture is consumed.     

The effect of activity type on the engagement and interaction of young children with disabilities in inclusive childcare settings

The engagement and adult and peer interaction of 37 young children with a range of disabilities was measured in free play, group, and meal-routine activities in inclusive childcare settings. A significant effect for activity type was found for total engagement, active engagement, and passive engagement, with the children being more engaged in free-play and meal-routine activities than group activities. Free-play and meal-routine activities provided better opportunities for active engagement than did group activities, but children were more actively engaged during meal-routine activities than during free play. Passive engagement was more commonly observed during group activities. Children interacted more with their peers during free play. When children with a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder were compared with children with other disabilities, they were found to be significantly less engaged during free play and interacted less with their peers. The implications of these findings for inclusive practice in childcare settings are discussed.     

Term disambiguation techniques based on target document collection for cross-language information retrieval: An empirical comparison of performance between techniques

Dictionary-based query translation for cross-language information retrieval often yields various translation candidates having different meanings for a source term in the query. This paper examines methods for solving the ambiguity of translations based on only the target document collections. First, we discuss two kinds of disambiguation technique: (1) one is a method using term co-occurrence statistics in the collection, and (2) a technique based on pseudo-relevance feedback. Next, these techniques are empirically compared using the CLEF 2003 test collection for German to Italian bilingual searches, which are executed by using English language as a pivot. The experiments showed that a variation of term co-occurrence based techniques, in which the best sequence algorithm for selecting translations is used with the Cosine coefficient, is dominant, and that the PRF method shows comparable high search performance, although statistical tests did not sufficiently support these conclusions. Furthermore, we repeat the same experiments for the case of French to Italian (pivot) and English to Italian (non-pivot) searches on the same CLEF 2003 test collection in order to verity our findings. Again, similar results were observed except that the Dice coefficient outperforms slightly the Cosine coefficient in the case of disambiguation based on term co-occurrence for English to Italian searches.     

Training Staff to Measure the Engagement of Children with Disabilities in Inclusive Childcare Centres

Practitioner use of the revised Individual Child Engagement Record – Revised (ICER‐R) for observing children with disabilities in inclusive childcare is examined. Training in the use of the ICER‐R, which includes both a momentary time sampling observation system and rating scales, was provided across two training phases with five to seven participants. Four of the five participants who completed both phases of the training achieved greater than 80% inter‐observer agreement on the observation measure within the allocated time, and were able to maintain this level of agreement over subsequent observation sessions. There was consistency in ratings across observers and positive, statistically significant correlations were found for data gathered using momentary time sampling and data from rating scales. The practical value of the ICER‐R was supported by feedback provided through evaluation questionnaires completed by participants. Training childcare practitioners to systematically observe children with disabilities in inclusive childcare has the potential to benefit both children and staff.     

Prediction of performance of cross-language information retrieval using automatic evaluation of translation

This study develops regression models for predicting the performance of cross-language information retrieval (CLIR). The model assumes that CLIR performance can be explained by two factors: (1) the ease of search inherent in each query and (2) the translation quality in the process of CLIR systems. As operational variables, monolingual information retrieval (IR) performance is used for measuring the ease of search, and the well-known evaluation metric BLEU is used to measure the translation quality. This study also proposes an alternative metric, weighted average for matched unigrams (WAMU), which is tailored to gauging translation quality for special IR purposes. The data for regression analysis are obtained from a retrieval experiment of English-to-Italian bilingual searches using the CLEF 2003 test collection. The CLIR and monolingual IR performances are measured by average precision score. The result shows that the proposed regression model can explain about 60% of the variation in CLIR performance, and WAMU has more predictive power than BLEU. A back translation method for applying the regression model to operational CLIR systems in real situations is discussed.     

Birth Order Effects on Early Language Development: Do Secondborn Children Learn from Overheard Speech?

The language development of 16 firstborn and 16 secondborn children of English-speaking families was compared at the age of 21 months in order to investigate whether secondborn children benefit from overheard conversations between caregivers and older siblings in learning personal pronouns. The child's spontaneous language data as well as controlled tasks were used to measure production of first- and second-person pronouns. The mean length of utterance, total number of intelligible utterances, total vocabulary (types), and total number of words (tokens) were calculated as measures of general language development. A follow-up study was conducted 3 months later to examine the subsequent language development of 10 firstborn and 10 secondborn children using the same procedures and measures as used at 21 months. The results indicated that secondborn children were more advanced than firstborn children at both ages in pronoun production, while not differing in general language development. It is argued that overheard conversations between caregivers and older siblings in addition to child-directed speech are important resources for secondborn children learning personal pronouns.