Learning to reach by reinforcement learning using a receptive field based function approximation approach with continuous actions.

Science.gov (United States)

Tamosiunaite, Minija; Asfour, Tamim; Wörgötter, Florentin

2009-03-01

Reinforcement learning methods can be used in robotics applications especially for specific target-oriented problems, for example the reward-based recalibration of goal directed actions. To this end still relatively large and continuous state-action spaces need to be efficiently handled. The goal of this paper is, thus, to develop a novel, rather simple method which uses reinforcement learning with function approximation in conjunction with different reward-strategies for solving such problems. For the testing of our method, we use a four degree-of-freedom reaching problem in 3D-space simulated by a two-joint robot arm system with two DOF each. Function approximation is based on 4D, overlapping kernels (receptive fields) and the state-action space contains about 10,000 of these. Different types of reward structures are being compared, for example, reward-on- touching-only against reward-on-approach. Furthermore, forbidden joint configurations are punished. A continuous action space is used. In spite of a rather large number of states and the continuous action space these reward/punishment strategies allow the system to find a good solution usually within about 20 trials. The efficiency of our method demonstrated in this test scenario suggests that it might be possible to use it on a real robot for problems where mixed rewards can be defined in situations where other types of learning might be difficult.

Learning to Act: Qualitative Learning of Deterministic Action Models

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Bolander, Thomas; Gierasimczuk, Nina

2017-01-01

In this article we study learnability of fully observable, universally applicable action models of dynamic epistemic logic. We introduce a framework for actions seen as sets of transitions between propositional states and we relate them to their dynamic epistemic logic representations as action...... in the limit (inconclusive convergence to the right action model). We show that deterministic actions are finitely identifiable, while arbitrary (non-deterministic) actions require more learning power—they are identifiable in the limit. We then move on to a particular learning method, i.e. learning via update......, which proceeds via restriction of a space of events within a learning-specific action model. We show how this method can be adapted to learn conditional and unconditional deterministic action models. We propose update learning mechanisms for the afore mentioned classes of actions and analyse...

Learning and exploration in action-perception loops.

Science.gov (United States)

Little, Daniel Y; Sommer, Friedrich T

2013-01-01

Discovering the structure underlying observed data is a recurring problem in machine learning with important applications in neuroscience. It is also a primary function of the brain. When data can be actively collected in the context of a closed action-perception loop, behavior becomes a critical determinant of learning efficiency. Psychologists studying exploration and curiosity in humans and animals have long argued that learning itself is a primary motivator of behavior. However, the theoretical basis of learning-driven behavior is not well understood. Previous computational studies of behavior have largely focused on the control problem of maximizing acquisition of rewards and have treated learning the structure of data as a secondary objective. Here, we study exploration in the absence of external reward feedback. Instead, we take the quality of an agent's learned internal model to be the primary objective. In a simple probabilistic framework, we derive a Bayesian estimate for the amount of information about the environment an agent can expect to receive by taking an action, a measure we term the predicted information gain (PIG). We develop exploration strategies that approximately maximize PIG. One strategy based on value-iteration consistently learns faster than previously developed reward-free exploration strategies across a diverse range of environments. Psychologists believe the evolutionary advantage of learning-driven exploration lies in the generalized utility of an accurate internal model. Consistent with this hypothesis, we demonstrate that agents which learn more efficiently during exploration are later better able to accomplish a range of goal-directed tasks. We will conclude by discussing how our work elucidates the explorative behaviors of animals and humans, its relationship to other computational models of behavior, and its potential application to experimental design, such as in closed-loop neurophysiology studies.

Learning and exploration in action-perception loops

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Daniel Ying-Jeh Little

2013-03-01

Full Text Available Discovering the structure underlying observed data is a recurring problem in machine learning with important applications in neuroscience. It is also a primary function of the brain. When data can be actively collected in the context of a closed action-perception loop, behavior becomes a critical determinant of learning efficiency. Psychologists studying exploration and curiosity in humans and animals have long argued that learning itself is a primary motivator of behavior. However, the theoretical basis of learning-driven behavior is not well understood. Previous computational studies of behavior have largely focused on the control problem of maximizing acquisition of rewards and have treated learning the structure of data as a secondary objective. Here, we study exploration in the absence of external reward feedback. Instead, we take the quality of an agent's learned internal model to be the primary objective. In a simple probabilistic framework, we derive a Bayesian estimate for the amount of information about the environment an agent can expect to receive by taking an action, a measure we term the predicted information gain (PIG. We develop exploration strategies that approximately maximize PIG. One strategy based on value-iteration consistently learns faster, across a diverse range of environments, than previously developed reward-free exploration strategies. Psychologists believe the evolutionary advantage of learning-driven exploration lies in the generalized utility of an accurate internal model. Consistent with this hypothesis, we demonstrate that agents which learn more efficiently during exploration are later better able to accomplish a range of goal-directed tasks. We will conclude by discussing how our work elucidates the explorative behaviors of animals and humans, its relationship to other computational models of behavior, and its potential application to experimental design, such as in closed-loop neurophysiology studies.

Collaborative action research: implementation of cooperative learning.

Science.gov (United States)

Smith-Stoner, Marilyn; Molle, Mary E

2010-06-01

Nurse educators must continually improve their teaching skills through innovation. However, research about the process used by faculty members to transform their teaching methods is limited. This collaborative study uses classroom action research to describe, analyze, and address problems encountered in implementing cooperative learning in two undergraduate nursing courses. After four rounds of action and reflection, the following themes emerged: students did not understand the need for structured cooperative learning; classroom structure and seating arrangement influenced the effectiveness of activities; highly structured activities engaged the students; and short, targeted activities that involved novel content were most effective. These findings indicate that designing specific activities to prepare students for class is critical to cooperative learning. Copyright 2010, SLACK Incorporated.

Mirroring "meaningful" actions: sensorimotor learning modulates imitation of goal-directed actions.

Science.gov (United States)

Catmur, Caroline; Heyes, Cecilia

2017-06-19

Imitation is important in the development of social and technological skills throughout the lifespan. Experiments investigating the acquisition and modulation of imitation (and of its proposed neural substrate, the mirror neuron system) have produced evidence that the capacity for imitation depends on associative learning in which connections are formed between sensory and motor representations of actions. However, evidence that the development of imitation depends on associative learning has been found only for non-goal-directed actions. One reason for the lack of research on goal-directed actions is that imitation of such actions is commonly confounded with the tendency to respond in a spatially compatible manner. However, since the most prominent account of mirror neuron function, and hence of imitation, suggests that these cells encode goal-directed actions, it is important to establish whether sensorimotor learning can also modulate imitation of goal-directed actions. Experiment 1 demonstrated that imitation of goal-directed grasping can be measured while controlling for spatial compatibility, and Experiment 2 showed that this imitation effect can be modulated by sensorimotor training. Together these data support the hypothesis that the capacity for behavioural imitation, and the properties of the mirror neuron system, are constructed in the course of development through associative learning.

Leadership Development through Virtual Action Learning: An Evaluation

Science.gov (United States)

Aspinwall, Kath; Pedler, Mike; Radcliff, Phil

2018-01-01

This paper presents a case study based on the evaluation of the two VAL (virtual action learning) sets. We report participants learning both leadership and the VAL process based on the basis of telephone interviews. We conclude that what is learned about leadership is connected with how learning takes place and suggest that the content and process…

The Impact of Learning about Technology via Action Research as a Professional Development Activity on Higher Education: A Case Study

Science.gov (United States)

Premdas, Leisa

2017-01-01

The purpose of this mixed method study was to determine the perceived impact of learning about technology via action research as a professional development activity on faculty and students in higher education. Nine faculty members--also Teaching and Technology Fellows representing various disciplines at St. John's University--were selected based…

Learning in non-formal education: Is it "youthful" for youth in action?

Science.gov (United States)

Norqvist, Lars; Leffler, Eva

2017-04-01

This article offers insights into the practices of a non-formal education programme for youth provided by the European Union (EU). It takes a qualitative approach and is based on a case study of the European Voluntary Service (EVS). Data were collected during individual and focus group interviews with learners (the EVS volunteers), decision takers and trainers, with the aim of deriving an understanding of learning in non-formal education. The research questions concerned learning, the recognition of learning and perspectives of usefulness. The study also examined the Youthpass documentation tool as a key to understanding the recognition of learning and to determine whether the learning was useful for learners (the volunteers). The findings and analysis offer several interpretations of learning, and the recognition of learning, which take place in non-formal education. The findings also revealed that it is complicated to divide learning into formal and non- formal categories; instead, non-formal education is useful for individual learners when both formal and non-formal educational contexts are integrated. As a consequence, the division of formal and non-formal (and possibly even informal) learning creates a gap which works against the development of flexible and interconnected education with ubiquitous learning and mobility within and across formal and non-formal education. This development is not in the best interests of learners, especially when seeking useful learning and education for youth (what the authors term "youthful" for youth in action).

What can action learning offer a beleaguered system? A narrative representing the relationship.

Science.gov (United States)

Traeger, James

2017-05-02

Purpose This is an attempt to write an account of action learning that is as close to the ground on which it was practised as the author can make it. In that sense, the reader can read what follows below as a kind of autoethnography, a "representation as relationship" as Gergen and Gergen (2002, p. 11) call it. This is because in the opportunity of telling a story about his practice as an action learning facilitator, the author hopes to evoke that which is more akin to the contactful environment of quality action learning than any amount of abstract theorising. Design/methodology/approach This is an example of "narrative inquiry", best judged, according to Sparkes (2002), in terms of the ability of such accounts to "contribute to sociological understanding in ways that, amongst others are self-knowing, self-respecting, self-sacrificing and self-luminous". Findings As the author re-tells this partial account, he has a sense of the massive wider structures around him, but all he can see in his dim lamp is the fleeting glimpse of the local strata. The author traces his hand along the seams, not intending to dig them out, but simply to witness them, or even, in a spirit of yearning, to give them a witnessing of themselves. Originality/value To the author, this is about portraying what action learning feels like, rather than thinks like, for his own and for the benefit of other practitioners.

CLEANing the Reward: Counterfactual Actions to Remove Exploratory Action Noise in Multiagent Learning

Science.gov (United States)

HolmesParker, Chris; Taylor, Mathew E.; Tumer, Kagan; Agogino, Adrian

2014-01-01

Learning in multiagent systems can be slow because agents must learn both how to behave in a complex environment and how to account for the actions of other agents. The inability of an agent to distinguish between the true environmental dynamics and those caused by the stochastic exploratory actions of other agents creates noise in each agent's reward signal. This learning noise can have unforeseen and often undesirable effects on the resultant system performance. We define such noise as exploratory action noise, demonstrate the critical impact it can have on the learning process in multiagent settings, and introduce a reward structure to effectively remove such noise from each agent's reward signal. In particular, we introduce Coordinated Learning without Exploratory Action Noise (CLEAN) rewards and empirically demonstrate their benefits

Leadership development through action learning sets: an evaluation study.

Science.gov (United States)

Walia, Surinder; Marks-Maran, Di

2014-11-01

This article examines the use of action learning sets in a leadership module delivered by a university in south east England. An evaluation research study was undertaking using survey method to evaluate student engagement with action learning sets, and their value, impact and sustainability. Data were collected through a questionnaire with a mix of Likert-style and open-ended questions and qualitative and quantitative data analysis was undertaken. Findings show that engagement in the action learning sets was very high. Action learning sets also had a positive impact on the development of leadership knowledge and skills and are highly valued by participants. It is likely that they would be sustainable as the majority would recommend action learning to colleagues and would consider taking another module that used action learning sets. When compared to existing literature on action learning, this study offers new insights as there is little empirical literature on student engagement with action learning sets and even less on value and sustainability. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Resistance in Action Learning: Struggling with Self-Efficacy and the Social Self--and What about the Set Advisor?

Science.gov (United States)

Burger, Ulrike

2013-01-01

This account of practice explores the concept of resistance in action learning. Resistance is conceptualized as an attempt of self-protection that is manifested in action learners' struggles with their sense of self-efficacy and their social Self. These struggles are an inherent part of the action learning process and may elicit defensive…

Learning ActionScript 30

CERN Document Server

Shupe, Rich

2010-01-01

If you're new to ActionScript 3.0, or want to enhance your skill set, this bestselling book is the ideal guide. Designers, developers, and programmers alike will find Learning ActionScript 3.0 invaluable for navigating ActionScript 3.0's learning curve. You'll learn the language by getting a clear look at essential topics such as logic, event handling, displaying content, classes, and much more. Updated for Flash Professional CS5, this revised and expanded edition delivers hands-on exercises and full-color code samples to help you increase your abilities as you progress through the book. Top

Action Learning in ActionAid Nepal: A Case Study

Science.gov (United States)

Lustig, Patricia; Rai, Deep Ranjani

2009-01-01

This article describes an example of how action learning was used as a framework for an organisational intervention to fundamentally change the organisational culture over a period of time. It also identifies our learning over that period of time and what worked well (and not so well) in an International Non-Governmental Organisation in Nepal.

Introducere in Action Learning

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Clausen, Søren Witzel

In these years action learning has become an increasing aspect of qualifying in service training of teachers in Western European countries. In this article the model of action learning which has been developed by teachers at VIA University College and introduced to the teachers at the SCAN...

Action learning in undergraduate engineering thesis supervision

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Brad Stappenbelt

2017-03-01

Full Text Available In the present action learning implementation, twelve action learning sets were conducted over eight years. The action learning sets consisted of students involved in undergraduate engineering research thesis work. The concurrent study accompanying this initiative, investigated the influence of the action learning environment on student approaches to learning and any accompanying academic, learning and personal benefits realised. The influence of preferred learning styles on set function and student adoption of the action learning process were also examined. The action learning environment implemented had a measurable significant positive effect on student academic performance, their ability to cope with the stresses associated with conducting a research thesis, the depth of learning, the development of autonomous learners and student perception of the research thesis experience. The present study acts as an addendum to a smaller scale implementation of this action learning approach, applied to supervision of third and fourth year research projects and theses, published in 2010.

Action learning in undergraduate engineering thesis supervision

OpenAIRE

Stappenbelt, Brad

2017-01-01

In the present action learning implementation, twelve action learning sets were conducted over eight years. The action learning sets consisted of students involved in undergraduate engineering research thesis work. The concurrent study accompanying this initiative investigated the influence of the action learning environment on student approaches to learning and any accompanying academic, learning and personal benefits realised. The influence of preferred learning styles on set function and s...

Influence of Action-Effect Associations Acquired by Ideomotor Learning on Imitation

Science.gov (United States)

Bunlon, Frédérique; Marshall, Peter J.; Quandt, Lorna C.; Bouquet, Cedric A.

2015-01-01

According to the ideomotor theory, actions are represented in terms of their perceptual effects, offering a solution for the correspondence problem of imitation (how to translate the observed action into a corresponding motor output). This effect-based coding of action is assumed to be acquired through action-effect learning. Accordingly, performing an action leads to the integration of the perceptual codes of the action effects with the motor commands that brought them about. While ideomotor theory is invoked to account for imitation, the influence of action-effect learning on imitative behavior remains unexplored. In two experiments, imitative performance was measured in a reaction time task following a phase of action-effect acquisition. During action-effect acquisition, participants freely executed a finger movement (index or little finger lifting), and then observed a similar (compatible learning) or a different (incompatible learning) movement. In Experiment 1, finger movements of left and right hands were presented as action-effects during acquisition. In Experiment 2, only right-hand finger movements were presented during action-effect acquisition and in the imitation task the observed hands were oriented orthogonally to participants’ hands in order to avoid spatial congruency effects. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that imitative performance was improved after compatible learning, compared to incompatible learning. In Experiment 2, although action-effect learning involved perception of finger movements of right hand only, imitative capabilities of right- and left-hand finger movements were equally affected. These results indicate that an observed movement stimulus processed as the effect of an action can later prime execution of that action, confirming the ideomotor approach to imitation. We further discuss these findings in relation to previous studies of action-effect learning and in the framework of current ideomotor approaches to imitation. PMID:25793755

Human reinforcement learning subdivides structured action spaces by learning effector-specific values.

Science.gov (United States)

Gershman, Samuel J; Pesaran, Bijan; Daw, Nathaniel D

2009-10-28

Humans and animals are endowed with a large number of effectors. Although this enables great behavioral flexibility, it presents an equally formidable reinforcement learning problem of discovering which actions are most valuable because of the high dimensionality of the action space. An unresolved question is how neural systems for reinforcement learning-such as prediction error signals for action valuation associated with dopamine and the striatum-can cope with this "curse of dimensionality." We propose a reinforcement learning framework that allows for learned action valuations to be decomposed into effector-specific components when appropriate to a task, and test it by studying to what extent human behavior and blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) activity can exploit such a decomposition in a multieffector choice task. Subjects made simultaneous decisions with their left and right hands and received separate reward feedback for each hand movement. We found that choice behavior was better described by a learning model that decomposed the values of bimanual movements into separate values for each effector, rather than a traditional model that treated the bimanual actions as unitary with a single value. A decomposition of value into effector-specific components was also observed in value-related BOLD signaling, in the form of lateralized biases in striatal correlates of prediction error and anticipatory value correlates in the intraparietal sulcus. These results suggest that the human brain can use decomposed value representations to "divide and conquer" reinforcement learning over high-dimensional action spaces.

Action Learning in Undergraduate Engineering Thesis Supervision

Science.gov (United States)

Stappenbelt, Brad

2017-01-01

In the present action learning implementation, twelve action learning sets were conducted over eight years. The action learning sets consisted of students involved in undergraduate engineering research thesis work. The concurrent study accompanying this initiative investigated the influence of the action learning environment on student approaches…

Neurocognitive mechanisms underlying social learning in infancy: infants' neural processing of the effects of others' actions.

Science.gov (United States)

Paulus, Markus; Hunnius, Sabine; Bekkering, Harold

2013-10-01

Social transmission of knowledge is one of the reasons for human evolutionary success, and it has been suggested that already human infants possess eminent social learning abilities. However, nothing is known about the neurocognitive mechanisms that subserve infants' acquisition of novel action knowledge through the observation of other people's actions and their consequences in the physical world. In an electroencephalogram study on social learning in infancy, we demonstrate that 9-month-old infants represent the environmental effects of others' actions in their own motor system, although they never achieved these effects themselves before. The results provide first insights into the neurocognitive basis of human infants' unique ability for social learning of novel action knowledge.

Dynamic mesolimbic dopamine signaling during action sequence learning and expectation violation

Science.gov (United States)

Collins, Anne L.; Greenfield, Venuz Y.; Bye, Jeffrey K.; Linker, Kay E.; Wang, Alice S.; Wassum, Kate M.

