Digital Game-Based Phonics Instruction Promotes Print Knowledge in Pre-Readers at Cognitive Risk for Dyslexia

Dyslexia is targeted most effectively when (1) interventions are provided preventively, before the onset of reading instruction, and (2) remediation programs combine letter-sound training with phoneme blending. Given the growing potential of technology in educational contexts, there has been a considerable increase of letter-sound trainings embedded in digital serious games. One such intervention is GraphoGame. Yet, current evidence on the preventive impact of GraphoGame is limited by the lack of adaptation of the original learning content to the skills of pre-readers, short training duration, and a restricted focus on explicitly trained skills. Therefore, the current study aims at investigating the impact of a preventive, and pre-reading adapted GraphoGame training (i.e., GraphoGame-Flemish, GG-FL) on explicitly trained skills and non-specifically trained phonological and language abilities. Following a large-scale screening (N = 1225), the current study included 88 pre-reading kindergarteners at cognitive risk for dyslexia who were assigned to three groups training either with GG-FL (n = 31), an active control game (n = 29), or no game (n = 28). Before and after the 12-week intervention, a variety of reading-related skills were assessed. Moreover, receptive letter knowledge and phonological awareness were measured every three weeks during the intervention period. Results revealed significantly larger improvements in the GG-FL group on explicitly trained skills, i.e., letter knowledge and word decoding, without finding transfer-effects to untrained phonological and language abilities. Our findings imply a GG-FL-driven head start on early literacy skills in at-risk children. A follow-up study should uncover the long-term impact and the ability of GG-FL to prevent actual reading failure.

Finding formulas: Does active search facilitate appropriate generalization?

Background One criterion of adaptive learning is appropriate generalization to new instances based on the original learning context and avoiding overgeneralization. Appropriate generalization requires understanding what features of a solution are applicable in a new context and whether the new context requires modifications or a new approach. In a series of three experiments, we investigate whether searching for an algebraic formalism before receiving direct instruction facilitates appropriate generalization. Results (1) Searching buffers against negative transfer: participants who first searched for an equation were less likely to overgeneralize compared to participants who completed a tell-and-practice activity. (2) Likelihood of creating a correct new adaptation varied by performance on the searching task. (3) Asking people to sketch alleviated some of the negative effects of tell-and-practice, but sketching did not augment the effect of searching. (4) When participants received more elaborate tell-and-practice instruction, the advantages of searching were less notable. Conclusions Searching for an algebraic formula prior to direct instruction may be a productive way to help learners connect a formula to its referent and avoid overgeneralization. Tell-and-practice instruction that only described the mathematical procedures led to the greatest levels of overgeneralization errors and worst performance. Tell-and-practice instruction that highlighted connections between the mathematical structure of the formula and the visual referent performed at similar or marginally worse levels than the search-first conditions.

Creating Stories by Student Teachers as a Space for Multifaceted Adult Learning. Sustainable and Intercultural Perspective

The paper discusses the participation of the “Quality Education” goal of SDGs, “Personal, social, and learning to learn competence” of the EU Key Competences for Lifelong Learning, and four categories (the educator is someone who…) of the Competences for Educators in ESD in student teacher university training. It presents the theoretical explorations of relevant content to show possible options to be introduced to pre-service teacher training. Reflections about desired changes in personal and professional development are followed by the presentation of workshop outcomes realised with students of 3rd stage studies of pedagogy at the University of Lodz. Students have been developing their intercultural and sustainable development competences by creating stories with multicultural aspect and sustainable perspective. The paper refers to the application of the author's original learning method “Me and you towards sustainability” inspired by books of Robbins, What if? … (2008, 2018). The paper concludes that learning by creation gives more chances to understand oneself and Others.

Context-dependent reinforcement learning impairment in depression

Backgrounds:Value-based decision-making impairment in depression is a complex phenomenon: while some studies did find evidence of blunted reward learning and reward-related signals in the brain, others indicate no effect. Here we test whether such reward sensitivity deficits are dependent on the overall value of the decision problem.Methods:We used a two-armed bandit task that includes two different contexts: one ‘rich’ context where both options were associated with an overall positive expected value and a ‘poor’ context where options were associated with overall negative expected value. We tested patients (N=30) undergoing a major depressive episode and age, gender and socio-economically matched controls (N=26). To assess whether differences in learning performance were due to a decision or a value-update process, we also analysed performance in a transfer phase, performed immediately after the learning phase. ResultsHealthy subjects showed similar learning performance in the ‘rich’ and the ‘poor’ contexts, while patients showed reduced learning in the ‘poor’ context. Analysis of the transfer phase showed that the context-dependent deficit in patients generalized when options were extrapolated from their original learning context, thus suggesting that the effect of depression has to be traced to the outcome encoding, rather than the decision phase.ConclusionsOur results illustrate that reinforcement learning deficits in depression are complex and depend on the value of the context. We show that depressive patients have a specific trouble in contexts with an overall negative state value, supporting the relevance of setting up patients in a spiral of positive reinforcement.

