Providing Task Instructions During Motor Training Enhances Performance and Modulates Attentional Brain Networks

Learning a new motor task is a complex cognitive and motor process. Especially early during motor learning, cognitive functions such as attentional engagement, are essential, e.g., to discover relevant visual stimuli. Drawing participant’s attention towards task-relevant stimuli—e.g., with task instructions using visual cues or explicit written information—is a common practice to support cognitive engagement during training and, hence, accelerate motor learning. However, there is little scientific evidence about how visually cued or written task instructions affect attentional brain networks during motor learning. In this experiment, we trained 36 healthy participants in a virtual motor task: surfing waves by steering a boat with a joystick. We measured the participants’ motor performance and observed attentional brain networks using alpha-band electroencephalographic (EEG) activity before and after training. Participants received one of the following task instructions during training: (1) No explicit task instructions and letting participants surf freely (implicit training; IMP); (2) Task instructions provided through explicit visual cues (explicit-implicit training; E-IMP); or (3) through explicit written commands (explicit training; E). We found that providing task instructions during training (E and E-IMP) resulted in less post-training motor variability—linked to enhanced performance—compared to training without instructions (IMP). After training, participants trained with visual cues (E-IMP) enhanced the alpha-band strength over parieto-occipital and frontal brain areas at wave onset. In contrast, participants who trained with explicit commands (E) showed decreased fronto-temporal alpha activity. Thus, providing task instructions in written (E) or using visual cues (E-IMP) leads to similar motor performance improvements by enhancing activation on different attentional networks. While training with visual cues (E-IMP) may be associated with visuo-attentional processes, verbal-analytical processes may be more prominent when written explicit commands are provided (E). Together, we suggest that training parameters such as task instructions, modulate the attentional networks observed during motor practice and may support participant’s cognitive engagement, compared to training without instructions.

Towards a Growth Mindset Culture in the Classroom: Implementation of a Lesson-Integrated Mindset Training

A mindset training aims to strengthen the belief that abilities are malleable (growth mindset), which has proven to be beneficial for learning. Teachers can support the effects of such a training by establishing a classroom culture in line with the growth mindset idea. Yet, previous training programs have mostly been detached from regular lessons. In this study, a physics teacher implemented a mindset training that consisted of explicit training sessions and implicit training phases. In these implicit phases, the teacher enriched ordinary lessons with growth mindset feedback. We investigated the overall effect of this lesson-integrated training on students’ beliefs and motivation. Students from two seventh-grade courses participated in the quasi-experimental study (N = 59). One course received the mindset training; the other course served as control. We measured growth mindsets about physics abilities, self-beliefs, and motivation before and after the training and six months later. The results indicate that there was a positive and stable training effect on growth mindsets, but no effect on self-beliefs. Regarding motivation, the training buffered the demotivation that occurred without training. We conclude that a mindset training is important when introducing a new and difficult school subject. Furthermore, we consider teachers’ involvement as a promising approach to optimize mindset interventions and to encourage a sustained change of instructional practices.

Developing Oral Comprehension Skills with Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education

The development of oral comprehension skills is rarely studied in second and foreign language teaching, let alone in learning contexts involving students with limited or interrupted formal education (SLIFE). Thus, we conducted a mixed-methods study attempting to measure the effect of implicit teaching of oral comprehension strategies with 37 SLIFE in Quebec City, a predominantly French-speaking city in Canada. Two experimental groups received implicit training in listening strategies, whereas a control group viewed the same documents without strategy training. Participants’ listening comprehension performance was measured quantitatively before the treatment, immediately after, and one week later with three different versions of an oral comprehension test targeting both explicit and implicit content of authentic audiovisual documents. Overall, data analysis showed a low success rate for all participants in the oral comprehension tests, with no significant effect of the experimental treatment. However, data from the intervention sessions revealed that the participants’ verbalisations of their comprehension varied qualitatively over time. The combination of these results is discussed in light of previous findings on low literate adults’ informal and formal language learning experiences.

Improving ASL fingerspelling comprehension in L2 learners with explicit phonetic instruction

Students acquiring American Sign Language (ASL) as a second language (L2) struggle with fingerspelling comprehension more than skilled signers. These L2 learners might be attempting to perceive and comprehend fingerspelling in a way that is different from native signers, which could negatively impact their ability to comprehend fingerspelling. This could be related to improper weighting of cues that skilled signers use to identify fingerspelled utterances. Improper cue-weighting in spoken language learners has been ameliorated through explicit phonetic instruction, but this method of teaching has yet to be applied to learners of a language in a new modality (M2 learners). The present study assesses this prospect. Eighteen university students in their third-semester of ASL were divided into two groups; one received explicit phonetic training, and the other received implicit training on fingerspelling. Data from a fingerspelling comprehension test, with two experimental conditions and a control, were submitted to a mixed effects logistic regression. This revealed a significant improvement from the pre-test to post-test by students who received the explicit training. Results indicate that even short exposure to explicit phonetic instruction significantly improves participants’ ability to understand fingerspelling, suggesting that ASL curricula should include this type of instruction to improve students’ fingerspelling comprehension abilities.

Explicit and implicit training methods for improving native English speakers’ comprehension of nonnative speech

Research on communication difficulties between native and nonnative speakers (NNSs) has generally focused on NNSs. However, native speakers’ (NSs) level of familiarity with nonnative accents can also affect communication. This study investigates whether implicit training (exposure to Korean-accented English through sentence transcription) and explicit training (learning about linguistic differences with a focus on Korean-accented English) can improve NSs’ comprehension of Korean-accented English. Participants in both training conditions showed greater improvement than the control group on sentence transcription tasks but not on multiple choice questions that assessed comprehension of a brief lecture. The results replicate past findings showing the effectiveness of implicit training and provide novel evidence of the effectiveness of explicit training. This suggests that explicit training can be effective in improving NSs’ understanding of short utterances when the training ensures participants have learned the material.

Ensemble Deep Learning for Biomedical Time Series Classification

Ensemble learning has been proved to improve the generalization ability effectively in both theory and practice. In this paper, we briefly outline the current status of research on it first. Then, a new deep neural network-based ensemble method that integrates filtering views, local views, distorted views, explicit training, implicit training, subview prediction, and Simple Average is proposed for biomedical time series classification. Finally, we validate its effectiveness on the Chinese Cardiovascular Disease Database containing a large number of electrocardiogram recordings. The experimental results show that the proposed method has certain advantages compared to some well-known ensemble methods, such asBaggingandAdaBoost.