2016-01-01

Prolonged mesolimbic dopamine concentration changes have been detected during spatial navigation, but little is known about the conditions that engender this signaling profile or how it develops with learning. To address this, we monitored dopamine concentration changes in the nucleus accumbens core of rats throughout acquisition and performance of an instrumental action sequence task. Prolonged dopamine concentration changes were detected that ramped up as rats executed each action sequence and declined after earned reward collection. With learning, dopamine concentration began to rise increasingly earlier in the execution of the sequence and ultimately backpropagated away from stereotyped sequence actions, becoming only transiently elevated by the most distal and unexpected reward predictor. Action sequence-related dopamine signaling was reactivated in well-trained rats if they became disengaged in the task and in response to an unexpected change in the value, but not identity of the earned reward. Throughout training and test, dopamine signaling correlated with sequence performance. These results suggest that action sequences can engender a prolonged mode of dopamine signaling in the nucleus accumbens core and that such signaling relates to elements of the motivation underlying sequence execution and is dynamic with learning, overtraining and violations in reward expectation. PMID:26869075

How to learn action research

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Nielsen, Kurt Aagaard; Svensson, Lennart

2006-01-01

The authors suggest routines and educational structures that could improve a succesfull learning and education of action research.......The authors suggest routines and educational structures that could improve a succesfull learning and education of action research....

Human reinforcement learning subdivides structured action spaces by learning effector-specific values

OpenAIRE

Gershman, Samuel J.; Pesaran, Bijan; Daw, Nathaniel D.

2009-01-01

Humans and animals are endowed with a large number of effectors. Although this enables great behavioral flexibility, it presents an equally formidable reinforcement learning problem of discovering which actions are most valuable, due to the high dimensionality of the action space. An unresolved question is how neural systems for reinforcement learning – such as prediction error signals for action valuation associated with dopamine and the striatum – can cope with this “curse of dimensionality...

A Framework for Hierarchical Perception-Action Learning Utilizing Fuzzy Reasoning.

Science.gov (United States)

Windridge, David; Felsberg, Michael; Shaukat, Affan

2013-02-01

Perception-action (P-A) learning is an approach to cognitive system building that seeks to reduce the complexity associated with conventional environment-representation/action-planning approaches. Instead, actions are directly mapped onto the perceptual transitions that they bring about, eliminating the need for intermediate representation and significantly reducing training requirements. We here set out a very general learning framework for cognitive systems in which online learning of the P-A mapping may be conducted within a symbolic processing context, so that complex contextual reasoning can influence the P-A mapping. In utilizing a variational calculus approach to define a suitable objective function, the P-A mapping can be treated as an online learning problem via gradient descent using partial derivatives. Our central theoretical result is to demonstrate top-down modulation of low-level perceptual confidences via the Jacobian of the higher levels of a subsumptive P-A hierarchy. Thus, the separation of the Jacobian as a multiplying factor between levels within the objective function naturally enables the integration of abstract symbolic manipulation in the form of fuzzy deductive logic into the P-A mapping learning. We experimentally demonstrate that the resulting framework achieves significantly better accuracy than using P-A learning without top-down modulation. We also demonstrate that it permits novel forms of context-dependent multilevel P-A mapping, applying the mechanism in the context of an intelligent driver assistance system.

Collaborative Action Research on Technology Integration for Science Learning

Science.gov (United States)

Wang, Chien-Hsing; Ke, Yi-Ting; Wu, Jin-Tong; Hsu, Wen-Hua

2012-02-01

This paper briefly reports the outcomes of an action research inquiry on the use of blogs, MS PowerPoint [PPT], and the Internet as learning tools with a science class of sixth graders for project-based learning. Multiple sources of data were essential to triangulate the key findings articulated in this paper. Corresponding to previous studies, the incorporation of technology and project-based learning could motivate students in self-directed exploration. The students were excited about the autonomy over what to learn and the use of PPT to express what they learned. Differing from previous studies, the findings pointed to the lack information literacy among students. The students lacked information evaluation skills, note-taking and information synthesis. All these findings imply the importance of teaching students about information literacy and visual literacy when introducing information technology into the classroom. The authors suggest that further research should focus on how to break the culture of "copy-and-paste" by teaching the skills of note-taking and synthesis through inquiry projects for science learning. Also, further research on teacher professional development should focus on using collaboration action research as a framework for re-designing graduate courses for science teachers in order to enhance classroom technology integration.

Changing the culture of academic medicine: the C-Change learning action network and its impact at participating medical schools.

Science.gov (United States)

Krupat, Edward; Pololi, Linda; Schnell, Eugene R; Kern, David E

2013-09-01

The culture of academic medicine has been described as hierarchical, competitive, and not highly supportive of female or minority faculty. In response to this, the authors designed the Learning Action Network (LAN), which was part of the National Initiative on Gender, Culture and Leadership in Medicine (C-Change). The LAN is a five-school consortium aimed at changing the organizational culture of its constituent institutions. The authors selected LAN schools to be geographically diverse and representative of U.S. medical schools. Institutional leaders and faculty representatives from constituent schools met twice yearly for four years (2006-2010), forming a cross-institutional learning community. Through their quarterly listing of institutional activities, schools reported a wide array of actions. Most common were increased faculty development and/or mentoring, new approaches to communication, and adoption of new policies and procedures. Other categories included data collection/management, engagement of key stakeholders, education regarding gender/diversity, and new/expanded leadership positions. Through exit interviews, most participants reported feeling optimistic about maintaining the momentum of change. However, some, especially in schools with leadership changes, expressed uncertainty. Participants reported that they felt that the LAN enabled, empowered, facilitated, and/or caused the reported actions.For others who might want to work toward changing the culture of academic medicine, the authors offer several lessons learned from their experiences with C-Change. Most notably, people, structures, policies, and reward systems must be put into place to support cultural values, and broad-based support should be created in order for changes to persist when inevitable transitions in leadership occur.

Beyond rational imitation: learning arbitrary means actions from communicative demonstrations.

Science.gov (United States)

Király, Ildikó; Csibra, Gergely; Gergely, György

2013-10-01

The principle of rationality has been invoked to explain that infants expect agents to perform the most efficient means action to attain a goal. It has also been demonstrated that infants take into account the efficiency of observed actions to achieve a goal outcome when deciding whether to reenact a specific behavior or not. It is puzzling, however, that they also tend to imitate an apparently suboptimal unfamiliar action even when they can bring about the same outcome more efficiently by applying a more rational action alternative available to them. We propose that this apparently paradoxical behavior is explained by infants' interpretation of action demonstrations as communicative manifestations of novel and culturally relevant means actions to be acquired, and we present empirical evidence supporting this proposal. In Experiment 1, we found that 14-month-olds reenacted novel arbitrary means actions only following a communicative demonstration. Experiment 2 showed that infants' inclination to reproduce communicatively manifested novel actions is restricted to behaviors they can construe as goal-directed instrumental acts. The study also provides evidence that infants' reenactment of the demonstrated novel actions reflects epistemic motives rather than purely social motives. We argue that ostensive communication enables infants to represent the teleological structure of novel actions even when the causal relations between means and end are cognitively opaque and apparently violate the efficiency expectation derived from the principle of rationality. This new account of imitative learning of novel means shows how the teleological stance and natural pedagogy--two separate cognitive adaptations to interpret instrumental versus communicative actions--are integrated as a system for learning socially constituted instrumental knowledge in humans. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Impairments in action-outcome learning in schizophrenia.

Science.gov (United States)

Morris, Richard W; Cyrzon, Chad; Green, Melissa J; Le Pelley, Mike E; Balleine, Bernard W

2018-03-03

Learning the causal relation between actions and their outcomes (AO learning) is critical for goal-directed behavior when actions are guided by desire for the outcome. This can be contrasted with habits that are acquired by reinforcement and primed by prevailing stimuli, in which causal learning plays no part. Recently, we demonstrated that goal-directed actions are impaired in schizophrenia; however, whether this deficit exists alongside impairments in habit or reinforcement learning is unknown. The present study distinguished deficits in causal learning from reinforcement learning in schizophrenia. We tested people with schizophrenia (SZ, n = 25) and healthy adults (HA, n = 25) in a vending machine task. Participants learned two action-outcome contingencies (e.g., push left to get a chocolate M&M, push right to get a cracker), and they also learned one contingency was degraded by delivery of noncontingent outcomes (e.g., free M&Ms), as well as changes in value by outcome devaluation. Both groups learned the best action to obtain rewards; however, SZ did not distinguish the more causal action when one AO contingency was degraded. Moreover, action selection in SZ was insensitive to changes in outcome value unless feedback was provided, and this was related to the deficit in AO learning. The failure to encode the causal relation between action and outcome in schizophrenia occurred without any apparent deficit in reinforcement learning. This implies that poor goal-directed behavior in schizophrenia cannot be explained by a more primary deficit in reward learning such as insensitivity to reward value or reward prediction errors.

Reply : Collective Action and the Empirical Content of Stochastic Learning Models

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Macy, M.W.; Flache, A.

2007-01-01

We are grateful for the opportunity that Bendor, Diermeier, and Ting (hereafter BDT) have provided to address important questions about the empirical content of learning theoretic solutions to the collective action problem. They discuss two well-known classes of adaptive models— stochastic learning

Action Learning: Developing Critical Competencies for Knowledge Era Workers

Science.gov (United States)

Robinson, Greg

2005-01-01

For most of the twentieth century, the goal in education was the generation and dissemination of information. With the rise of technology and unlimited access to information, it is the ability to apply knowledge and learn from experience that is the new priority for employee development. Action learning, with its emphasis on action and reflection,…

Notes toward a Philosophy of Action Learning Research

Science.gov (United States)

Coghlan, David; Coughlan, Paul

2010-01-01

The philosophical foundations of action learning research have not received a great deal of attention. In the context of action learning postgraduate and professional programmes in universities, articulation of a philosophy of action learning research seems timely and appropriate. This article explores a philosophy of action learning research,…

Action Learning: How Learning Transfers from Entrepreneurs to Small Firms

Science.gov (United States)

Jones, Karen; Sambrook, Sally A.; Pittaway, Luke; Henley, Andrew; Norbury, Heather

2014-01-01

This paper presents research with small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) owners who have participated in a leadership development programme. The primary focus of this paper is on learning transfer and factors affecting it, arguing that entrepreneurs must engage in "action" in order to "learn" and that under certain conditions…

Community–University Partnerships: Using Participatory Action Learning and Action Research (PALAR

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Judith Kearney

2013-09-01

Full Text Available This article positions participatory action learning and action research (PALAR as a preferred methodology for community-university partnerships to achieve a holistic outcome that benefits the common interest. Evidence for this claim is illustrated through case studies of two community engagement programs, one in South Africa and the other in Australia. The South African study explains how relationships, reflection and recognition (the three R’s of PALAR are important elements that promote a truly participatory approach to knowledge creation and practical improvement in social circumstances. The Australian study then highlights what can be achieved. It does this by showing the potential for PALAR participants to learn how to design and implement a community engagement program, and how to cascade their own learning into their community to improve educational opportunities. Both studies demonstrate PALAR’s potential to disrupt traditional understandings of the research process, particularly in terms of researcher–participant relationships. At the same time, both studies identify the challenges arising from the theoretical and practical implications of PALAR as an approach to community development. This article is therefore significant for universities and funding organisations engaging in community-based research and development through partnerships, specifically in contexts of disadvantage. Keywords: Participatory action learning and action research, PALAR, community development, community engagement, community partnerships, disadvantaged communities, higher education.

Caregiver’s perception about learning for home care

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Saul Ferraz de Paula

2017-08-01

Full Text Available The objective was to know the perception of the caregiver about the learning needs of care to be performed at home. This is an exploratory descriptive research, with a qualitative approach. Data collection occurred through a semi-structured interview, from August to October 2014, with six caregivers of patients hospitalized in a medium-sized hospital in the municipality of Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul State. The data were analyzed by the content analysis method, identifying two categories: The caregiver's perception about the learning needs; The attendance of the caregiver's learning needs. The study showed that the learning based on empirical, instinctive and observational methodologies, without the participation of the nurse in the process. There is need to improve this learning. The participation of the nurse as an educator in the planning, organization and development of the educational action stands out, since he/she is part of the care; however, the caregivers did not visualize this professional.

Bring learning into action

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Annemieke van den Berg

2018-05-01

Full Text Available Context: This critical reflection is about the positive effects for educational and research settings of participation in a two-day programme entitled ‘Using participatory action research and appreciative inquiry to research healthcare practice’. Aims: To reflect on the journey of positive developments in research and education that started with participation in this programme. Using Caring Conversations (Dewar, 2011 as a reflective framework of questions, this article discusses the journey in order to encourage others to consider the approach of appreciative inquiry to bring to life the concept of co-creation in research and education. Conclusions and implications for practice: Participation in this programme has led to the implementation of a variety of actions in educational and research settings. Central to all these actions is an appreciative approach to co-creation as a counterpart to today’s prevailing problem-based viewpoint. A possible factor behind these developments was the power of vulnerability experienced during the programme, a shared process of transformational learning. Implications for practice: This critical reflection: Provides an invitation to shift from a problem-based focus to a positive revolution Provides an appreciative reflective story about the power of vulnerability as an inspiration for others to move out of their comfort zone and seek to discover their own exceptionality Supports a shift from a facilitator-led to a co-creation approach in doing research and teaching with older adults

Action Learning. A Guide for Professional, Management and Educational Development. Second Edition.

Science.gov (United States)

McGill, Ian; Beaty, Liz

Action learning is a process of learning and reflection that happens with the support of a group of colleagues ("set") working with real problems with the intention of getting things done. This guide is for those who want to practice action learning. It can be used to introduce the concepts of action learning to others and as a manual…

Cross-View Action Recognition via Transferable Dictionary Learning.

Science.gov (United States)

Zheng, Jingjing; Jiang, Zhuolin; Chellappa, Rama

2016-05-01

Discriminative appearance features are effective for recognizing actions in a fixed view, but may not generalize well to a new view. In this paper, we present two effective approaches to learn dictionaries for robust action recognition across views. In the first approach, we learn a set of view-specific dictionaries where each dictionary corresponds to one camera view. These dictionaries are learned simultaneously from the sets of correspondence videos taken at different views with the aim of encouraging each video in the set to have the same sparse representation. In the second approach, we additionally learn a common dictionary shared by different views to model view-shared features. This approach represents the videos in each view using a view-specific dictionary and the common dictionary. More importantly, it encourages the set of videos taken from the different views of the same action to have the similar sparse representations. The learned common dictionary not only has the capability to represent actions from unseen views, but also makes our approach effective in a semi-supervised setting where no correspondence videos exist and only a few labeled videos exist in the target view. The extensive experiments using three public datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms recently developed approaches for cross-view action recognition.

Neural Behavior Chain Learning of Mobile Robot Actions

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Lejla Banjanovic-Mehmedovic

2012-01-01

Full Text Available This paper presents a visual/motor behavior learning approach, based on neural networks. We propose Behavior Chain Model (BCM in order to create a way of behavior learning. Our behavior-based system evolution task is a mobile robot detecting a target and driving/acting towards it. First, the mapping relations between the image feature domain of the object and the robot action domain are derived. Second, a multilayer neural network for offline learning of the mapping relations is used. This learning structure through neural network training process represents a connection between the visual perceptions and motor sequence of actions in order to grip a target. Last, using behavior learning through a noticed action chain, we can predict mobile robot behavior for a variety of similar tasks in similar environment. Prediction results suggest that the methodology is adequate and could be recognized as an idea for designing different mobile robot behaviour assistance.

Action Learning--A Process Which Supports Organisational Change Initiatives

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Joyce, Pauline

2012-01-01

This paper reflects on how action learning sets (ALSs) were used to support organisational change initiatives. It sets the scene with contextualising the inclusion of change projects in a masters programme. Action learning is understood to be a dynamic process where a team meets regularly to help individual members address issues through a highly…

Unsupervised Learning of Action Primitives

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Baby, Sanmohan; Krüger, Volker; Kragic, Danica

2010-01-01

and scale, the use of the object can provide a strong invariant for the detection of motion primitives. In this paper we propose an unsupervised learning approach for action primitives that makes use of the human movements as well as the object state changes. We group actions according to the changes......Action representation is a key issue in imitation learning for humanoids. With the recent finding of mirror neurons there has been a growing interest in expressing actions as a combination meaningful subparts called primitives. Primitives could be thought of as an alphabet for the human actions....... In this paper we observe that human actions and objects can be seen as being intertwined: we can interpret actions from the way the body parts are moving, but as well from how their effect on the involved object. While human movements can look vastly different even under minor changes in location, orientation...

Learning Visual Representations for Perception-Action Systems

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Piater, Justus; Jodogne, Sebastien; Detry, Renaud

2011-01-01

and RLJC, our second method learns structural object models for robust object detection and pose estimation by probabilistic inference. To these models, the method associates grasp experiences autonomously learned by trial and error. These experiences form a nonparametric representation of grasp success......We discuss vision as a sensory modality for systems that effect actions in response to perceptions. While the internal representations informed by vision may be arbitrarily complex, we argue that in many cases it is advantageous to link them rather directly to action via learned mappings....... These arguments are illustrated by two examples of our own work. First, our RLVC algorithm performs reinforcement learning directly on the visual input space. To make this very large space manageable, RLVC interleaves the reinforcement learner with a supervised classification algorithm that seeks to split...

SOCAP: Lessons learned in applying SIPE-2 to the military operations crisis action planning domain

Science.gov (United States)

Desimone, Roberto

1992-01-01

This report describes work funded under the DARPA Planning and Scheduling Initiative that led to the development of SOCAP (System for Operations Crisis Action Planning). In particular, it describes lessons learned in applying SIPE-2, the underlying AI planning technology within SOCAP, to the domain of military operations deliberate and crisis action planning. SOCAP was demonstrated at the U.S. Central Command and at the Pentagon in early 1992. A more detailed report about the lessons learned is currently being prepared. This report was presented during one of the panel discussions on 'The Relevance of Scheduling to AI Planning Systems.'

Do Investors Learn About Analyst Accuracy?

OpenAIRE

Chang, Charles; Daouk, Hazem; Wang, Albert

2008-01-01

We study the impact of analyst forecasts on prices to determine whether investors learn about analyst accuracy. Our test market is the crude oil futures market. Prices rise when analysts forecast a decrease (increase) in crude supplies. In the 15 minutes following supply realizations, prices rise (fall) when forecasts have been too high (low). In both the initial price action relative to forecasts and in the subsequent reaction relative to realized forecast errors, the price response is stron...

Translating visual information into action predictions: Statistical learning in action and nonaction contexts.

Science.gov (United States)

Monroy, Claire D; Gerson, Sarah A; Hunnius, Sabine

2018-05-01

Humans are sensitive to the statistical regularities in action sequences carried out by others. In the present eyetracking study, we investigated whether this sensitivity can support the prediction of upcoming actions when observing unfamiliar action sequences. In two between-subjects conditions, we examined whether observers would be more sensitive to statistical regularities in sequences performed by a human agent versus self-propelled 'ghost' events. Secondly, we investigated whether regularities are learned better when they are associated with contingent effects. Both implicit and explicit measures of learning were compared between agent and ghost conditions. Implicit learning was measured via predictive eye movements to upcoming actions or events, and explicit learning was measured via both uninstructed reproduction of the action sequences and verbal reports of the regularities. The findings revealed that participants, regardless of condition, readily learned the regularities and made correct predictive eye movements to upcoming events during online observation. However, different patterns of explicit-learning outcomes emerged following observation: Participants were most likely to re-create the sequence regularities and to verbally report them when they had observed an actor create a contingent effect. These results suggest that the shift from implicit predictions to explicit knowledge of what has been learned is facilitated when observers perceive another agent's actions and when these actions cause effects. These findings are discussed with respect to the potential role of the motor system in modulating how statistical regularities are learned and used to modify behavior.

