QUESTION TYPES IN DIAGNOSTIC TESTING IN ENGLISH CLASSES

The paper presents some specific features and principal methods of organizing diagnostic tests and typical questions and tasks suitable for assessing students’ basic knowledge and skills in teaching foreign languages. Essential conditions of conducting testing in English classes are analyzed. The article also determines some effective ways how to improve both preparation and testing processes.

Chop Chop BERT: Visual Question Answering by Chopping VisualBERT’s Heads

Vision-and-Language (VL) pre-training has shown great potential on many related downstream tasks, such as Visual Question Answering (VQA), one of the most popular problems in the VL field. All of these pre-trained models (such as VisualBERT, ViLBERT, LXMERT and UNITER) are built with Transformer, which extends the classical attention mechanism to multiple layers and heads. To investigate why and how these models work on VQA so well, in this paper we explore the roles of individual heads and layers in Transformer models when handling 12 different types of questions. Specifically, we manually remove (chop) heads (or layers) from a pre-trained VisualBERT model at a time, and test it on different levels of questions to record its performance. As shown in the interesting echelon shape of the result matrices, experiments reveal different heads and layers are responsible for different question types, with higher-level layers activated by higher-level visual reasoning questions. Based on this observation, we design a dynamic chopping module that can automatically remove heads and layers of the VisualBERT at an instance level when dealing with different questions. Our dynamic chopping module can effectively reduce the parameters of the original model by 50%, while only damaging the accuracy by less than 1% on the VQA task.

INVESTIGATION OF CLASS TEACHERS’ OPINIONS ABOUT QUESTION ASKING SKILL, QUESTIONING STRATEGIES AND QUESTION TYPES

In the current study, it was aimed to determine the opinions of primary school class teachers about their question asking skill, questioning strategies and the question types they use. The study employed the survey model, one of the qualitative research methods. In line with the purpose of the study, interviews were conducted with 52 primary school class teachers working in state and private schools in the Büyükçekmece district of the city of İstanbul. The data collected with a semi-structured interview form were analyzed by using the descriptive and content analysis methods. According to the results of the study, it was concluded that while determining the purposes of the questions they ask, the primary school class teachers mostly focus on evaluation, that the types of questions they use do not go beyond measuring the information possessed by students, that they think that the main advantage of asking questions is receiving feedbacks, that they think that knowing question asking strategies enables the teacher to improve the quality in education and that they think that the questions asked should be in compliance with the subjects and objectives. In light of these findings, it can be suggested that seminars and in-service training about question asking strategies should be given to teachers. <p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0798/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>