Enhancing the feature-based 3D deformable face recognition using hybrid PCA-NN

<p>Facial recognition is one of the most important advancements in image processing. An important job is to build an automated framework with the same human capacity’s for recognizing face. The face is a complex 3D graphical model, and constructing a computational model is a challenging task. This paper aims at a facial detection technique focused on the coding and decoding of the facial feature object theory approach to data. One of the most natural and common principal component analysis (PCA) method. This approach transforms the face features into a minimal set of basic attributes, peculiarities, which are the critical components of the original learning image collection (or the training package). The proposed technique is a combination of the PCA system and the identification of components using the neural network (NN) feed-forward propagation method. This experiment proves that recognition of deformed 3D face is doable. By taking into account almost all forms of feature extraction and engineering, the NN yields a recognition score of 95%.</p>

Facebook-supported tasks for exploring critical and creative thinking in a physics teaching course

Research shows that traditional teacher-and-content-centered education doesn’t give students good preparation in critical and creative thinking. This article presents a qualitative study of student performances in two original learning tasks, one related to critical thinking and the other related to creative thinking. The study was carried out in an obligatory physics teaching course for undergraduate students. The first learning task focused on critical thinking, in which students were asked to evaluate various defects in an artificially contextualized electrostatic exercise. Students’ performances, collected via Google Classroom, show that they were able to detect and justify its contextual defects using real-world knowledge. A big challenge to students was to provide quantitative arguments against noticed huge electric charge allegedly created in described electrostatic cling. The second learning task focused on creative thinking, in which students engaged in a multi-step learning sequence to elaborate one explanation and two predictions related to enigmatic behavior of a tomato. A secret and closed Facebook group was administered to present the subtasks in the sequence and receive students’ answers in real time. The results show that students performed better in the subtasks that called for a near knowledge transfer than in other ones calling for a far knowledge transfer. In their reflective comments about the sequence, students recognized the importance of “thinking out of the box” for deeper learning of physics. Based on the results, suggestions on the design of critical and creative thinking related tasks are discussed for future implementation.

Self-incremental learning vector quantization with human cognitive biases

Human beings have adaptively rational cognitive biases for efficiently acquiring concepts from small-sized datasets. With such inductive biases, humans can generalize concepts by learning a small number of samples. By incorporating human cognitive biases into learning vector quantization (LVQ), a prototype-based online machine learning method, we developed self-incremental LVQ (SILVQ) methods that can be easily interpreted. We first describe a method to automatically adjust the learning rate that incorporates human cognitive biases. Second, SILVQ, which self-increases the prototypes based on the method for automatically adjusting the learning rate, is described. The performance levels of the proposed methods are evaluated in experiments employing four real and two artificial datasets. Compared with the original learning vector quantization algorithms, our methods not only effectively remove the need for parameter tuning, but also achieve higher accuracy from learning small numbers of instances. In the cases of larger numbers of instances, SILVQ can still achieve an accuracy that is equal to or better than those of existing representative LVQ algorithms. Furthermore, SILVQ can learn linearly inseparable conceptual structures with the required and sufficient number of prototypes without overfitting.

The impact of experiential learning on Environmental Education during a Moroccan summer university

In this study, the goal is to explore the impact of Experiential Learning Theory (ELT) and different experiential approaches on learning about sustainable development in environmental experiential learning education. Teachers were involved in participation with students to enhance their understanding of the importance of environment, developing their aptitude to combine theory and practice, also expanding their global vision. In order to accomplish this project with original learning opportunities, qualitative data of thirty participators was collected and revealed important issues in terms of pedagogical methodology in applying this theory. Overall, this paper shows the great capacity of learners to identify their styles and modes of learning and to expand them in all disciplines and fields even in their personal usual or professional life in the future and proposes global innovations in Moroccan environmental education.

Context-dependent memory effects in two immersive virtual reality environments: On Mars and underwater

The context-dependent memory effect, in which memory for an item is better when the retrieval context matches the original learning context, has proved to be difficult to reproduce in a laboratory setting. In an effort to identify a set of features that generate a robust context-dependent memory effect, we developed a paradigm in virtual reality using two semantically distinct virtual contexts: underwater and Mars environments, each with a separate body of knowledge (schema) associated with it. We show that items are better recalled when retrieved in the same context as the study context; we also show that the size of the effect is larger for items deemed context-relevant at encoding, suggesting that context-dependent memory effects may depend on items being integrated into an active schema.

Behavioral and Neurobiological Mechanisms of Pavlovian and Instrumental Extinction Learning

This article reviews the behavioral neuroscience of extinction, the phenomenon in which a behavior that has been acquired through Pavlovian or instrumental (operant) learning decreases in strength when the outcome that reinforced it is removed. Behavioral research indicates that neither Pavlovian nor operant extinction depends substantially on erasure of the original learning, but instead depends on new inhibitory learning that is primarily expressed in the context in which it is learned, as exemplified by the renewal effect. Although the nature of the inhibition may differ in Pavlovian and operant extinction, in either case the decline in responding may depend on both generalization decrement and the correction of prediction error. At the neural level, Pavlovian extinction requires a tripartite neural circuit involving the amygdala, prefrontal cortex, and hippocampus. Synaptic plasticity in the amygdala is essential for extinction learning, and prefrontal cortical inhibition of amygdala neurons encoding fear memories is involved in fear retrieval. Hippocampal-prefrontal circuits mediate fear relapse phenomena, including renewal. Instrumental extinction involves distinct ensembles in corticostriatal, striatopallidal, and striatohypothalamic circuits as well as their thalamic returns for inhibitory (extinction) and excitatory (renewal and other relapse phenomena) control over operant responding. The field has made significant progress in recent decades, although a fully integrated biobehavioral understanding still awaits.