Entrepreneurial learning requires action

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Brink, Tove; Madsen, Svend Ole

2014-01-01

that is enhanced by essential large-scale industry players and other SME managers are required to create action and value in learning. An open-mindedness to new learning approaches by SME managers and an open-mindedness to multi- and cross-disciplinary collaboration with SME managers by facilitators is required....

Learning through Participatory Action Research for Community Ecotourism Planning.

Science.gov (United States)

Guevara, Jose Roberto Q.

1996-01-01

Ecologically sound tourism planning and policy require an empowering community participation. The participatory action research model helps a community gain understanding of its social reality, learn how to learn, initiate dialog, and discover new possibilities for addressing its situation. (SK)

Hebbian learning and predictive mirror neurons for actions, sensations and emotions.

Science.gov (United States)

Keysers, Christian; Gazzola, Valeria

2014-01-01

Spike-timing-dependent plasticity is considered the neurophysiological basis of Hebbian learning and has been shown to be sensitive to both contingency and contiguity between pre- and postsynaptic activity. Here, we will examine how applying this Hebbian learning rule to a system of interconnected neurons in the presence of direct or indirect re-afference (e.g. seeing/hearing one's own actions) predicts the emergence of mirror neurons with predictive properties. In this framework, we analyse how mirror neurons become a dynamic system that performs active inferences about the actions of others and allows joint actions despite sensorimotor delays. We explore how this system performs a projection of the self onto others, with egocentric biases to contribute to mind-reading. Finally, we argue that Hebbian learning predicts mirror-like neurons for sensations and emotions and review evidence for the presence of such vicarious activations outside the motor system.

Virtual Action Learning: Practices and Challenges

Science.gov (United States)

Dickenson, Mollie; Burgoyne, John; Pedler, Mike

2010-01-01

This paper reports findings from research that set out to explore virtual action learning (VAL) as an emerging variety of action learning (AL). In bringing together geographically dispersed individuals within and across organizations, and possibly across time, VAL has obvious potential in both educational and commercial contexts. Whilst there is…

EHR Learning - It's about Nursing, Leadership and Long-Term Commitments.

Science.gov (United States)

Furlong, Karen E

2016-01-01

Despite a global commitment to the adoption of technologies, such as electronic health records (EHRs), to support the delivery of health services, there is little empirical guidance to support effective planning for the integration of these tools into practice settings (Suter et al. 2009). In particular, although EHR learning is known to positively influence integration (Byrne 2012), individual perspectives are often overlooked because of investigative designs that devalue such viewpoints by exploring the utility of technologies rather than the lived experiences of individual users of the technology. Therefore, this qualitative study offered nurse participants opportunities to make sense of EHR learning through talking about their experiences. This narrative inquiry was a collaborative interpretive method of discovery: stories and thematic analysis were the two separate yet complementary frames used to support data analysis. Finally, several practice implications and recommendations about EHR learning are presented with an emphasis placed upon patient safety as a way to impart accountability on behalf of learners, educators and those charged with governing responsibilities during times of EHR integration. Copyright © 2016 Longwoods Publishing.

An Action Learning Project on Diversity: Pitfalls and Possibilities.

Science.gov (United States)

Hite, Linda M.

1997-01-01

In a college course on diversity in the workplace, students' experiences with conducting a cultural audit of the university as a workplace illustrate the dilemmas that can arise when students conduct action research in a real client system. Despite the inherent problems, the project resulted in significant student learning about the subject and…

Learning about Proteins

Science.gov (United States)

... Fitness Diseases & Conditions Infections Drugs & Alcohol School & Jobs Sports Expert Answers (Q&A) Staying Safe Videos for Educators Search English Español Learning About Proteins KidsHealth / For Kids / Learning About Proteins What's in ...

STUDENTS’ MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT THE NATURE OF MATTER AND HOW IT IMPAIRS BIOCHEMISTRY LEARNING

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

E. Montagna

2015-08-01

Full Text Available Introduction: It is widely known that misconceptions impairs student’s learning. IUBMB proposed a concept inventory which defines biochemistry’s teaching scope. Even though it is known that many of them are subject of misconceptions by students, we collected informal data suggesting a deeper and most pervasive misconception related to the students’ perceptions about what is and is not a molecule through their classroom statements and tests. We hypothesize that students’ impairments on biochemistry learning possibly come from failure to assume that names are related to well defined molecules indicating lack of matter’s representative levels of integration. Objectives The present work aims to detect in freshmen students’ misconceptions about the chemical nature of main small and macromolecules which potentialy impairs biochemistry learning. Materials and methods: A list of assertions about real life situations involving and citing main biomolecules – ATP, DNA, protein, lipid, carbohydrate, enzyme, hormon, vitamin – were mixed with other containing vague common terms – toxin, transgenic, healthy, unwanted elements, chemical compound – not suggesting hazardous situations in order to capture students’ impressions. More than 150 students from five courses in three different higher education institutions answered true or false on 35 assertions. Results and discussion: More than 70% of students had more than 80% error in this task designed to be not tricky, misleading or with unpreviously studied concepts. Results suggests students do not understand compounds as molecules but as entities unrelated to real life situations; on the other hand vague terms triggers a negative perception not necessarily related to harm or hazardous situations. We suggest that it is originated by poor scientific literacy from previous scholarity as well as lack of criteria on media vehicles about the topics here cited. Conclusion: We conclude that many

Defining Success in Action Learning: An International Comparison

Science.gov (United States)

Bong, Hyeon-Cheol; Cho, Yonjoo

2017-01-01

Purpose: The purpose of this paper was to explore how the two groups of action learning experts (Korean and non-Korean experts) define success of action learning to see whether there are any cultural differences. To this end, the authors conducted a total of 44 interviews with action learning experts around the world. Research questions guiding…

Learning about Carbohydrates

Science.gov (United States)

... Videos for Educators Search English Español Learning About Carbohydrates KidsHealth / For Kids / Learning About Carbohydrates Print en ... source of energy for the body. What Are Carbohydrates? There are two major types of carbohydrates (or ...

Learning about Allergies

Science.gov (United States)

... Videos for Educators Search English Español Learning About Allergies KidsHealth / For Kids / Learning About Allergies What's in ... in the spring. Why Do Some Kids Get Allergies? People may be born with a genetic (say: ...

Action and Organizational Learning in an Elevator Company

Science.gov (United States)

De Loo, Ivo

2006-01-01

Purpose: To highlight the relevance of management control in action learning programs that aim to foster organizational learning. Design/methodology/approach: Literature review plus case study. The latter consists of archival analysis and multiple interviews. Findings: When action learning programs are built around singular learning experiences,…

Design based action research in the world of robot technology and learning

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Majgaard, Gunver

2010-01-01

Why is design based action research method important in the world of robot technology and learning? The article explores how action research and interaction-driven design can be used in development of educational robot technological tools. The actual case is the development of “Fraction Battle......” which is about learning fractions in primary school. The technology is based on robot technology. An outdoor digital playground is taken into to the classroom and then redesigned. The article argues for interaction design takes precedence to technology or goal driven design for development...... of educational tools....

Project InterActions: A Multigenerational Robotic Learning Environment

Science.gov (United States)

Bers, Marina U.

2007-12-01

This paper presents Project InterActions, a series of 5-week workshops in which very young learners (4- to 7-year-old children) and their parents come together to build and program a personally meaningful robotic project in the context of a multigenerational robotics-based community of practice. The goal of these family workshops is to teach both parents and children about the mechanical and programming aspects involved in robotics, as well as to initiate them in a learning trajectory with and about technology. Results from this project address different ways in which parents and children learn together and provide insights into how to develop educational interventions that would educate parents, as well as children, in new domains of knowledge and skills such as robotics and new technologies.

Solving Wicked Problems through Action Learning

Science.gov (United States)

Crul, Liselore

2014-01-01

This account of practice outlines the Oxyme Action Learning Program which was conducted as part of the Management Challenge in my final year of the MSc in Coaching and Behavioral Change at Henley Business School. The central research questions were: (1) how action learning can help to solve wicked problems and (2) what the effect of an action…

Action Research as a Space for Transforming Learning Cultures

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Elżbieta Wołodźko

2015-12-01

Full Text Available The article presents a three-year educational action research project on autonomous and reflective learning. Students and teachers, being actively engaged in many learning practices, were both participating in process(es of developing educational and research community. These interrelated processes framed a dynamic space for constructing and reconstructing the participants’ learning cultures. Thanks to linking educational and research aspects of students’ activity and to interpenetration of practice and reflection, action research generates particular conditions for learning cultures’ transformation, from “traditional” toward “new” ones, based on reflectivity, authenticity and empowerment. The dynamism of learning cultures was connected to various and conscious and reflective types of educational participation, which affected autonomy of studying (in its numerous dimensions and types, being in turn a constitutive element of participants’ learning cultures.

Safe or Unsafe? The Paradox of Action Learning

Science.gov (United States)

Robertson, Jane; Bell, Diane

2017-01-01

Business Driven Action Learning (BDAL), as a learning philosophy that attempts to create real value for business is often used by executive education providers in their management development programmes. As the action learning facilitator, I found that the learning that took place during such a management development programme resulted in…

Linking Action Learning and Inter-Organisational Learning: The Learning Journey Approach

Science.gov (United States)

Schumacher, Thomas

2015-01-01

The article presents and illustrates the learning journey (LJ)--a new management development approach to inter-organisational learning based on observation, reflection and problem-solving. The LJ involves managers from different organisations and applies key concepts of action learning and systemic organisational development. Made up of…

Understanding Infants' and Children's Social Learning about Foods: Previous Research and New Prospects

Science.gov (United States)

Shutts, Kristin; Kinzler, Katherine D.; DeJesus, Jasmine M.

2013-01-01

Developmental psychologists have devoted significant attention to investigating how children learn from others' actions, emotions, and testimony. Yet most of this research has examined children's socially guided learning about artifacts. The present article focuses on a domain that has received limited attention from those interested in the…

To Act and Learn: A Bakhtinian Exploration of Action Learning

Science.gov (United States)

Gold, Jeff; Anderson, Lisa; Clarke, Jean; Thorpe, Richard

2009-01-01

This paper considers the work of the Russian social philosopher and cultural theorist, Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin as a source of understanding for those involved in action learning. Drawing upon data gathered over two years during the evaluation of 20 action learning sets in the north of England, we will seek to work with the ideas of Bakhtin to…

A review of assertions about the processes and outcomes of social learning in natural resource management.

Science.gov (United States)

Cundill, G; Rodela, R

2012-12-30

Social learning has become a central theme in natural resource management. This growing interest is underpinned by a number of assertions about the outcomes of social learning, and about the processes that support these outcomes. Yet researchers and practitioners who seek to engage with social learning through the natural resource management literature often become disorientated by the myriad processes and outcomes that are identified. We trace the roots of current assertions about the processes and outcomes of social learning in natural resource management, and assess the extent to which there is an emerging consensus on these assertions. Results suggest that, on the one hand, social learning is described as taking place through deliberative interactions amongst multiple stakeholders. During these interactions, it is argued that participants learn to work together and build relationships that allow for collective action. On the other hand, social learning is described as occurring through deliberate experimentation and reflective practice. During these iterative cycles of action, monitoring and reflection, participants learn how to cope with uncertainty when managing complex systems. Both of these processes, and their associated outcomes, are referred to as social learning. Where, therefore, should researchers and practitioners focus their attention? Results suggest that there is an emerging consensus that processes that support social learning involve sustained interaction between stakeholders, on-going deliberation and the sharing of knowledge in a trusting environment. There is also an emerging consensus that the key outcome of such learning is improved decision making underpinned by a growing awareness of human-environment interactions, better relationships and improved problem-solving capacities for participants. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Learning about America, and about Buying from Starbucks

Science.gov (United States)

Simon, Bryant

2011-01-01

Professor Bryant Simon is the author of "Everything But the Coffee: Learning About America From Starbucks" (University of California Press, 2009). He presented his key findings to the class and summarizes them here. Studying Starbucks reveals essential truths about what its customers, who represented a large cross-section of the American…

Human dorsal striatum encodes prediction errors during observational learning of instrumental actions.

Science.gov (United States)

Cooper, Jeffrey C; Dunne, Simon; Furey, Teresa; O'Doherty, John P

2012-01-01

The dorsal striatum plays a key role in the learning and expression of instrumental reward associations that are acquired through direct experience. However, not all learning about instrumental actions require direct experience. Instead, humans and other animals are also capable of acquiring instrumental actions by observing the experiences of others. In this study, we investigated the extent to which human dorsal striatum is involved in observational as well as experiential instrumental reward learning. Human participants were scanned with fMRI while they observed a confederate over a live video performing an instrumental conditioning task to obtain liquid juice rewards. Participants also performed a similar instrumental task for their own rewards. Using a computational model-based analysis, we found reward prediction errors in the dorsal striatum not only during the experiential learning condition but also during observational learning. These results suggest a key role for the dorsal striatum in learning instrumental associations, even when those associations are acquired purely by observing others.

SPORT SCIENCE STUDENTS‟ BELIEFS ABOUT LANGUAGE LEARNING

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Suvi Akhiriyah

2017-04-01

Full Text Available There are many reasons for students of Sport Science to use English. Yet, knowing the importance of learning English is sometimes not enough to encourage them to learn English well. Based on the experience in teaching them, erroneous belief seems to be held by many of them. It arouses curiosity about the beliefs which might be revealed to help the students to be successful in language learning. By investigating sport science students‘ beliefs about language learning, it is expected that types of the beliefs which they hold can be revealed. Understanding students‘ beliefs about language learning is essential because these beliefs can have possible consequences for second language learning and instruction. This study is expected to provide empirical evidence. The subjects of this study were 1st semester students majoring in Sport Science of Sport Science Faculty. There were 4 classes with 38 students in each class. There were approximately 152 students as the population of the study. The sample was taken by using random sampling. All members of the population received the questionnaire. The questionnaire which was later handed back to the researcher is considered as the sample. The instrument in this study is the newest version of Beliefs About Language Learning Inventory (BALLI, version 2.0, developed by Horwitz to asses the beliefs about learning a foreign language.

Using Service-Learning to Educate Students about Stakeholder Involvement

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Beth Walter Honadle

2012-04-01

Full Text Available Using Lee’s definition of service-learning as “an instructional method in which students learn course content by actively participating in thoughtfully organized service experiences related to that content”, this article offers a case of action-oriented service- learning. It shows one way to combine traditional teaching methods with an action-oriented approach to service-learning that benefits both the community and imparts critical know-how into the education of planning students. Through service-learning students acquire valuable skills and also increase their competence as practitioners and increase their confidence in their field in a way that nurtures their abilities and provides minimal risk to the clientele because the students are working under the guidance of faculty. As previous research from diverse fields have shown, service-learning benefits the students and the groups they encounter through their projects. KEYWORDSservice-learning, civic engagement, community development

Psychological Climates in Action Learning Sets: A Manager's Perspective

Science.gov (United States)

Yeadon-Lee, Annie

2015-01-01

Action learning (AL) is often viewed as a process that facilitates professional learning through the creation of a positive psychological climate [Marquardt, M. J. 2000. "Action Learning and Leadership." "The Learning Organisation" 7 (5): 233-240; Schein, E. H. 1979. "Personal Change Through Interpersonal…

Distinct prediction errors in mesostriatal circuits of the human brain mediate learning about the values of both states and actions: evidence from high-resolution fMRI.

Science.gov (United States)

Colas, Jaron T; Pauli, Wolfgang M; Larsen, Tobias; Tyszka, J Michael; O'Doherty, John P

2017-10-01

Prediction-error signals consistent with formal models of "reinforcement learning" (RL) have repeatedly been found within dopaminergic nuclei of the midbrain and dopaminoceptive areas of the striatum. However, the precise form of the RL algorithms implemented in the human brain is not yet well determined. Here, we created a novel paradigm optimized to dissociate the subtypes of reward-prediction errors that function as the key computational signatures of two distinct classes of RL models-namely, "actor/critic" models and action-value-learning models (e.g., the Q-learning model). The state-value-prediction error (SVPE), which is independent of actions, is a hallmark of the actor/critic architecture, whereas the action-value-prediction error (AVPE) is the distinguishing feature of action-value-learning algorithms. To test for the presence of these prediction-error signals in the brain, we scanned human participants with a high-resolution functional magnetic-resonance imaging (fMRI) protocol optimized to enable measurement of neural activity in the dopaminergic midbrain as well as the striatal areas to which it projects. In keeping with the actor/critic model, the SVPE signal was detected in the substantia nigra. The SVPE was also clearly present in both the ventral striatum and the dorsal striatum. However, alongside these purely state-value-based computations we also found evidence for AVPE signals throughout the striatum. These high-resolution fMRI findings suggest that model-free aspects of reward learning in humans can be explained algorithmically with RL in terms of an actor/critic mechanism operating in parallel with a system for more direct action-value learning.

A reward optimization method based on action subrewards in hierarchical reinforcement learning.

Science.gov (United States)

Fu, Yuchen; Liu, Quan; Ling, Xionghong; Cui, Zhiming

2014-01-01

Reinforcement learning (RL) is one kind of interactive learning methods. Its main characteristics are "trial and error" and "related reward." A hierarchical reinforcement learning method based on action subrewards is proposed to solve the problem of "curse of dimensionality," which means that the states space will grow exponentially in the number of features and low convergence speed. The method can reduce state spaces greatly and choose actions with favorable purpose and efficiency so as to optimize reward function and enhance convergence speed. Apply it to the online learning in Tetris game, and the experiment result shows that the convergence speed of this algorithm can be enhanced evidently based on the new method which combines hierarchical reinforcement learning algorithm and action subrewards. The "curse of dimensionality" problem is also solved to a certain extent with hierarchical method. All the performance with different parameters is compared and analyzed as well.

Action Learning Drives the Emerald Academy

Science.gov (United States)

Nalborczyk, Sarah; Sandelands, Luke

2012-01-01

This account examines the action learning process adopted by Emerald Group Publishing Ltd., embedded in the organization through the in-company Emerald Academy. In case study format, the paper emphasizes that in order to align learning with organizational objectives joined up thinking and practice is needed beyond the learning and development…

Action Learning as Relational Practice

Science.gov (United States)

Boydell, Tom; Blantern, Chris

2007-01-01

In this paper we propose that all knowledge is made through social processes and is political (of the people involved). If one invests in a relational or historical ontology (a philosophical choice) there are implications for the way action learning is practiced. We illuminate some of these "relational practices". We purport that action learning…

Dialogues about teaching sports in Physical Education: an action research in continuing education

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Fernando Jaime González

2015-09-01

Full Text Available The research aimed to verify the consequences of an experience of collaborative learning and in conceptions in the teaching of sports with interaction between adversaries, the physical education teachers. Through action research, we developed a collaborative-study with a group of teachers about teaching sports invasion, for two years and a half. The results show that there are possibilities for change in the work of teachers who participate in experiences of action research, but projects of this type have a number of difficulties and challenges that need to be considered in their development to build effective conditions of exchange.

