Combating Effort Avoidance in Computer Adaptive Practicing: Does a Problem Skipping Restriction Promote Learning?

Effort is key in learning, evidenced by its omnipresence in both empirical findings and educational theories. At the same time, students are consistently found to avoid effort. In this study, we investigate whether limiting effort avoidance improves learning outcomes, and explore for whom this would be the case. In a large-scale computer adaptive practice system for primary education, over 150,000 participants were distributed across four conditions in which a problem-skipping option was delayed for 0, 3, 6, or 9 seconds. The results show that after a 14 week period, no average treatment effects in learning outcomes can be found between conditions. A substantive typology of students, based on the expected target mechanisms of the intervention, neither shows consistent conditional average treatment effects. Nevertheless, the substantive typology is shown to be meaningful, as the different types—toilers, skippers, and rushers—differ with respect to their learning outcomes. We argue that although the scale of the experiment suggests a precise null finding, the cumulative nature of the effect of problem skipping cautions against generalizing this finding to sustained intervention.

Evolving from Didactic to Dialogic: An Action Research for Improving Teaching Practices in the mini-CEX Workshops

BackgroundFaculty development is imperative to ensure successful outcomes in the training of competent physicians. However, how faculty developers can improve the delivery of an assessment workshop through researching their individual teaching practices remains unexplored.MethodsIn 2016, the authors conducted four cycles of action research in the context of mini-Clinical Evaluation Exercise (mini-CEX) workshops. Multiple sources of qualitative data, including a faculty developer’s reflective journal, field notes taken by a researcher-observer, and post-workshop written reflection and feedback from fourteen workshop attendees, were collected and analyzed thematically.ResultsBy doing action research, the faculty developer scrutinized each step as an opportunity for change, enacted adaptive practice and reflection on teaching practices and formulated action plans to transform a workshop design. In so doing, a workshop evolved from didactic to dialogic with continuous improvement on enhanced engagement, focused discussion and participant empowerment through a collaborative inquiry into feedback practice. These action research cycles also supported development of adaptive practice and identity formation in the faculty developer.ConclusionsThe systematic approach of action research serves as a vehicle to enable faculty developers to investigate individual teaching practices as a self-reflective inquiry, to examine, rectify, and transform processes of program delivery, and ultimately introduce themselves as agents for change and improvement.

Irregular Problems and Biased Solutions

This chapter details how the U.S. intervention in Iraq completed a full cycle through the information practice framework between 2003 and 2008. During the invasion and its aftermath, managed practice turned into insulated practice, which prompted both internal and external actors to adapt. During the subsequent occupation, adaptive practice turned into problematic practice, which in turn encouraged the U.S. military to institutionalize doctrinal reforms. The chapter explores the ways in which insulated practice still persisted at the end of this process, curiously enough, even in a tactical unit close to the fight that had ample opportunity to make sense of facts on the ground. It also surveys the Special Operations Task Force's (SOTF) information system and then compares the SOTF to other units that conducted a similar mission (Joint Special Operations Command, JSOC) or operated in the same environment (U.S. Marines) to demonstrate how different institutional choices can generate different qualities of information practice.

Increasing Complexity and Uneven Results

This chapter focuses on the command and control of drone operations, which spans international, organizational, and intellectual boundaries. The complex information system that directs U.S. drone campaigns developed historically through many iterations of exploitation and reform. The chapter looks at the dynamic interaction of different types of information practice over time. In a process reminiscent of the bottom-up development of FalconView, practitioners made many improvements to Predator and Reaper drones and to the information systems that controlled them. This long learning process was punctuated with tragic fratricides and civilian deaths. Catalyzed by such errors, an institutional framework gradually evolved to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of drone operations. Practitioners throughout a global command and control system struggled to capture the benefits of managed and adaptive practice while avoiding the pitfalls of insulated and problematic practice. Emergent military solutions encouraged actors to alter the strategic problems, and new solutions increased system complexity over time.

Straight to the Source? Where Adaptations, Artworks, Historical Films, and Novels Connect

Responding to several recent interventions in adaptation studies that have argued for history-as-adaptation, this article develops a sustained examination of how page-to-screen adaptations may be understood as structured and interpreted in ways analogous to the historical film. Considering the relationship between historical screen texts and the historical novel, including the many novel-to-film adaptations of such stories, the article identifies a distinct subset of adaptations in which artworks and literary works are engaged as the ‘source’ for fictional and semi-fictional narratives that ostensibly address the circumstances of their creation. Re-purposing the term ‘origin story’ to characterize these stories, the works of historical novelist Tracy Chevalier are posited as examples of this creative adaptive practice. In addition, this article argues for the trope of ‘bringing-to-life’ and the associated domain of re-enactment as key modes, deeply resonant since the earliest phases of cinema technology, for figuring both the page-to-screen adaptation and historical film. Finally, the 2015 historical biopic and adaptation Trumbo and its relationship to a range of sources are examined in the light of ideas proposed in this article.

Critical Computation: Digital Automata and General Artificial Thinking

As machines have become increasingly smart and have entangled human thinking with artificial intelligences, it seems no longer possible to distinguish among levels of decision-making that occur in the newly formed space between critical reasoning, logical inference and sheer calculation. Since the 1980s, computational systems of information processing have evolved to include not only deductive methods of decision, whereby results are already implicated in their premises, but have crucially shifted towards an adaptive practice of learning from data, an inductive method of retrieving information from the environment and establishing general premises. This shift in logical methods of decision-making does not simply concern technical apparatuses, but is a symptom of a transformation in logical thinking activated with and through machines. This article discusses the pioneering work of Katherine Hayles, whose study of the cybernetic and computational infrastructures of our culture particularly clarifies this epistemological transformation of thinking in relation to machines.