Learning about interruptions

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Brandrup, Morten

‘Interruption’ is a well described phenomenon within health-care. This study describes a field study in which nurses at a surgical ward desired to gain insights to what they experienced as interruptions from phone calls of the coordinating nurse. Employing an effects-driven approach data about...... the frequency and types of phone calls was collected using a tailored experience sampling tool. The data as well as the data became a way for the nurses to learn about the problem and use it as a stepping stone for discussing possible solutions....

Reinforcement learning in continuous state and action spaces

NARCIS (Netherlands)

H. P. van Hasselt (Hado); M.A. Wiering; M. van Otterlo

2012-01-01

textabstractMany traditional reinforcement-learning algorithms have been designed for problems with small finite state and action spaces. Learning in such discrete problems can been difficult, due to noise and delayed reinforcements. However, many real-world problems have continuous state or action

Civil Society, Adult Learning and Action in India.

Science.gov (United States)

Tandon, Rajesh

2000-01-01

Five case studies of individual and collective learning projects in India demonstrate that (1) the impetus for civic action arises from local conditions; (2) transformative action requires sustained adult learning; and (3) civil society is a complex concept reflecting diverse priorities and perspectives. (SK)

Making Facilitation Work: The Challenges on an International DBA Action Learning Set

Science.gov (United States)

OFarrell, Jack

2018-01-01

This account relates my experiences as facilitator of an action learning set on a DBA cohort comprising international students and myself. It outlines the reasons for my selection as facilitator and describes my initial expectations and assumptions of action learning. I chart the difficulty in separating the 'what' of my own research from the…

Action learning: a tool for the development of strategic skills for Nurse Consultants?

Science.gov (United States)

Young, Sarah; Nixon, Eileen; Hinge, Denise; McFadyen, Jan; Wright, Vanessa; Lambert, Pauline; Pilkington, Carolyn; Newsome, Christine

2010-01-01

This paper will discuss the process of action learning and the outcomes of using action learning as a tool to achieve a more strategic function from Nurse Consultant posts. It is documented that one of the most challenging aspect of Nurse Consultant roles, in terms of leadership, is the strategic contribution they make at a senior corporate Trust level, often across organizations and local health economies. A facilitated action learning set was established in Brighton, England, to support the strategic leadership development of eight nurse consultant posts across two NHS Trusts. Benefits to patient care, with regard to patient pathways and cross-organizational working, have been evident outcomes associated with the nurse consultant posts involved in the action learning set. Commitment by organizational nurse leaders is essential to address the challenges facing nurse consultants to implement change at strategic levels. The use of facilitated action learning had been a successful tool in developing the strategic skills of Nurse Consultant posts within this setting. Action learning sets may be successfully applied to a range of senior nursing posts with a strategic remit and may assist post holders in achieving better outcomes pertinent to their roles.

Learning about Our Community: From the Underground Railroad to School Lunch.

Science.gov (United States)

Hicks, Bonnie; Montequin, Leah; Hicks, Jason

2000-01-01

Forms part of a themed issue describing "Parent-Kid-Teacher Investigators," a program in which parents, children, and teachers gather regularly to use language and literacy for action research projects. Offers a portrait of the weekly meetings. Summarizes what three particular groups learned about their topics: the underground railroad;…

Switching Reinforcement Learning for Continuous Action Space

Science.gov (United States)

Nagayoshi, Masato; Murao, Hajime; Tamaki, Hisashi

Reinforcement Learning (RL) attracts much attention as a technique of realizing computational intelligence such as adaptive and autonomous decentralized systems. In general, however, it is not easy to put RL into practical use. This difficulty includes a problem of designing a suitable action space of an agent, i.e., satisfying two requirements in trade-off: (i) to keep the characteristics (or structure) of an original search space as much as possible in order to seek strategies that lie close to the optimal, and (ii) to reduce the search space as much as possible in order to expedite the learning process. In order to design a suitable action space adaptively, we propose switching RL model to mimic a process of an infant's motor development in which gross motor skills develop before fine motor skills. Then, a method for switching controllers is constructed by introducing and referring to the “entropy”. Further, through computational experiments by using robot navigation problems with one and two-dimensional continuous action space, the validity of the proposed method has been confirmed.

From action to abstraction: Gesture as a mechanism of change.

Science.gov (United States)

Goldin-Meadow, Susan

2015-12-01

Piaget was a master at observing the routine behaviors children produce as they go from knowing less to knowing more about at a task, and making inferences not only about how the children understood the task at each point, but also about how they progressed from one point to the next. In this paper, I examine a routine behavior that Piaget overlooked-the spontaneous gestures speakers produce as they explain their solutions to a problem. These gestures are not mere hand waving. They reflect ideas that the speaker has about the problem, often ideas that are not found in that speaker's talk. But gesture can do more than reflect ideas-it can also change them. In this sense, gesture behaves like any other action; both gesture and action on objects facilitate learning problems on which training was given. However, only gesture promotes transferring the knowledge gained to problems that require generalization. Gesture is, in fact, a special kind of action in that it represents the world rather than directly manipulating the world (gesture does not move objects around). The mechanisms by which gesture and action promote learning may therefore differ-gesture is able to highlight components of an action that promote abstract learning while leaving out details that could tie learning to a specific context. Because it is both an action and a representation, gesture can serve as a bridge between the two and thus be a powerful tool for learning abstract ideas.

FROM ACTION LEARNING TOTHETEACHING ORGANIZATION: An Experiential Approach

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Teddy Pawitra

2003-05-01

Full Text Available This paper expounds action learning for effective change leadership development using the learning-teaching helix as a paradigm for individual’s introspection. Which consists of five phases—Awareness phase (as certain your strengths and weaknesses. Alignment phase (identify your core competence. Action phase (synthesize your work, business and management skills, Adoption phase (becoming a leader and Assurance phase (excel as an educator cum coach. In addition, to succeed, the individual has to plan, strategize, prioritize and integrate. As a holistic manager the individual needs to think, feel and do to evolve from continuous action learning to the cycle of teaching for continuous innovation in organizational performance capabilities.

Action Learning and Constructivist Grounded Theory: Powerfully Overlapping Fields of Practice

Science.gov (United States)

Rand, Jane

2013-01-01

This paper considers the shared characteristics between action learning (AL) and the research methodology constructivist grounded theory (CGT). Mirroring Edmonstone's [2011. "Action Learning and Organisation Development: Overlapping Fields of Practice." "Action Learning: Research and Practice" 8 (2): 93-102] article, which…

Statistical learning of action: the role of conditional probability.

Science.gov (United States)

Meyer, Meredith; Baldwin, Dare

2011-12-01

Identification of distinct units within a continuous flow of human action is fundamental to action processing. Such segmentation may rest in part on statistical learning. In a series of four experiments, we examined what types of statistics people can use to segment a continuous stream involving many brief, goal-directed action elements. The results of Experiment 1 showed no evidence for sensitivity to conditional probability, whereas Experiment 2 displayed learning based on joint probability. In Experiment 3, we demonstrated that additional exposure to the input failed to engender sensitivity to conditional probability. However, the results of Experiment 4 showed that a subset of adults-namely, those more successful at identifying actions that had been seen more frequently than comparison sequences-were also successful at learning conditional-probability statistics. These experiments help to clarify the mechanisms subserving processing of intentional action, and they highlight important differences from, as well as similarities to, prior studies of statistical learning in other domains, including language.

Reinforcement Learning in Continuous Action Spaces

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Hasselt, H. van; Wiering, M.A.

2007-01-01

Quite some research has been done on Reinforcement Learning in continuous environments, but the research on problems where the actions can also be chosen from a continuous space is much more limited. We present a new class of algorithms named Continuous Actor Critic Learning Automaton (CACLA)

From Idea to Action: Promoting Responsible Management Education through a Semester-Long Academic Integrity Learning Project

Science.gov (United States)

Lavine, Marc H.; Roussin, Christopher J.

2012-01-01

The authors describe a semester-long action-learning project where undergraduate or graduate management students learn about ethics, responsibility, and organizational behavior by examining the policy of their college or university that addresses academic integrity. Working in teams, students adopt a stakeholder management approach as they make…

Explicit learning of arbitrary and non-arbitrary action-effect relations in adults and 4-year-olds

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Stephan Alexander eVerschoor

2012-02-01

Full Text Available Ideomotor theories claim that carrying out a movement that produces a perceivable effect creates a bidirectional association between the two, which can be used by action control processes to retrieve the associated action by anticipating its outcome. Indeed, previous implicit-learning studies have shown that practice renders novel but action-contingent stimuli effective retrieval cues of the action they used to follow, suggesting that experiencing sequences of actions and effects creates bidirectional action-effect associations. We investigated whether action-effect associations are also acquired under explicit-learning conditions and whether familiar action-effect relations (such as between a trumpet and a trumpet sound are learned the same way as novel, arbitrary relations are. We also investigated whether these factors affect adults and 4-year-old children equally. Our findings suggest that explicit learning produces the same bidirectional action-effect associations as implicit learning does, that non-arbitrary relations improve performance without affecting learning per se, and that adults and young children show equivalent performance—apart from the common observation that children have greater difficulty to withstand stimulus-induced action tendencies.

Using Science to Take a Stand: Action-Oriented Learning in an Afterschool Science Club

Science.gov (United States)

Hagenah, Sara

This dissertation study investigates what happens when students participate in an afterschool science club designed around action-oriented science instruction, a set of curriculum design principles based on social justice pedagogy. Comprised of three manuscripts written for journal publication, the dissertation includes 1) Negotiating community-based action-oriented science teaching and learning: Articulating curriculum design principles, 2) Middle school girls' socio-scientific participation pathways in an afterschool science club, and 3) Laughing and learning together: Productive science learning spaces for middle school girls. By investigating how action-oriented science design principles get negotiated, female identity development in and with science, and the role of everyday social interactions as students do productive science, this research fills gaps in the understanding of how social justice pedagogy gets enacted and negotiated among multiple stakeholders including students, teachers, and community members along what identity development looks like across social and scientific activity. This study will be of interest to educators thinking about how to enact social justice pedagogy in science learning spaces and those interested in identity development in science.

Learning about energy

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Anon.

1986-01-01

This book provides a technological but mostly non-mathematical approach to learning about energy, with material ranging from basic technical and scientific information, to discussions of important recent events, trends, and policy implications. Major topics include: energy in its social and economic context, conservation: technical and institutional topics, resources and reserves of fossil fuels, coal and its derivatives, nuclear power: technology, safety, wastes, societ complications and controlled fusion, solar power: photo voltaics, wind, boimass and other modes, and increasing global electrification: energy storage and power system integration

Decoding Ourselves: An Inquiry into Faculty Learning about Reciprocity in Service-Learning

Science.gov (United States)

Miller-Young, Janice; Dean, Yasmin; Rathburn, Melanie; Pettit, Jennifer; Underwood, Margot; Gleeson, Judy; Lexier, Roberta; Calvert, Victoria; Clayton, Patti

2015-01-01

Faculty learning about service-learning is an important area of research because understanding how faculty develop their practice is an important first step in improving student learning outcomes and relationships with community members. Enacting reciprocity in service-learning can be particularly troublesome because it requires faculty to learn…

Active Affordance Learning in Continuous State and Action Spaces

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Wang, C.; Hindriks, K.V.; Babuska, R.

2014-01-01

Learning object affordances and manipulation skills is essential for developing cognitive service robots. We propose an active affordance learning approach in continuous state and action spaces without manual discretization of states or exploratory motor primitives. During exploration in the action

Defining Learning Space in a Serious Game in Terms of Operative and Resultant Actions

Science.gov (United States)

Martin, Michael W.; Shen, Yuzhong

2012-01-01

This paper explores the distinction between operative and resultant actions in games, and proposes that the learning space created by a serious game is a function of these actions. Further, it suggests a possible relationship between these actions and the forms of cognitive load imposed upon the game player. Association of specific types of cognitive load with respective forms of actions in game mechanics also presents some heuristics for integrating learning content into serious games. Research indicates that different balances of these types of actions are more suitable for novice or experienced learners. By examining these relationships, we can develop a few basic principles of game design which have an increased potential to promote positive learning outcomes.

Fostering Environmental Knowledge and Action through Online Learning Resources

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Maier, Carmen Daniela

2010-01-01

In order to secure correct understanding of environmental issues, to promote behavioral change and to encourage environmental action, more and more educational practices support and provide environmental programs. This article explores the design of online learning resources created for teachers...... and students by the GreenLearning environmental education program. The topic is approached from a social semiotic perspective. I conduct a multimodal analysis of the knowledge processes and the knowledge selection types that characterize the GreenLearning environmental education program and its online...

Learning, Action and Solutions in Action Learning: Investigation of Facilitation Practice Using the Concept of Living Theories

Science.gov (United States)

Sanyal, Chandana

2018-01-01

This paper explores the practice of action learning (AL) facilitation in supporting AL set members to address their 'messy' problems through a self-reflexive approach using the concept of 'living theory' [Whitehead, J., and J. McNiff. 2006. "Action Research Living Theory." London: Sage]. The facilitation practice is investigated through…

Teaching about Tort Law--My Actions, My Actions, Somebody Got Hurt!

Science.gov (United States)

Rose, Stephen A.

1997-01-01

Presents a lesson plan that uses cases to teach students about three types of torts: intentional wrongs, negligence, and strict liability. Torts are wrongful actions (not involving a breech of contract) that may result in a civic action. Includes lesson procedures, objectives, and student handouts on torts and negligence cases. (MJP)

Entrepreneurial learning requires action on the meaning generated

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Brink, Tove; Madsen, Svend Ole

2015-01-01

Purpose: This paper reveals how managers of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can utilise their participation in research-based training to enable innovation and growth. Design/methodology/approach: Action research and action learning from a longitudinal study of 10 SME managers...... in the wind turbine industry are conducted to reveal SME managers learning and the impact of the application of learning in the wind turbine industry. Findings: The findings of this study show that SME managers employ a practice-shaped holistic cross-disciplinary approach to learning. This learning approach...... is supported by theory dissemination and collaboration on the business challenges perceived. Open mindedness to new learning by SME managers and to cross-disciplinary collaboration with SME managers by university facilitators/ researchers is required. Research limitations/implications: The research...

ROBOT LEARNING OF OBJECT MANIPULATION TASK ACTIONS FROM HUMAN DEMONSTRATIONS

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Maria Kyrarini

2017-08-01

Full Text Available Robot learning from demonstration is a method which enables robots to learn in a similar way as humans. In this paper, a framework that enables robots to learn from multiple human demonstrations via kinesthetic teaching is presented. The subject of learning is a high-level sequence of actions, as well as the low-level trajectories necessary to be followed by the robot to perform the object manipulation task. The multiple human demonstrations are recorded and only the most similar demonstrations are selected for robot learning. The high-level learning module identifies the sequence of actions of the demonstrated task. Using Dynamic Time Warping (DTW and Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM, the model of demonstrated trajectories is learned. The learned trajectory is generated by Gaussian mixture regression (GMR from the learned Gaussian mixture model.  In online working phase, the sequence of actions is identified and experimental results show that the robot performs the learned task successfully.

Uncertainty in action-value estimation affects both action choice and learning rate of the choice behaviors of rats.

Science.gov (United States)

Funamizu, Akihiro; Ito, Makoto; Doya, Kenji; Kanzaki, Ryohei; Takahashi, Hirokazu

2012-04-01

The estimation of reward outcomes for action candidates is essential for decision making. In this study, we examined whether and how the uncertainty in reward outcome estimation affects the action choice and learning rate. We designed a choice task in which rats selected either the left-poking or right-poking hole and received a reward of a food pellet stochastically. The reward probabilities of the left and right holes were chosen from six settings (high, 100% vs. 66%; mid, 66% vs. 33%; low, 33% vs. 0% for the left vs. right holes, and the opposites) in every 20-549 trials. We used Bayesian Q-learning models to estimate the time course of the probability distribution of action values and tested if they better explain the behaviors of rats than standard Q-learning models that estimate only the mean of action values. Model comparison by cross-validation revealed that a Bayesian Q-learning model with an asymmetric update for reward and non-reward outcomes fit the choice time course of the rats best. In the action-choice equation of the Bayesian Q-learning model, the estimated coefficient for the variance of action value was positive, meaning that rats were uncertainty seeking. Further analysis of the Bayesian Q-learning model suggested that the uncertainty facilitated the effective learning rate. These results suggest that the rats consider uncertainty in action-value estimation and that they have an uncertainty-seeking action policy and uncertainty-dependent modulation of the effective learning rate. © 2012 The Authors. European Journal of Neuroscience © 2012 Federation of European Neuroscience Societies and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Business Action Learning Tasmania (BALT)--An Account of Practice

Science.gov (United States)

Cother, Genevieve; Cother, Robert F.

2017-01-01

Business Action Learning Tasmania's (BALT) mission is self-reliant industry development, with diverse companies co-operating to improve their profitability, develop their people and grow the local economy. This is achieved through collaborative action learning, with companies working together on projects of vital importance and sharing the…

Learning from Action Evaluation of the Use of Multimedia Case Studies in Management Information Systems Courses

Science.gov (United States)

Kawulich, Barbara B.

2011-01-01

This manuscript shares lessons learned from conducting an action evaluation of the use of multimedia case studies in Management Information Systems (MIS) courses. Three undergraduate MIS classes took part in the study. The purpose for using case studies in these classes was to teach students about the role of MIS in business. An action evaluation…

Action Learning in Virtual Higher Education: Applying Leadership Theory

Science.gov (United States)

Curtin, Joseph

2016-01-01

This paper reports the historical foundation of Northeastern University's course, LDR 6100: Developing Your Leadership Capability, a partial literature review of action learning (AL) and virtual action learning (VAL), a course methodology of LDR 6100 requiring students to apply leadership perspectives using VAL as instructed by the author,…

Accelerating Strategic Change Through Action Learning

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Younger, Jon; Sørensen, René; Cleemann, Christine

2013-01-01

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe how a leading global company used action-learning based leadership development to accelerate strategic culture change. Design/methodology/approach – It describes the need for change, and the methodology and approach by which the initiative, Impact......, generated significant benefits. Findings – The initiative led to financial benefit, as well as measurable gains in customer centricity, collaboration, and innovation. It was also a powerful experience for participants in their journey as commercial leaders. Originality/value – Impact was created using...

Robot soccer action selection based on Q learning

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

无

2001-01-01

This paper researches robot soccer action selection based on Q learning . The robot learn to activate particular behavior given their current situation and reward signal. We adopt neural network to implementations of Q learning for their generalization properties and limited computer memory requirements

Perceptual learning during action video game playing.

Science.gov (United States)

Green, C Shawn; Li, Renjie; Bavelier, Daphne

2010-04-01

Action video games have been shown to enhance behavioral performance on a wide variety of perceptual tasks, from those that require effective allocation of attentional resources across the visual scene, to those that demand the successful identification of fleetingly presented stimuli. Importantly, these effects have not only been shown in expert action video game players, but a causative link has been established between action video game play and enhanced processing through training studies. Although an account based solely on attention fails to capture the variety of enhancements observed after action game playing, a number of models of perceptual learning are consistent with the observed results, with behavioral modeling favoring the hypothesis that avid video game players are better able to form templates for, or extract the relevant statistics of, the task at hand. This may suggest that the neural site of learning is in areas where information is integrated and actions are selected; yet changes in low-level sensory areas cannot be ruled out. Copyright © 2009 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Representation and Integration: Combining Robot Control, High-Level Planning, and Action Learning

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Petrick, Ronald; Kraft, Dirk; Mourao, Kira

We describe an approach to integrated robot control, high-level planning, and action effect learning that attempts to overcome the representational difficulties that exist between these diverse areas. Our approach combines ideas from robot vision, knowledgelevel planning, and connectionist machine......-level action specifications, suitable for planning, from a robot’s interactions with the world. We present a detailed overview of our approach and show how it supports the learning of certain aspects of a high-level lepresentation from low-level world state information....... learning, and focuses on the representational needs of these components.We also make use of a simple representational unit called an instantiated state transition fragment (ISTF) and a related structure called an object-action complex (OAC). The goal of this work is a general approach for inducing high...

Does Lean Production Sacrifice Learning in a Manufacturing Environment? An Action Learning Case Study.

Science.gov (United States)

Scott, Fiona M.; Butler, Jim; Edwards, John

2001-01-01

An action learning program was implemented by a manufacturer using lean production practices. Action learning practices were accommodated during times of stability, but abandoned in times of crisis. The meaning of work in this organizational culture excluded all practices, such as reflection, that were not visible and targeted at immediate…

Robots show us how to teach them: feedback from robots shapes tutoring behavior during action learning.

Science.gov (United States)

Vollmer, Anna-Lisa; Mühlig, Manuel; Steil, Jochen J; Pitsch, Karola; Fritsch, Jannik; Rohlfing, Katharina J; Wrede, Britta

2014-01-01

Robot learning by imitation requires the detection of a tutor's action demonstration and its relevant parts. Current approaches implicitly assume a unidirectional transfer of knowledge from tutor to learner. The presented work challenges this predominant assumption based on an extensive user study with an autonomously interacting robot. We show that by providing feedback, a robot learner influences the human tutor's movement demonstrations in the process of action learning. We argue that the robot's feedback strongly shapes how tutors signal what is relevant to an action and thus advocate a paradigm shift in robot action learning research toward truly interactive systems learning in and benefiting from interaction.

Franchisees in Crisis: Using Action Learning to Self-Organise

Science.gov (United States)

O'Donoghue, Carol

2011-01-01

The present article describes the use of action learning by a group of 30 franchisees to organise themselves and work through a period of upheaval and uncertainty when their parent company faced liquidation. Written from the perspective of one of the franchisees who found herself adopting action learning principles to facilitate the group, it…

Facilitating organizational development through action learning : Some practical and theoretical considerations

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Donnenberg, O.; De Loo, I.G.M.

2004-01-01

Action learning programmes are supposed to result in both personal and organizational development. However, organizational development can be negligible because, as the term implies, a connection must be secured between what has been learned by action learning participants and other members of an

What Do Caregivers Notice and Value about How Children Learn through Play in a Children's Museum?

Science.gov (United States)

Letourneau, Susan M.; Meisner, Robin; Neuwirth, Jessica L.; Sobel, David M.

2017-01-01

In two studies, Providence Children's Museum investigated caregivers' observations and perceptions of their children's play and learning at the museum. In the first, caregivers (N = 40) were interviewed about what they observed children doing, what they believed children were thinking about, and their own thoughts and actions while watching…

Action understanding and imitation learning in a robot-human task

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Erlhagen, W.; Mukovskiy, A.; Bicho, E.; Panin, G.; Kiss, C.; Knoll, A.; Schie, H.T. van; Bekkering, H.

2005-01-01

We report results of an interdisciplinary project which aims at endowing a real robot system with the capacity for learning by goal-directed imitation. The control architecture is biologically inspired as it reflects recent experimental findings in action observation/execution studies. We test its

Assessing the value of action learning for social enterprises and charities

OpenAIRE

Smith, Sue; Smith, Laurie

2017-01-01

In this paper we evaluate action learning for leaders of social enterprises and charities. Based on ethnographic research including participant observation, facilitator reflective diary notes and in-depth, qualitative interviews with participants of two action learning sets undertaken over eight months, analysed using Wenger et al.’s (2011) value creation framework, we show how the current and future value of action learning is perceived by the participants. We seek to give a deeper understan...

Staying mindful in action

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Svalgaard, Lotte

2016-01-01

Action Learning is a well-proven method to integrate ‘task’ and ‘process’, as learning about team and self (process) takes place while delivering on a task or business challenge of real importance (task). An Action Lab® is an intensive Action Learning programme lasting for 5 days, which aims...... at balancing and integrating individual challenges and business challenges, as well as the ‘Action’ and the ‘Learning’ of Action Learning. However, in spite of the aspiration to balance and integrate ‘task’ and ‘process’, a tendency and a challenge is experienced: When deeply involved in delivering...... this tendency by sharing a study looking into what hinders and promotes mindful awareness on the process, while dealing with a business challenge in an Action Lab®. Drawing on the findings, the account of practice will share some recommendations for the Action Learning facilitator to take up the challenge...

Learning about Neurofibromatosis

Science.gov (United States)

Skip to main content Learning about Neurofibromatosis Enter Search Term(s): Español Research Funding An Overview Bioinformatics Current Grants Education and Training Funding Extramural Research News ...

A Collaborative Action Research Approach to Professional Learning

Science.gov (United States)

Bleicher, Robert E.

2014-01-01

The field of professional development is moving towards the notion of professional learning, highlighting the active learning role that teachers play in changing their knowledge bases, beliefs and practice. This article builds on this idea and argues for creating professional learning that is guided by a collaborative action research (CAR)…

Probing folk-psychology: Do Libet-style experiments reflect folk intuitions about free action?

Science.gov (United States)

Deutschländer, Robert; Pauen, Michael; Haynes, John-Dylan

2017-02-01

There is an ongoing debate in philosophy and psychology about when one should consider an action to be free. Several aspects are frequently suggested as relevant: (a) a prior intention, (b) a conscious action-related thought, (c) prior deliberation, (d) a meaningful choice, (e) different consequences of the action, and (f) the duration between intention and action. Here we investigated which criteria laypeople adopt and thus probed their intuitions about free actions in three surveys based on daily life scenarios. First, our results indicate that laypeople consider a conscious intention important for an action to be free. Second, laypeople consider spontaneous actions without consequences to be freer than actions with prior deliberation. Third, laypeople consider proximal rather than distal intentions relevant when it comes to judging actions as free. Taken together, these results suggest that simple laboratory experiments on action choices reflect laypeople's intuitions of free actions to a considerable degree. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Agroecology Education: Action-Oriented Learning and Research

Science.gov (United States)

Lieblein, Geir; Breland, Tor Arvid; Francis, Charles; Ostergaard, Edvin

2012-01-01

Purpose: This article examines and evaluates the potential contributions from action learning and action research with stakeholders to higher education in agriculture and food systems. Design/Methodology/Approach: The research is based on our experiences over the past two decades of running PhD courses and an MSc degree programme in Agroecology in…

Learn About Tuberculosis

Science.gov (United States)

... Diseases > Lung Disease Lookup > Tuberculosis (TB) Learn About Tuberculosis Tuberculosis (TB) is an airborne bacterial infection caused by the organism Mycobacterium tuberculosis that primarily affects the lungs, although other organs ...

Learning from doing: the case for combining normalisation process theory and participatory learning and action research methodology for primary healthcare implementation research.

Science.gov (United States)

de Brún, Tomas; O'Reilly-de Brún, Mary; O'Donnell, Catherine A; MacFarlane, Anne

2016-08-03

The implementation of research findings is not a straightforward matter. There are substantive and recognised gaps in the process of translating research findings into practice and policy. In order to overcome some of these translational difficulties, a number of strategies have been proposed for researchers. These include greater use of theoretical approaches in research focused on implementation, and use of a wider range of research methods appropriate to policy questions and the wider social context in which they are placed. However, questions remain about how to combine theory and method in implementation research. In this paper, we respond to these proposals. Focussing on a contemporary social theory, Normalisation Process Theory, and a participatory research methodology, Participatory Learning and Action, we discuss the potential of their combined use for implementation research. We note ways in which Normalisation Process Theory and Participatory Learning and Action are congruent and may therefore be used as heuristic devices to explore, better understand and support implementation. We also provide examples of their use in our own research programme about community involvement in primary healthcare. Normalisation Process Theory alone has, to date, offered useful explanations for the success or otherwise of implementation projects post-implementation. We argue that Normalisation Process Theory can also be used to prospectively support implementation journeys. Furthermore, Normalisation Process Theory and Participatory Learning and Action can be used together so that interventions to support implementation work are devised and enacted with the expertise of key stakeholders. We propose that the specific combination of this theory and methodology possesses the potential, because of their combined heuristic force, to offer a more effective means of supporting implementation projects than either one might do on its own, and of providing deeper understandings of

Analysing the Continuity of Teaching and Learning in Classroom Actions: When the Joint Action Framework in Didactics Meets the Pragmatist Approach to Classroom Discourses

Science.gov (United States)

Ligozat, Florence; Lundqvist, Eva; Amade-Escot, Chantal

2018-01-01

One strand of comparative didactics aims at discussing the relationships between the theoretical constructions developed within subject didactics and how these can contribute to research about teaching and learning. This article explores the relationships between categories for analysing joint actions of teacher and students (didactic contract,…

Learning about Autism

Science.gov (United States)

Skip to main content Learning About Autism Enter Search Term(s): Español Research Funding An Overview Bioinformatics Current Grants Education and Training Funding Extramural Research News Features Funding Divisions Funding ...

Learning about Thalassemia

Science.gov (United States)

Skip to main content Learning About Thalassemia Enter Search Term(s): Español Research Funding An Overview Bioinformatics Current Grants Education and Training Funding Extramural Research News Features Funding Divisions Funding ...

Lifelong learning of human actions with deep neural network self-organization.

Science.gov (United States)

Parisi, German I; Tani, Jun; Weber, Cornelius; Wermter, Stefan

2017-12-01

Lifelong learning is fundamental in autonomous robotics for the acquisition and fine-tuning of knowledge through experience. However, conventional deep neural models for action recognition from videos do not account for lifelong learning but rather learn a batch of training data with a predefined number of action classes and samples. Thus, there is the need to develop learning systems with the ability to incrementally process available perceptual cues and to adapt their responses over time. We propose a self-organizing neural architecture for incrementally learning to classify human actions from video sequences. The architecture comprises growing self-organizing networks equipped with recurrent neurons for processing time-varying patterns. We use a set of hierarchically arranged recurrent networks for the unsupervised learning of action representations with increasingly large spatiotemporal receptive fields. Lifelong learning is achieved in terms of prediction-driven neural dynamics in which the growth and the adaptation of the recurrent networks are driven by their capability to reconstruct temporally ordered input sequences. Experimental results on a classification task using two action benchmark datasets show that our model is competitive with state-of-the-art methods for batch learning also when a significant number of sample labels are missing or corrupted during training sessions. Additional experiments show the ability of our model to adapt to non-stationary input avoiding catastrophic interference. Copyright © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

Building Civic Bridges: Community-Centered Action Civics

Science.gov (United States)

LeCompte, Karon; Blevins, Brooke

2015-01-01

Project-based learning is an example of powerful social studies learning in which student engage in active inquiry. Action civics is a relatively new educational practice in which students "act as citizens" through a cycle of research, action, and reflection about problems they care about in their community. "Building Civic…

U. S. Department of energy actions to ensure nuclear safety at its nuclear facilities in response to lessons being learned from the Fukushima dacha accident

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Chung, Dae; O' Brien, James [U. S. Department of Energy, Washington (United States)

2012-03-15

The U. S. Department of Energy (DOE) has established a rigorous nuclear safety regulatory infrastructure for the protection of workers, the public, and the environment. An essential part of this infrastructure is a safety culture that promotes organizational learning and includes a commitment to safety by senior leaders that is demonstrated through their actions and behaviors. The tragic Fukushima Dacha accident presented an important challenge for DOE leaders to demonstrate a robust safety culture by critically examining the Department' s regulatory infrastructure and its implementation to ensure that appropriate safety provisions were in place. This paper discusses the actions DOE has taken to date in this regard and further planned action to ensure safety at DOE facilities in light of lessons being learned from the Fukushima Dacha accident.

U. S. Department of energy actions to ensure nuclear safety at its nuclear facilities in response to lessons being learned from the Fukushima dacha accident

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Chung, Dae; O'Brien, James

2012-01-01

The U. S. Department of Energy (DOE) has established a rigorous nuclear safety regulatory infrastructure for the protection of workers, the public, and the environment. An essential part of this infrastructure is a safety culture that promotes organizational learning and includes a commitment to safety by senior leaders that is demonstrated through their actions and behaviors. The tragic Fukushima Dacha accident presented an important challenge for DOE leaders to demonstrate a robust safety culture by critically examining the Department' s regulatory infrastructure and its implementation to ensure that appropriate safety provisions were in place. This paper discusses the actions DOE has taken to date in this regard and further planned action to ensure safety at DOE facilities in light of lessons being learned from the Fukushima Dacha accident

Learning about depression

Science.gov (United States)

... medlineplus.gov/ency/patientinstructions/000325.htm Learning about depression To use the sharing features on this page, ... trigger or reason. What are the Signs of Depression? You may notice some or all of the ...

Learning about ventilators

Science.gov (United States)

... medlineplus.gov/ency/patientinstructions/000458.htm Learning about ventilators To use the sharing features on this page, ... fixed or changed. How Does Being on a Ventilator Feel? A person receives medicine to remain comfortable ...

Teacher learning about probabilistic reasoning in relation to teaching it in an Advanced Certificate in Education (ACE programme

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Faaiz Gierdien

2008-02-01

Full Text Available I report on what teachers in an Advanced Certificate in Education (ACE in-service programme learned about probabilistic reasoning in relation to teaching it. I worked 'on the inside' using my practice as a site for studying teaching and learning. The teachers were from three different towns in the Northern Cape province and had limited teaching contact time, as is the nature of ACE programmes. Findings revealed a complicated picture, where some teachers were prepared to consider influences of their intuitive probabilistic reasoning on formal probabilistic reasoning when it came to teaching. It was, however, the 'genuineness' of teacher learning which was the issue that the findings have to address. Therefore a speculative, hopeful strategy for affecting teacher learning in mathematics teacher education practice is to sustain disequilibrium between dichotomies such as formal and intuitive probabilistic reasoning, which has analogies in content and pedagogy, and subject matter and method.

Skill Learning for Intelligent Robot by Perception-Action Integration: A View from Hierarchical Temporal Memory

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Xinzheng Zhang

2017-01-01

Full Text Available Skill learning autonomously through interactions with the environment is a crucial ability for intelligent robot. A perception-action integration or sensorimotor cycle, as an important issue in imitation learning, is a natural mechanism without the complex program process. Recently, neurocomputing model and developmental intelligence method are considered as a new trend for implementing the robot skill learning. In this paper, based on research of the human brain neocortex model, we present a skill learning method by perception-action integration strategy from the perspective of hierarchical temporal memory (HTM theory. The sequential sensor data representing a certain skill from a RGB-D camera are received and then encoded as a sequence of Sparse Distributed Representation (SDR vectors. The sequential SDR vectors are treated as the inputs of the perception-action HTM. The HTM learns sequences of SDRs and makes predictions of what the next input SDR will be. It stores the transitions of the current perceived sensor data and next predicted actions. We evaluated the performance of this proposed framework for learning the shaking hands skill on a humanoid NAO robot. The experimental results manifest that the skill learning method designed in this paper is promising.

Learning, attentional control and action video games

Science.gov (United States)

Green, C.S.; Bavelier, D.

2012-01-01

While humans have an incredible capacity to acquire new skills and alter their behavior as a result of experience, enhancements in performance are typically narrowly restricted to the parameters of the training environment, with little evidence of generalization to different, even seemingly highly related, tasks. Such specificity is a major obstacle for the development of many real-world training or rehabilitation paradigms, which necessarily seek to promote more general learning. In contrast to these typical findings, research over the past decade has shown that training on ‘action video games’ produces learning that transfers well beyond the training task. This has led to substantial interest among those interested in rehabilitation, for instance, after stroke or to treat amblyopia, or training for various precision-demanding jobs, for instance, endoscopic surgery or piloting unmanned aerial drones. Although the predominant focus of the field has been on outlining the breadth of possible action-game-related enhancements, recent work has concentrated on uncovering the mechanisms that underlie these changes, an important first step towards the goal of designing and using video games for more definite purposes. Game playing may not convey an immediate advantage on new tasks (increased performance from the very first trial), but rather the true effect of action video game playing may be to enhance the ability to learn new tasks. Such a mechanism may serve as a signature of training regimens that are likely to produce transfer of learning. PMID:22440805

Mayan Children's Creation of Learning Ecologies by Initiative and Cooperative Action.

Science.gov (United States)

de León, Lourdes

2015-01-01

This chapter examines Mayan children's initiatives in creating their own learning environments in collaboration with others as they engage in culturally relevant endeavors of family and community life. To this end, I carry out a fine-grained ethnographic and linguistic analysis of the interactional emergence of learning ecologies. Erickson defines learning ecology as a socioecological system where participants mutually influence one another through verbal and nonverbal actions, as well as through other forms of semiotic communication (2010, 254). In analyzing learning ecologies, I adopt a "theory of action" approach, taking into account multimodal communication (e.g., talk, gesture, gaze, body positioning), participants' sociospatial organization, embodied action, objects, tools, and other culturally relevant materials brought together to build action (Goodwin, 2000, 2013; Hutchins, 1995). I use microethnographic analysis (Erickson, 1992) to bring to the surface central aspects of children's agentive roles in learning through "cooperative actions" (Goodwin, 2013) and "hands-on" experience (Ingold, 2007) the skills of competent members of their community. I examine three distinct Learning Ecologies created by children's initiatives among the Mayan children that I observed: (i) children requesting guidance to collaborate in a task, (ii) older children working on their own initiative with subsequent monitoring and correction from competent members, and (iii) children with near competence in a task with occasional monitoring and no guidance. I argue that these findings enrich and add power to models of family- and community-based learning such as Learning by Observing and Pitching In (Rogoff, 2014). © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Code-specific learning rules improve action selection by populations of spiking neurons.

Science.gov (United States)

Friedrich, Johannes; Urbanczik, Robert; Senn, Walter

2014-08-01

Population coding is widely regarded as a key mechanism for achieving reliable behavioral decisions. We previously introduced reinforcement learning for population-based decision making by spiking neurons. Here we generalize population reinforcement learning to spike-based plasticity rules that take account of the postsynaptic neural code. We consider spike/no-spike, spike count and spike latency codes. The multi-valued and continuous-valued features in the postsynaptic code allow for a generalization of binary decision making to multi-valued decision making and continuous-valued action selection. We show that code-specific learning rules speed up learning both for the discrete classification and the continuous regression tasks. The suggested learning rules also speed up with increasing population size as opposed to standard reinforcement learning rules. Continuous action selection is further shown to explain realistic learning speeds in the Morris water maze. Finally, we introduce the concept of action perturbation as opposed to the classical weight- or node-perturbation as an exploration mechanism underlying reinforcement learning. Exploration in the action space greatly increases the speed of learning as compared to exploration in the neuron or weight space.

Learning to Recognize Actions From Limited Training Examples Using a Recurrent Spiking Neural Model

Science.gov (United States)

Panda, Priyadarshini; Srinivasa, Narayan

2018-01-01

A fundamental challenge in machine learning today is to build a model that can learn from few examples. Here, we describe a reservoir based spiking neural model for learning to recognize actions with a limited number of labeled videos. First, we propose a novel encoding, inspired by how microsaccades influence visual perception, to extract spike information from raw video data while preserving the temporal correlation across different frames. Using this encoding, we show that the reservoir generalizes its rich dynamical activity toward signature action/movements enabling it to learn from few training examples. We evaluate our approach on the UCF-101 dataset. Our experiments demonstrate that our proposed reservoir achieves 81.3/87% Top-1/Top-5 accuracy, respectively, on the 101-class data while requiring just 8 video examples per class for training. Our results establish a new benchmark for action recognition from limited video examples for spiking neural models while yielding competitive accuracy with respect to state-of-the-art non-spiking neural models. PMID:29551962

"I Will Never Become a Soldier for You!": The Relevance of Biographical Learning for Political Action

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Andrea Neugebauer

2011-05-01

Full Text Available This article focuses on the biographical dimension of the processes of developing political awareness and the significance for consistency in political action. It is based on a single case study which was developed within an oral history project in the 1980s. A new reconstruction of a worker's narrative about his refusal to serve in the army and subsequent flight during the National-Socialist period shows how personal desires for change and institutionalized political patterns of interpretation and action are intertwined. The protagonist could cope with times of extremely restricted latitude for action, as was the case in the Nazi era, acquiring personal learning or crisis management skills as long as there was hope for future emancipation and social integration. In the postwar period the dissipation of this perspective lead to a reduction in his individual ability to take political action. URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1102118

Comparison as a Universal Learning Action

Science.gov (United States)

Merkulova, T. V.

2016-01-01

This article explores "comparison" as a universal metasubject learning action, a key curricular element envisaged by the Russian Federal State Educational Standards. Representing the modern learner's fundamental pragmatic skill embedding such core capacities as information processing, critical thinking, robust decision-making, and…

Action-outcome learning and prediction shape the window of simultaneity of audiovisual outcomes.

Science.gov (United States)

Desantis, Andrea; Haggard, Patrick

2016-08-01

To form a coherent representation of the objects around us, the brain must group the different sensory features composing these objects. Here, we investigated whether actions contribute in this grouping process. In particular, we assessed whether action-outcome learning and prediction contribute to audiovisual temporal binding. Participants were presented with two audiovisual pairs: one pair was triggered by a left action, and the other by a right action. In a later test phase, the audio and visual components of these pairs were presented at different onset times. Participants judged whether they were simultaneous or not. To assess the role of action-outcome prediction on audiovisual simultaneity, each action triggered either the same audiovisual pair as in the learning phase ('predicted' pair), or the pair that had previously been associated with the other action ('unpredicted' pair). We found the time window within which auditory and visual events appeared simultaneous increased for predicted compared to unpredicted pairs. However, no change in audiovisual simultaneity was observed when audiovisual pairs followed visual cues, rather than voluntary actions. This suggests that only action-outcome learning promotes temporal grouping of audio and visual effects. In a second experiment we observed that changes in audiovisual simultaneity do not only depend on our ability to predict what outcomes our actions generate, but also on learning the delay between the action and the multisensory outcome. When participants learned that the delay between action and audiovisual pair was variable, the window of audiovisual simultaneity for predicted pairs increased, relative to a fixed action-outcome pair delay. This suggests that participants learn action-based predictions of audiovisual outcome, and adapt their temporal perception of outcome events based on such predictions. Copyright © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Teachers' learning about research for enhancing students' thinking skills in science learning

Science.gov (United States)

Nammungkhun, Wisanugorn; Satchukorn, Sureerat; Saenpuk, Nudchanard; Yuenyong, Chokchai; Chantharanuwong, Warawun

2018-01-01

This paper aimed to clarify teachers' learning about research for enhancing students' thinking skills in science learning. The study applied the lens of sociocultural view of learning to discuss teachers' learning about research. Participants included teachers who participated in the project of thinking research schools: research for enhancing students' thinking skills. The project of thinking research schools provided participants chance to learn knowledge about research and thinking research, doing research and publication, and participate in the international conference. Methodology regarded ethnographic research. The tools of interpretation included participant observation, interview, and document analysis. The researchers as participants of the research project of thinking research schools tried to clarify what they learned about research from their way of seeing the view of research about enhancing students' thinking skills through participant observation. The findings revealed what and how teachers as apprenticeship learn about research through legitimate peripheral participation in the research project community of practice. The paper clarified teachers' conceptualization about research for enhancing students' thinking through the workshop, doing research, writing up research article with supported by experts, presenting research in the international conference, editing their research article on the way of publishing, and so on.

Developing Transferable Management Skills through Action Learning

Science.gov (United States)

Yeadon-Lee, Annie; Hall, Roger

2013-01-01

There has been increasing criticism of the relevance of the Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree in developing skills and competencies. Action learning, devised to address problem solving in the

Learning, attentional control, and action video games.

Science.gov (United States)

Green, C S; Bavelier, D

2012-03-20

While humans have an incredible capacity to acquire new skills and alter their behavior as a result of experience, enhancements in performance are typically narrowly restricted to the parameters of the training environment, with little evidence of generalization to different, even seemingly highly related, tasks. Such specificity is a major obstacle for the development of many real-world training or rehabilitation paradigms, which necessarily seek to promote more general learning. In contrast to these typical findings, research over the past decade has shown that training on 'action video games' produces learning that transfers well beyond the training task. This has led to substantial interest among those interested in rehabilitation, for instance, after stroke or to treat amblyopia, or training for various precision-demanding jobs, for instance, endoscopic surgery or piloting unmanned aerial drones. Although the predominant focus of the field has been on outlining the breadth of possible action-game-related enhancements, recent work has concentrated on uncovering the mechanisms that underlie these changes, an important first step towards the goal of designing and using video games for more definite purposes. Game playing may not convey an immediate advantage on new tasks (increased performance from the very first trial), but rather the true effect of action video game playing may be to enhance the ability to learn new tasks. Such a mechanism may serve as a signature of training regimens that are likely to produce transfer of learning. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Omani Students' Views about Global Warming: Beliefs about Actions and Willingness to Act

Science.gov (United States)

Ambusaidi, Abdullah; Boyes, Edward; Stanisstreet, Martin; Taylor, Neil

2012-01-01

A 44-item questionnaire was designed to determine students' views about how useful various "specific" actions might be in helping to reduce global warming, their willingness to undertake these various actions and the extent to which these two might be related. The instrument was administered to students in Grades 6 to 12 (N = 1532) from…

Using Relational Histogram Features and Action Labelled Data to Learn Preconditions for Means-End Actions

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Fichtl, Severin; Kraft, Dirk; Krüger, Norbert

2015-01-01

The outcome of many complex manipulation ac- tions is contingent on the spatial relationships among pairs of objects, e.g. if an object is “inside” or “on top” of another. Recognising these spatial relationships requires a vision system which can extract appropriate features from the vision input...... that capture and represent the spatial relationships in an easily accessible way. We are interested in learning to predict the success of “means end” actions that manipulate two objects at once, from exploratory actions, and the observed sensorimo- tor contingencies. In this paper, we use relational histogram...... features and illustrate their effect on learning to predict a variety of “means end” actions’ outcomes. The results show that our vision features can make the learning problem significantly easier, leading to increased learning rates and higher maximum performance. This work is in particular important...

The Virtual Learning Commons: An Emerging Technology for Learning About Emerging Technologies

Science.gov (United States)

Pennington, D. D.; Del Rio, N.; Fierro, C.; Gandara, A.; Garcia, A.; Garza, J.; Giandoni, M.; Ochoa, O.; Padilla, E.; Salamah, S.

2013-12-01

The Virtual Learning Commons (VLC), funded by the National Science Foundation Office of Cyberinfrastructure CI-Team Program, is a combination of semantic, visualization, and social media tools that support knowledge sharing and innovation across research disciplines. The explosion of new scientific tools and techniques challenges the ability of researchers to be aware of emerging technologies that might benefit them. Even when aware, it can be difficult to understand enough about emerging technologies to become potential adopters or re-users. Often, emerging technologies have little documentation, especially about the context of their use. The VLC tackles this challenge by providing mechanisms for individuals and groups of researchers to collectively organize Web resources through social bookmarking, and engage each other around those collections in order to a) learn about potentially relevant technologies that are emerging; and b) get feedback from other researchers on innovative ideas and designs. Concurrently, developers of emerging technologies can learn about potential users and the issues they encounter, and they can analyze the impact of their tools on other projects. The VLC aims to support the 'fuzzy front end' of innovation, where novel ideas emerge and there is the greatest potential for impact on research design. It is during the fuzzy front end that conceptual collisions across disciplines and exposure to diverse perspectives provide opportunity for creative thinking that can lead to inventive outcomes. This presentation will discuss the innovation theories that have informed design of the VLC, and hypotheses about the flow of information in virtual settings that can enable the process of innovation. The presentation will include a brief demonstration of key capabilities within the VLC that enable learning about emerging technologies, including the technologies that are presented in this session.

Collective action and its interpreters

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

João Alfredo Costa de Campos Melo Júnior

2007-12-01

Full Text Available This article intention is to give the theorical and intellectual map production regarding collective actions. For such, we will analyze the propositions of five thinkers who have work for the better understanding of this question. We will discuss the contributions of the Chicago School, especially psic-sociology, and Herbert Blumer symbolic interactionism; the classical Marxists approaches on collective actions; Claus Offe and the Marxist point of view on the new models of collective actions; Charles Tilly and his social-historic perspective analysis about social movements; and finally Mancur Olson and collective action from a rational perspective. What we intend is to present comparatively the theorical and practical similarities and exclusions of these contemporary authors who contribute with collective actions today.

Blended Learning in Action: A Practical Guide toward Sustainable Change

Science.gov (United States)

Tucker, Catlin R.; Wycoff, Tiffany; Green, Jason T.

2017-01-01

Blended learning has the power to reinvent education, but transitioning to a blended model is challenging. Blended learning requires a fundamentally new approach to learning as well as a new skillset for both teachers and school leaders. Loaded with research, examples, and resources, "Blended Learning in Action" demonstrates the…

Transitioning to a More Sustainable Society: Unpacking the Role of the Learning-Action Nexus

Science.gov (United States)

Moyer, Joanne M.; Sinclair, A. John; Quinn, Lisa

2016-01-01

In recent years, action on sustainability has been highly influential around the globe and many now recognize the importance of individual and social learning for inspiring action and achieving sustainability outcomes. Transformative learning theory has been criticized, however, for insufficient development of the link between learning and action.…

Action observation and robotic agents: learning and anthropomorphism.

Science.gov (United States)

Press, Clare

2011-05-01

The 'action observation network' (AON), which is thought to translate observed actions into motor codes required for their execution, is biologically tuned: it responds more to observation of human, than non-human, movement. This biological specificity has been taken to support the hypothesis that the AON underlies various social functions, such as theory of mind and action understanding, and that, when it is active during observation of non-human agents like humanoid robots, it is a sign of ascription of human mental states to these agents. This review will outline evidence for biological tuning in the AON, examining the features which generate it, and concluding that there is evidence for tuning to both the form and kinematic profile of observed movements, and little evidence for tuning to belief about stimulus identity. It will propose that a likely reason for biological tuning is that human actions, relative to non-biological movements, have been observed more frequently while executing corresponding actions. If the associative hypothesis of the AON is correct, and the network indeed supports social functioning, sensorimotor experience with non-human agents may help us to predict, and therefore interpret, their movements. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Video Game Learning Dynamics: Actionable Measures of Multidimensional Learning Trajectories

Science.gov (United States)

Reese, Debbie Denise; Tabachnick, Barbara G.; Kosko, Robert E.

2015-01-01

Valid, accessible, reusable methods for instructional video game design and embedded assessment can provide actionable information enhancing individual and collective achievement. Cyberlearning through game-based, metaphor-enhanced learning objects (CyGaMEs) design and embedded assessment quantify player behavior to study knowledge discovery and…

The Coordination Dynamics of Observational Learning: Relative Motion Direction and Relative Phase as Informational Content Linking Action-Perception to Action-Production.

Science.gov (United States)

Buchanan, John J

2016-01-01

The primary goal of this chapter is to merge together the visual perception perspective of observational learning and the coordination dynamics theory of pattern formation in perception and action. Emphasis is placed on identifying movement features that constrain and inform action-perception and action-production processes. Two sources of visual information are examined, relative motion direction and relative phase. The visual perception perspective states that the topological features of relative motion between limbs and joints remains invariant across an actor's motion and therefore are available for pickup by an observer. Relative phase has been put forth as an informational variable that links perception to action within the coordination dynamics theory. A primary assumption of the coordination dynamics approach is that environmental information is meaningful only in terms of the behavior it modifies. Across a series of single limb tasks and bimanual tasks it is shown that the relative motion and relative phase between limbs and joints is picked up through visual processes and supports observational learning of motor skills. Moreover, internal estimations of motor skill proficiency and competency are linked to the informational content found in relative motion and relative phase. Thus, the chapter links action to perception and vice versa and also links cognitive evaluations to the coordination dynamics that support action-perception and action-production processes.

Children show heightened knew-it-all-along errors when learning new facts about kinds: Evidence for the power of kind representations in children's thinking.

Science.gov (United States)

Sutherland, Shelbie L; Cimpian, Andrei

2015-08-01

Several proposals in the literature on conceptual development converge on the claim that information about kinds of things in the world has a privileged status in children's cognition, insofar as it is acquired, manipulated, and stored with surprising ease. Our goal in the present studies (N = 440) was to test a prediction of this claim. Specifically, if the early cognitive system privileges kind (or generic) information in the proposed ways, then learning new facts about kinds should be so seamless that it is often accompanied by an impression that these facts were known all along. To test this prediction, we presented 4- to 7-year-old children with novel kind-wide and individual-specific facts, and we then asked children whether they had prior knowledge of these facts. As predicted, children were under the impression that they had known the kind-wide facts more often than the individual-specific facts, even though in reality they had just learned both (Experiments 1, 2, 3, and 5). Importantly, learning facts about (nongeneric) plural sets of individuals was not similarly accompanied by heightened knew-it-all-along errors (Experiment 4), highlighting the privileged status of kind information per se. Finally, we found that young children were able to correctly recognize their previous ignorance of newly learned generic facts when this ignorance was made salient before the learning event (Experiment 6), suggesting that children's frequent knew-it-all-along impressions about such facts truly stem from metacognitive difficulties rather than being a methodological artifact. In sum, these 6 studies indicate that learning information about kinds is accompanied by heightened knew-it-all-along errors. More broadly, this evidence supports the view that early cognition privileges kind representations. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

Learning about the Nature of Science Using Algae

Science.gov (United States)

Edelmann, Hans G.; Martius, Thilo; Hahn, Achim; Schlüter, Kirsten; Nessler, Stefan H.

2016-01-01

Enquiry learning and teaching about the nature of science (NoS) is a key element of science education. We have designed an experimental setting for students aged 12-14 years to exercise enquiry-learning skills and to introduce students to the NoS aspects of creativity and imagination. It also illustrates the impact of carbon dioxide on the growth…

Learning about Osteogenesis Imperfecta

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Skip to main content Learning About Osteogenesis Imperfecta Enter Search Term(s): Español Research Funding An Overview Bioinformatics Current Grants Education and Training Funding Extramural Research ...

Learning about Holoprosencephaly (HPE)

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Skip to main content Learning About Holoprosencephaly Enter Search Term(s): Español Research Funding An Overview Bioinformatics Current Grants Education and Training Funding Extramural Research News ...

Learning about Retinitis Pigmentosa

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Skip to main content Learning about Retinitis Pigmentosa Enter Search Term(s): Español Research Funding An Overview Bioinformatics Current Grants Education and Training Funding Extramural Research ...

Learning about Phenylketonuria (PKU)

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Skip to main content Learning About Phenylketonuria Enter Search Term(s): Español Research Funding An Overview Bioinformatics Current Grants Education and Training Funding Extramural Research News ...

Learning about Parkinson's Disease

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Skip to main content Learning About Parkinson's Disease Enter Search Term(s): Español Research Funding An Overview Bioinformatics Current Grants Education and Training Funding Extramural Research ...

Learning about Hereditary Hemochromatosis

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Learning about Klinefelter Syndrome

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Skip to main content Learning About Klinefelter Syndrome Enter Search Term(s): Español Research Funding An Overview Bioinformatics Current Grants Education and Training Funding Extramural Research ...

Learning about Huntington's Disease

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Skip to main content Learning About Huntington's Disease Enter Search Term(s): Español Research Funding An Overview Bioinformatics Current Grants Education and Training Funding Extramural Research ...

Learning Science, Learning about Science, Doing Science: Different Goals Demand Different Learning Methods

Science.gov (United States)

Hodson, Derek

2014-01-01

This opinion piece paper urges teachers and teacher educators to draw careful distinctions among four basic learning goals: learning science, learning about science, doing science and learning to address socio-scientific issues. In elaboration, the author urges that careful attention is paid to the selection of teaching/learning methods that…

Learning from Toyota: How Action Learning Can Foster Competitive Advantage in New Product Development (NPD)

Science.gov (United States)

Fuchs, Barbara

2007-01-01

New product development and commercialization are essential to entrepreneurial growth and international competitiveness. Excellence in this area is strongly supported by individual and organizational learning efforts. By analyzing how Japanese car manufacturer Toyota organizes learning, this paper evaluates the potential of action learning to…

Multi-task learning with group information for human action recognition

Science.gov (United States)

Qian, Li; Wu, Song; Pu, Nan; Xu, Shulin; Xiao, Guoqiang

2018-04-01

Human action recognition is an important and challenging task in computer vision research, due to the variations in human motion performance, interpersonal differences and recording settings. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-task learning framework with group information (MTL-GI) for accurate and efficient human action recognition. Specifically, we firstly obtain group information through calculating the mutual information according to the latent relationship between Gaussian components and action categories, and clustering similar action categories into the same group by affinity propagation clustering. Additionally, in order to explore the relationships of related tasks, we incorporate group information into multi-task learning. Experimental results evaluated on two popular benchmarks (UCF50 and HMDB51 datasets) demonstrate the superiority of our proposed MTL-GI framework.

Learning a Mid-Level Representation for Multiview Action Recognition

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Cuiwei Liu

2018-01-01

Full Text Available Recognizing human actions in videos is an active topic with broad commercial potentials. Most of the existing action recognition methods are supposed to have the same camera view during both training and testing. And thus performances of these single-view approaches may be severely influenced by the camera movement and variation of viewpoints. In this paper, we address the above problem by utilizing videos simultaneously recorded from multiple views. To this end, we propose a learning framework based on multitask random forest to exploit a discriminative mid-level representation for videos from multiple cameras. In the first step, subvolumes of continuous human-centered figures are extracted from original videos. In the next step, spatiotemporal cuboids sampled from these subvolumes are characterized by multiple low-level descriptors. Then a set of multitask random forests are built upon multiview cuboids sampled at adjacent positions and construct an integrated mid-level representation for multiview subvolumes of one action. Finally, a random forest classifier is employed to predict the action category in terms of the learned representation. Experiments conducted on the multiview IXMAS action dataset illustrate that the proposed method can effectively recognize human actions depicted in multiview videos.

Dissociable brain systems mediate vicarious learning of stimulus-response and action-outcome contingencies.

Science.gov (United States)

Liljeholm, Mimi; Molloy, Ciara J; O'Doherty, John P

2012-07-18

Two distinct strategies have been suggested to support action selection in humans and other animals on the basis of experiential learning: a goal-directed strategy that generates decisions based on the value and causal antecedents of action outcomes, and a habitual strategy that relies on the automatic elicitation of actions by environmental stimuli. In the present study, we investigated whether a similar dichotomy exists for actions that are acquired vicariously, through observation of other individuals rather than through direct experience, and assessed whether these strategies are mediated by distinct brain regions. We scanned participants with functional magnetic resonance imaging while they performed an observational learning task designed to encourage either goal-directed encoding of the consequences of observed actions, or a mapping of observed actions to conditional discriminative cues. Activity in different parts of the action observation network discriminated between the two conditions during observational learning and correlated with the degree of insensitivity to outcome devaluation in subsequent performance. Our findings suggest that, in striking parallel to experiential learning, neural systems mediating the observational acquisition of actions may be dissociated into distinct components: a goal-directed, outcome-sensitive component and a less flexible stimulus-response component.

Safe Exploration of State and Action Spaces in Reinforcement Learning

OpenAIRE

Garcia, Javier; Fernandez, Fernando

2014-01-01

In this paper, we consider the important problem of safe exploration in reinforcement learning. While reinforcement learning is well-suited to domains with complex transition dynamics and high-dimensional state-action spaces, an additional challenge is posed by the need for safe and efficient exploration. Traditional exploration techniques are not particularly useful for solving dangerous tasks, where the trial and error process may lead to the selection of actions whose execution in some sta...

Action Search: Learning to Search for Human Activities in Untrimmed Videos

KAUST Repository

Alwassel, Humam; Heilbron, Fabian Caba; Ghanem, Bernard

2017-01-01

Traditional approaches for action detection use trimmed data to learn sophisticated action detector models. Although these methods have achieved great success at detecting human actions, we argue that huge information is discarded when ignoring

Cultivating collaborative improvement: an action learning approach

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Middel, H.G.A.; McNichols, Timothy

2006-01-01

The process of implementing collaborative initiatives across disparate members of supply networks is fraught with difficulties. One approach designed to tackle the difficulties of organisational change and interorganisational improvement in practice is 'action learning'. This paper examines the

Developing Citizen Leaders through Action Learning

Science.gov (United States)

Foley, Dolores

2006-01-01

This is an account of a programmer utilizing the application of action learning to the development of capacities of citizens. The Citizen Leadership for Democratic Governance is designed to equip citizens with the skills to get involved and handle the difficult tasks of governance in their communities in South Africa. After a history of apartheid…

Integrating transformative learning and action learning approaches to enhance ethical leadership for supervisors in the hotel business

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Boonyuen Saranya

2016-01-01

Full Text Available Ethical leadership is now increasingly focused in leadership development. The main purpose of this study is to explore two methods of adult learning, action learning and transformative learning, and to use the methods to enhance ethical leadership. Building ethical leadership requires an approach that focuses on personal values, beliefs, or frames of references, which is transformative learning. Transformative learning requires a series of meetings to conduct critical discourse and to follow up the learning of learners. By organizing such action learning, human resource developers can optimize their time and effort more effectively. The authors have created a comprehensive model to integrate the two learning approaches in a general way that focuses not only on ethical leadership, but also on all kinds of behavioral transformation in the workplace in the hotel business or even other types of business.

Learning about Turner Syndrome

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Skip to main content Learning About Turner Syndrome Enter Search Term(s): Español Research Funding An Overview Bioinformatics Current Grants Education and Training Funding Extramural Research News Features Funding Divisions Funding ...

Learning about Breast Cancer

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Skip to main content Learning About Breast Cancer Enter Search Term(s): Español Research Funding An Overview Bioinformatics Current Grants Education and Training Funding Extramural Research News Features Funding Divisions Funding ...

Doctoral Student Learning Patterns: Learning about Active Knowledge Creation or Passive Production

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Vekkaila, Jenna; Pyhältö, Kirsi

2016-01-01

Doctoral studies are about learning to create new knowledge and to become a researcher. Yet surprisingly little is known about the individual learning patterns of doctoral students. The study aims to explore learning patterns among natural science doctoral students. The participants included 19 doctoral students from a top-level natural science…

How Infants and Young Children Learn About Food: A Systematic Review

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Manon Mura Paroche

2017-07-01

Full Text Available Early childhood is a critical time for establishing food preferences and dietary habits. In order for appropriate advice to be available to parents and healthcare professionals it is essential for researchers to understand the ways in which children learn about foods. This review summarizes the literature relating to the role played by known developmental learning processes in the establishment of early eating behavior, food preferences and general knowledge about food, and identifies gaps in our knowledge that remain to be explored. A systematic literature search identified 48 papers exploring how young children learn about food from the start of complementary feeding to 36 months of age. The majority of the papers focus on evaluative components of children's learning about food, such as their food preferences, liking and acceptance. A smaller number of papers focus on other aspects of what and how children learn about food, such as a food's origins or appropriate eating contexts. The review identified papers relating to four developmental learning processes: (1 Familiarization to a food through repeated exposure to its taste, texture or appearance. This was found to be an effective technique for learning about foods, especially for children at the younger end of our age range. (2 Observational learning of food choice. Imitation of others' eating behavior was also found to play an important role in the first years of life. (3 Associative learning through flavor-nutrient and flavor-flavor learning (FFL. Although the subject of much investigation, conditioning techniques were not found to play a major role in shaping the food preferences of infants in the post-weaning and toddler periods. (4 Categorization of foods. The direct effects of the ability to categorize foods have been little studied in this age group. However, the literature suggests that what infants are willing to consume depends on their ability to recognize items on their plate as

Learning Environments Designed According to Learning Styles and Its Effects on Mathematics Achievement

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Özerem, Aysen; Akkoyunlu, Buket

2015-01-01

Problem Statement: While designing a learning environment it is vital to think about learner characteristics (learning styles, approaches, motivation, interests… etc.) in order to promote effective learning. The learning environment and learning process should be designed not to enable students to learn in the same manner and at the same level,…

Patterns in Elementary School Students' Strategic Actions in Varying Learning Situations

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Malmberg, Jonna; Järvenoja, Hanna; Järvelä, Sanna

2013-01-01

This study uses log file traces to examine differences between high-and low-achieving students' strategic actions in varying learning situations. In addition, this study illustrates, in detail, what strategic and self-regulated learning constitutes in practice. The study investigates the learning patterns that emerge in learning situations…

Data Wise in Action: Stories of Schools Using Data to Improve Teaching and Learning

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Boudett, Kathryn Parker, Ed.; Steele, Jennifer L., Ed.

2007-01-01

What does it look like when a school uses data wisely? "Data Wise in Action", a new companion and sequel to the bestselling "Data Wise", tells the stories of eight very different schools following the Data Wise process of using assessment results to improve teaching and learning. "Data Wise in Action" highlights the…

Transforming Language Ideologies through Action Research: A Case Study of Bilingual Science Learning

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Yang, Eunah

This qualitative case study explored a third grade bilingual teacher's transformative language ideologies through participating in a collaborative action research project. By merging language ideologies theory, Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), and action research, I was able to identify the analytic focus of this study. I analyzed how one teacher and I, the researcher, collaboratively reflected on classroom language practices during the video analysis meetings and focus groups. Further, I analyzed twelve videos that we coded together to see the changes in the teacher's language practices over time. My unit of analysis was the discourse practice mediated by additive language ideologies. Throughout the collaborative action research process, we both critically reflected on the classroom language use. We also developed a critical consciousness about the participatory shifts and learning of focal English Learner (EL) students. Finally, the teacher made changes to her classroom language practices. The results of this study will contribute to the literacy education research field for theoretical, methodological, and practical insights. The integration of language ideologies, CHAT, and action research can help educational practitioners, researchers, and policy makers understand the importance of transforming teachers' language ideologies in designing additive learning contexts for ELs. From a methodological perspective, the transformative language ideologies through researcher and teacher collaborated video analysis process provide a unique contribution to the language ideologies in education literature, with analytic triangulation. As a practical implication, this study suggests action research can be one of the teacher education tools to help the teachers transform language ideologies for EL education.

Practising What We Teach: Vocational Teachers Learn to Research through Applying Action Learning Techniques

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Lasky, Barbara; Tempone, Irene

2004-01-01

Action learning techniques are well suited to the teaching of organisation behaviour students because of their flexibility, inclusiveness, openness, and respect for individuals. They are no less useful as a tool for change for vocational teachers, learning, of necessity, to become researchers. Whereas traditional universities have always had a…

Analysis of a physics teacher's pedagogical `micro-actions' that support 17-year-olds' learning of free body diagrams via a modelling approach

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Tay, Su Lynn; Yeo, Jennifer

2018-01-01

Great teaching is characterised by the specific actions a teacher takes in the classroom to bring about learning. In the context of model-based teaching (MBT), teachers' difficulty in working with students' models that are not scientifically consistent is troubling. To address this problem, the aim of this study is to identify the pedagogical micro-actions to support the development of scientific models and modelling skills during the evaluation and modification stages of MBT. Taking the perspective of pedagogical content knowing (PCKg), it identifies these micro-actions as an in-situ, dynamic transformation of knowledges of content, pedagogy, student and environment context. Through a case study approach, a lesson conducted by an experienced high-school physics teacher was examined. Audio and video recordings of the lesson contributed to the data sources. Taking a grounded approach in the analysis, eight pedagogical micro-actions enacted by the teacher were identified, namely 'clarification', 'evaluation', 'explanation', 'modification', 'exploration', 'referencing conventions', 'focusing' and 'meta-representing'. These micro-actions support students' learning related to the conceptual, cognitive, discursive and epistemological aspects of modelling. From the micro-actions, we identify the aspects of knowledges of PCKg that teachers need in order to competently select and enact these micro-actions. The in-situ and dynamic transformation of these knowledges implies that professional development should also be situated in the context in which these micro-actions are meaningful.

Organizational Support for Action Learning in South Korean Organizations

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Cho, Yonjoo; Egan, Toby

2013-01-01

The purpose of this study was (1) to examine the impact of organizational support on employee learning and performance and (2) to elaborate on the context of organizational support for action learning in South Korean organizations. For this inquiry, two central questions were posed: What are employee reactions to organizational support for action…

Learning about “wicked” problems in the Global South. Creating a film-based learning environment with “Visual Problem Appraisal”

OpenAIRE

Loes Witteveen; Rico Lie

2012-01-01

The current complexity of sustainable development in the Global South calls for the design of learning strategies that can deal with this complexity. One such innovative learning strategy, called Visual Problem Appraisal (VPA), is highlighted in this article. The strategy is termed visual as it creates a learning environment that is film-based. VPA enhances the analysis of complex issues, and facilitates stakeholder dialogue and action planning. The strategy is used in workshops dealing with ...

Action adaptation during natural unfolding social scenes influences action recognition and inferences made about actor beliefs.

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Keefe, Bruce D; Wincenciak, Joanna; Jellema, Tjeerd; Ward, James W; Barraclough, Nick E

2016-07-01

When observing another individual's actions, we can both recognize their actions and infer their beliefs concerning the physical and social environment. The extent to which visual adaptation influences action recognition and conceptually later stages of processing involved in deriving the belief state of the actor remains unknown. To explore this we used virtual reality (life-size photorealistic actors presented in stereoscopic three dimensions) to see how visual adaptation influences the perception of individuals in naturally unfolding social scenes at increasingly higher levels of action understanding. We presented scenes in which one actor picked up boxes (of varying number and weight), after which a second actor picked up a single box. Adaptation to the first actor's behavior systematically changed perception of the second actor. Aftereffects increased with the duration of the first actor's behavior, declined exponentially over time, and were independent of view direction. Inferences about the second actor's expectation of box weight were also distorted by adaptation to the first actor. Distortions in action recognition and actor expectations did not, however, extend across different actions, indicating that adaptation is not acting at an action-independent abstract level but rather at an action-dependent level. We conclude that although adaptation influences more complex inferences about belief states of individuals, this is likely to be a result of adaptation at an earlier action recognition stage rather than adaptation operating at a higher, more abstract level in mentalizing or simulation systems.

ADAPTIVE E-LEARNING AND ITS EVALUATION

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KOSTOLÁNYOVÁ, Katerina

2012-12-01

Full Text Available This paper introduces a complex plan for a complete system of individualized electronic instruction. The core of the system is a computer program to control teaching, the so called “virtual teacher”. The virtual teacher automatically adapts to individual student’s characteristics and their learning style. It adapts to static as well as to dynamic characteristics of the student. To manage all this it needs a database of various styles and forms of teaching as well as a sufficient amount of information about the learning style, type of memory and other characteristics of the student. The information about these characteristics, the structure of data storage and its use by the virtual teacher are also part of this paper. We also outline a methodology of adaptive study materials. We define basic rules and forms to create adaptive study materials. This adaptive e-learning system was pilot tested in learning of more than 50 students. These students filled in a learning style questionnaire at the beginning of the study and they had the option to fill in an adaptive evaluation questionnaire at the end of the study. Results of these questionnaires were analyzed. Several conclusions were concluded from this analysis to alter the methodology of adaptive study materials.

Collaborative Action Research on Technology Integration for Science Learning

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Wang, Chien-hsing; Ke, Yi-Ting; Wu, Jin-Tong; Hsu, Wen-Hua

2012-01-01

This paper briefly reports the outcomes of an action research inquiry on the use of blogs, MS PowerPoint [PPT], and the Internet as learning tools with a science class of sixth graders for project-based learning. Multiple sources of data were essential to triangulate the key findings articulated in this paper. Corresponding to previous studies,…

Sensitivity of the action observation network to physical and observational learning.

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Cross, Emily S; Kraemer, David J M; Hamilton, Antonia F de C; Kelley, William M; Grafton, Scott T

2009-02-01

Human motor skills can be acquired by observation without the benefit of immediate physical practice. The current study tested if physical rehearsal and observational learning share common neural substrates within an action observation network (AON) including premotor and inferior parietal regions, that is, areas activated both for execution and observation of similar actions. Participants trained for 5 days on dance sequences set to music videos. Each day they physically rehearsed one set of dance sequences ("danced"), and passively watched a different set of sequences ("watched"). Functional magnetic resonance imaging was obtained prior to and immediately following the 5 days of training. After training, a subset of the AON showed a degree of common activity for observational and physical learning. Activity in these premotor and parietal regions was sustained during observation of sequences that were danced or watched, but declined for unfamiliar sequences relative to the pretraining scan session. These imaging data demonstrate the emergence of action resonance processes in the human brain based on observational learning without physical practice and identify commonalities in the neural substrates for physical and observational learning.

Making Sense of Undergraduate Students' Reflections as They Learn through Writing an Action Research Proposal

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Maoto, S.

2011-01-01

This article explores learning opportunities offered by students' written reflections as they learn through writing an action research proposal. From tapping into students' reported struggles, I analysed data using three stages of qualitative data analysis: data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing (Miles and Huberman 1994). It emerged…

Representation Learning of Logic Words by an RNN: From Word Sequences to Robot Actions

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Tatsuro Yamada

2017-12-01

Full Text Available An important characteristic of human language is compositionality. We can efficiently express a wide variety of real-world situations, events, and behaviors by compositionally constructing the meaning of a complex expression from a finite number of elements. Previous studies have analyzed how machine-learning models, particularly neural networks, can learn from experience to represent compositional relationships between language and robot actions with the aim of understanding the symbol grounding structure and achieving intelligent communicative agents. Such studies have mainly dealt with the words (nouns, adjectives, and verbs that directly refer to real-world matters. In addition to these words, the current study deals with logic words, such as “not,” “and,” and “or” simultaneously. These words are not directly referring to the real world, but are logical operators that contribute to the construction of meaning in sentences. In human–robot communication, these words may be used often. The current study builds a recurrent neural network model with long short-term memory units and trains it to learn to translate sentences including logic words into robot actions. We investigate what kind of compositional representations, which mediate sentences and robot actions, emerge as the network's internal states via the learning process. Analysis after learning shows that referential words are merged with visual information and the robot's own current state, and the logical words are represented by the model in accordance with their functions as logical operators. Words such as “true,” “false,” and “not” work as non-linear transformations to encode orthogonal phrases into the same area in a memory cell state space. The word “and,” which required a robot to lift up both its hands, worked as if it was a universal quantifier. The word “or,” which required action generation that looked apparently random, was represented as an

Systems Thinking, Lean Production and Action Learning

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Seddon, John; Caulkin, Simon

2007-01-01

Systems thinking underpins "lean" management and is best understood through action-learning as the ideas are counter-intuitive. The Toyota Production System is just that--a system; the failure to appreciate that starting-place and the advocacy of "tools" leads many to fail to grasp what is, without doubt, a significant…

Circles of Tobacco Wisdom: learning about traditional and commercial tobacco with Native elders.

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Nadeau, Melanie; Blake, Norby; Poupart, John; Rhodes, Kristine; Forster, Jean L

2012-11-01

Circles of Tobacco Wisdom (CTW) was an elder-led, community-based project that aimed to enhance tobacco control in the American Indian community. Its goal was to provide elders with the knowledge, opportunities, and support to enable them to assume leadership of a tobacco control movement that was grounded in the ceremonial traditions of tobacco use. The purpose of this study was to test the effects of the pilot intervention on participants. The design of this pilot study intervention was a single group, pre-post comparison, with a pre-post survey, monthly check-ins, and a post-1-year focus group. Twelve elders were included in the pre- and post-analyses. All twelve elders were women who self-identified as American Indian (mean age = 64). The CTW elders participated in monthly talking circles, quarterly learning sessions, and a post-1-year focus group, and took part in other learning, support, and community action opportunities. Data were collected from December 2008 through November 2009 and analyzed throughout the process. American Indian Elders' tobacco-related knowledge, perceptions, beliefs, and behaviors were measured while participating in the CTW project. Knowledge, perceptions, beliefs, and behavior changes were seen with cigarette smoking, secondhand smoke, and ceremonial tobacco use and risk perception. After 6 months, the number of people the elders had talked with about tobacco increased, elders were more likely to have a discussion on tobacco at a community event, and their comfort level talking about commercial and traditional tobacco also increased. A number of themes also were identified in the focus group: feeling more comfortable talking about tobacco issues, learning a lot about traditional and commercial tobacco, and realizing the dangers of smoking. Elders increased their knowledge about commercial and traditional tobacco and changed related attitudes as a result of CTW. Further, American Indian Elders perceived that CTW was effective

Diverse Strategies for Diverse Learners: Action Learning in a Hybrid Mode

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Esmarie Strydom

2007-08-01

Full Text Available This paper describes an action research study during which a flexible or hybrid approach to delivering an Information and Communication Technology competency course is implemented in the preparation of student teachers. The course incorporates Web-based course-content delivery, face-to-face classroom meetings to satisfy the need for human interaction, a variety of assessment methods, as well as recognition of prior learning. The objectives are to accommodate learning diversity, make learning focused and achievable for each learner, allow for intervention if the learning outcomes are not met, and focus on and guide the learning process, i.e. teach learners how to learn. This paper reports on the perspectives and experiences of two groups of first year learners, namely student teachers who attended a hybrid ICT course and first year learners who attended an e-learning ICT course. It was found that the success rate of the hybrid mode ICT course was significantly higher than that of the similar e-learning ICT course. The hybrid mode ICT course also enabled the learners to become self-directed to a higher degree.

Action learning in virtual higher education: applying leadership theory.

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Curtin, Joseph

2016-05-03

This paper reports the historical foundation of Northeastern University's course, LDR 6100: Developing Your Leadership Capability, a partial literature review of action learning (AL) and virtual action learning (VAL), a course methodology of LDR 6100 requiring students to apply leadership perspectives using VAL as instructed by the author, questionnaire and survey results of students who evaluated the effectiveness of their application of leadership theories using VAL and insights believed to have been gained by the author administering VAL. Findings indicate most students thought applying leadership perspectives using AL was better than considering leadership perspectives not using AL. In addition as implemented in LDR 6100, more students evaluated VAL positively than did those who assessed VAL negatively.

Students’ Perception about Learning Assessment in Higher Education

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Holmes Rodríguez-Espinosa

2016-09-01

Full Text Available This research aimed to know university students’ perception about learning assessment carried out by their teachers, their level of objectivity and skill, among other aspects. The study was conducted in Medellin, Colombia, between January and July 2015. A final sample size of 400 university students from public and private institutions, randomly selected, was used. The data analysis was carried out by using multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA with orthogonal-type canonical contrast, factor analysis, and one-dimensional type frequency analysis. It was found that university students have a good perception about the assessment practices of their teachers. Likewise, highly significant differences between men and women in their perception of learning assessment were identified. Students consider that learning assessment practices have contributed to improve their learning and are in accordance with the learning objectives. Nevertheless, most students have felt that their teachers are not objective in evaluation and they often use questions that confuse students, and very theoretical questions without application to practice. A lack of non-traditional assessment practices, such as peer assessment, self-assessment as well as virtual platforms use for assessments, was found. These findings imply the need to improve teacher training on assessment skills to allow them to plan evaluation as a strategy to improve learning, involving students in an active way.

Mentoring, coaching and action learning: interventions in a national clinical leadership development programme.

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McNamara, Martin S; Fealy, Gerard M; Casey, Mary; O'Connor, Tom; Patton, Declan; Doyle, Louise; Quinlan, Christina

2014-09-01

To evaluate mentoring, coaching and action learning interventions used to develop nurses' and midwives' clinical leadership competencies and to describe the programme participants' experiences of the interventions. Mentoring, coaching and action learning are effective interventions in clinical leadership development and were used in a new national clinical leadership development programme, introduced in Ireland in 2011. An evaluation of the programme focused on how participants experienced the interventions. A qualitative design, using multiple data sources and multiple data collection methods. Methods used to generate data on participant experiences of individual interventions included focus groups, individual interviews and nonparticipant observation. Seventy participants, including 50 programme participants and those providing the interventions, contributed to the data collection. Mentoring, coaching and action learning were positively experienced by participants and contributed to the development of clinical leadership competencies, as attested to by the programme participants and intervention facilitators. The use of interventions that are action-oriented and focused on service development, such as mentoring, coaching and action learning, should be supported in clinical leadership development programmes. Being quite different to short attendance courses, these interventions require longer-term commitment on the part of both individuals and their organisations. In using mentoring, coaching and action learning interventions, the focus should be on each participant's current role and everyday practice and on helping the participant to develop and demonstrate clinical leadership skills in these contexts. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Intrinsically motivated action-outcome learning and goal-based action recall: a system-level bio-constrained computational model.

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Baldassarre, Gianluca; Mannella, Francesco; Fiore, Vincenzo G; Redgrave, Peter; Gurney, Kevin; Mirolli, Marco

2013-05-01

Reinforcement (trial-and-error) learning in animals is driven by a multitude of processes. Most animals have evolved several sophisticated systems of 'extrinsic motivations' (EMs) that guide them to acquire behaviours allowing them to maintain their bodies, defend against threat, and reproduce. Animals have also evolved various systems of 'intrinsic motivations' (IMs) that allow them to acquire actions in the absence of extrinsic rewards. These actions are used later to pursue such rewards when they become available. Intrinsic motivations have been studied in Psychology for many decades and their biological substrates are now being elucidated by neuroscientists. In the last two decades, investigators in computational modelling, robotics and machine learning have proposed various mechanisms that capture certain aspects of IMs. However, we still lack models of IMs that attempt to integrate all key aspects of intrinsically motivated learning and behaviour while taking into account the relevant neurobiological constraints. This paper proposes a bio-constrained system-level model that contributes a major step towards this integration. The model focusses on three processes related to IMs and on the neural mechanisms underlying them: (a) the acquisition of action-outcome associations (internal models of the agent-environment interaction) driven by phasic dopamine signals caused by sudden, unexpected changes in the environment; (b) the transient focussing of visual gaze and actions on salient portions of the environment; (c) the subsequent recall of actions to pursue extrinsic rewards based on goal-directed reactivation of the representations of their outcomes. The tests of the model, including a series of selective lesions, show how the focussing processes lead to a faster learning of action-outcome associations, and how these associations can be recruited for accomplishing goal-directed behaviours. The model, together with the background knowledge reviewed in the paper

Exploring Constructivist Social Learning Practices in Aiding Russian-Speaking Teachers to Learn Estonian: An Action Research Approach

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Kiilo, Tatjana; Kutsar, Dagmar

2012-01-01

Based on appreciative inquiry and threshold concepts from an intercultural learning perspective, the article makes insights into the constructivist social learning practice of Estonian language learning amongst Russian-speaking teachers in Estonia. The application of educational action research methodology, more specifically that of Bridget…

Action learning as a form of management control : The case of a Dutch elevator company

NARCIS (Netherlands)

De Loo, I.G.M.

2005-01-01

Action learning has been proposed as both a problem-solving and organizational learning approach when organizations are faced with complex, unfamiliar problems for which no clear-cut solutions exist. Certainly when action learning participants are not intrinsically motivated to tackle these problems

Student approaches for learning in medicine: what does it tell us about the informal curriculum?

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Zhang, Jianzhen; Peterson, Raymond F; Ozolins, Ieva Z

2011-10-21

It has long been acknowledged that medical students frequently focus their learning on that which will enable them to pass examinations, and that they use a range of study approaches and resources in preparing for their examinations. A recent qualitative study identified that in addition to the formal curriculum, students are using a range of resources and study strategies which could be attributed to the informal curriculum. What is not clearly established is the extent to which these informal learning resources and strategies are utilized by medical students. The aim of this study was to establish the extent to which students in a graduate-entry medical program use various learning approaches to assist their learning and preparation for examinations, apart from those resources offered as part of the formal curriculum. A validated survey instrument was administered to 522 medical students. Factor analysis and internal consistence, descriptive analysis and comparisons with demographic variables were completed. The factor analysis identified eight scales with acceptable levels of internal consistency with an alpha coefficient between 0.72 and 0.96. Nearly 80% of the students reported that they were overwhelmed by the amount of work that was perceived necessary to complete the formal curriculum, with 74.3% believing that the informal learning approaches helped them pass the examinations. 61.3% believed that they prepared them to be good doctors. A variety of informal learning activities utilized by students included using past student notes (85.8%) and PBL tutor guides (62.7%), and being part of self-organised study groups (62.6%), and peer-led tutorials (60.2%). Almost all students accessed the formal school resources for at least 10% of their study time. Students in the first year of the program were more likely to rely on the formal curriculum resources compared to those of Year 2 (p = 0.008). Curriculum planners should examine the level of use of informal

Emerging Assumptions About Organization Design, Knowledge And Action

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Alan Meyer

2013-12-01

Full Text Available Participants in the Organizational Design Community’s 2013 Annual Conference faced the challenge of “making organization design knowledge actionable.”  This essay summarizes the opinions and insights participants shared during the conference.  I reflect on these ideas, connect them to recent scholarly thinking about organization design, and conclude that seeking to make design knowledge actionable is nudging the community away from an assumption set based upon linearity and equilibrium, and toward a new set of assumptions based on emergence, self-organization, and non-linearity.

Nursing students at a university - a study about learning style preferences.

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Hallin, Karin

2014-12-01

In most adult education, teachers use methods that assume all students learn in the same way. But knowledge of students' learning style preferences highlights the importance of adequate teaching and learning adaptation. The aim of the study was to describe and compare final year nursing students' learning style preferences in two campuses during three semesters. A further aim was to identify differences between learning style preferences and personal characteristics. A descriptive cross-sectional study using the Productivity Environmental Preference Survey (PEPS) questionnaire was conducted at a Swedish rural university. Three semester groups with 263 nursing students participated in 2012-2013. The majority of the students were 'flexible' in their learning style preferences and had none or few strong preferences. Students with strong preferences preferred high structure (75%) and an authority figure present (40%). About a third were highly auditory, tactile and/or kinesthetic while 8% were highly visual. Few significant differences were revealed between the groups of campuses and the groups of semesters or between learning style preferences and upper secondary school and care experience. There were no significant differences between learning style preferences and age and assistant nurse graduation. More women than men were highly motivated, auditory, tactile and kinesthetic and preferred structure and mobility. The PEPS questionnaire provides nursing students with self-awareness regarding their strengths and shortcomings in learning and teachers with a valuable and practical basis for their selection of adapted individual and group teaching methods. The findings suggest the need for wide variation and interactive teaching approaches, conscious didactic actions between cooperating teachers and conscious learning strategies for nursing students. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Task-Based Language Learning and Teaching: An Action-Research Study

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Calvert, Megan; Sheen, Younghee

2015-01-01

The creation, implementation, and evaluation of language learning tasks remain a challenge for many teachers, especially those with limited experience with using tasks in their teaching. This action-research study reports on one teacher's experience of developing, implementing, critically reflecting on, and modifying a language learning task…

Adults learn through doing

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Nena Mijoč

2000-12-01

Full Text Available The present paper is about learning through doing. Not only adults but children learn through doing as well. However it is very important how we interpret, how we make sense from our experiences. J. Dewey, pragmatist and one of the founders of theory of experiential learning believes that experience is in the centre of learning. He talks about desire, on the basis of impulse, which is not reachable at the same moment. The cycle is followed by reflection, comparison with previous knowledge and experiences, judgement and planning for action. The latter brings us to goals which need to be set. However not every action demands pre-planned operational goals. D. Schon reminds us that our civilisation believes in »technical rationality« leading us to see professional activity as instrumental problem solving made rigorous by the application of scientific theory and technique. The plan of action is important, but it must be flexible. Openness for new knowledge means letting us have new experiences, which brings new ideas and new interpretations of reality which are not always congruent with what we already know. This brings cognitive conflict, the basis for reflective learning. The latter does not mean only self-directed learning or passive receiving of scientific knowledge, on the contrary it demands new forms of learning and education. Formats which will foster never ending dialog between new scientific knowledge and experiences and subjective knowledge of people in their living surroundings. Education, which does not paralyse, but encourages searching for knowledge and solutions for the problems of people.

Lessons Learned about Inclusion While Starting a New College

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Jones, Michelle D.

2018-01-01

Starting a college from scratch presents a unique opportunity to think about how to build an inclusive learning environment from the beginning by selecting people and strategies that do not carry the weight of the traditional academic model and its prejudices and assumptions about who belongs and who does not. This article documents the lessons…

Practice as source of learning and knowledge that comes from experience: what science and biology teachers say about it

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Luciana M. Lunardi Campos

2001-01-01

Full Text Available This paper is about the possible knowledge that Science and Biology teachers may acquire form their daily work. Fourth three teachers were considered in this research and all belong to the Public School of the city of Botucatu, S.P. All of them were unanimous in stressing the importance of their professional activity as a meaningful aspect. They learned more about themselves, their methods, their employed resources and their pupils through it. Three dimensions can be pointed out here: personal, professional and pedagogical and it can be named nine aspects of the knowledge from experience. An organized and active knowledge may be achieved by reckoning the teacher as the main producer of knowledge about his occupation and assuming as well how important his practice and knowledge from experience are.

Urban Myths about Learning and Education

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De Bruyckere, Pedro; Kirschner, Paul A.; Hulshof, Casper

2016-01-01

In this book, the most common popular myths relating to learning and education are discussed with respect to whether there is any truth in the myth and what good educational and psychological research has to say about them. Examples of such myths range from: learning styles to neuromyths such as

Integrating transformative learning and action learning approaches to enhance ethical leadership for supervisors in the hotel business

OpenAIRE

Boonyuen Saranya; Charungkaittikul Suwithida; Ratana-ubol Archanya

2016-01-01

Ethical leadership is now increasingly focused in leadership development. The main purpose of this study is to explore two methods of adult learning, action learning and transformative learning, and to use the methods to enhance ethical leadership. Building ethical leadership requires an approach that focuses on personal values, beliefs, or frames of references, which is transformative learning. Transformative learning requires a series of meetings to conduct critical discourse and to follow ...

"Just Deal with It": Neoliberalism in Dyslexic Students' Talk about Dyslexia and Learning at University

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Cameron, Harriet; Billington, Tom

2017-01-01

There are different ways of theorising dyslexia and different ways of constructing meanings around dyslexia in different learning contexts. This paper considers the role of neoliberalist ideology in shaping conversations about dyslexia and "fairness" during two focus group conversations analysed as part of a study into the discursive…

Children's gendered ways of talking about learning to write

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Maria Sol Iparraguirre

2012-03-01

Full Text Available This study attempts to integrate a gender perspective in the research of children's conceptions about learning to write. We analyzed the individual interviews of 160 schoolchildren - equally distributed between boys and girls - in the eight grades from kindergarten to seventh grade in elementary school in Argentina, in order to explore gender-related patterns in their conceptions of learning to write. The lexicometric method was applied to the transcriptions of children's responses. Subsequent qualitative analysis of modal responses revealed distinctive gender differences regarding both the content and the form of responses. We describe and interpret such differences within a theoretical framework that distinguishes two different modes of discourse and thought: the gendered conversational styles studied by Tannen, and the two modes of cognitive functioning proposed by Bruner. Results show that boys tended to adopt a report talk style and to present traits that are close to those proposed by Bruner in his portrait of the logico-paradigmatic mode of thought. Girls, instead, tended to adopt a rapport talk style and to integrate to a greater extent a set of procedures characterizing a narrative modality, by speaking at length of human actions, intentions and feelings. These findings underscore the educational potential of considering gender as an important (and still unexplored aspect that influences children's(and most probably teachers' conceptions of how one learns.

Education tools for entrepreneurship creating an action-learning environment through educational learning tools

CERN Document Server

Gómez, Jaime; Vélez-Torres, Francisco; Rueda-Armengot, Carlos

2016-01-01

This book examines education in entrepreneurship through an action-learning environment that employs various education tools, technology tools and pedagogical methods being implemented into university curriculums around the world. Entrepreneurship in all of its aspects, connotations, and applications has undoubtedly become a major force for new and sustainable wealth creation in both emerging and developed economies. This notion has been encouraging universities to incorporate entrepreneurship-related competencies into the curriculums of almost all subjects, as researchers, educators, and administrators alike acknowledge that students must be fully engaged and prepared to thrive in a society increasingly defined by innovation. In this context, the primary challenge consists in how to inspire or work beyond the mental limits in the classroom; to determine which learning platforms are required or useful to unlock and stimulate creativity and eliminate the human aversion to failure. Featuring contributions and c...

Learn every day about numbers 100 best ideas from teachers

CERN Document Server

Charner, Kathy

2009-01-01

Classroom-tested and teacher approved, these activities help children ages three to six learn all about numbers. With one hundred engaging and fun activities, Learn Every Day About Numbers offers everything a teacher needs to build a foundation for future math learning. Children will love becoming a Number Detective, a Flashlight Writer, or a Number Hero as they investigate the wonderful world of numbers. Each activity offers learning objectives to meet standards, a materials list, related children's books, and an assessment component to measure children's learning. Learning about numbers has never been so much fun!.

Action Researchers' Perspectives about the Distinguishing Characteristics of Action Research: A Delphi and Learning Circles Mixed-Methods Study

Science.gov (United States)

Rowell, Lonnie L.; Polush, Elena Yu; Riel, Margaret; Bruewer, Aaron

2015-01-01

The purpose of this study was to identify distinguishing characteristics of action research within the Action Research Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. The authors sought to delineate the foundational framework endorsed by this community. The study was conducted during January-April 2012 and employed an…

Finding Waldo: Learning about Users from their Interactions.

Science.gov (United States)

Brown, Eli T; Ottley, Alvitta; Zhao, Helen; Quan Lin; Souvenir, Richard; Endert, Alex; Chang, Remco

2014-12-01

Visual analytics is inherently a collaboration between human and computer. However, in current visual analytics systems, the computer has limited means of knowing about its users and their analysis processes. While existing research has shown that a user's interactions with a system reflect a large amount of the user's reasoning process, there has been limited advancement in developing automated, real-time techniques that mine interactions to learn about the user. In this paper, we demonstrate that we can accurately predict a user's task performance and infer some user personality traits by using machine learning techniques to analyze interaction data. Specifically, we conduct an experiment in which participants perform a visual search task, and apply well-known machine learning algorithms to three encodings of the users' interaction data. We achieve, depending on algorithm and encoding, between 62% and 83% accuracy at predicting whether each user will be fast or slow at completing the task. Beyond predicting performance, we demonstrate that using the same techniques, we can infer aspects of the user's personality factors, including locus of control, extraversion, and neuroticism. Further analyses show that strong results can be attained with limited observation time: in one case 95% of the final accuracy is gained after a quarter of the average task completion time. Overall, our findings show that interactions can provide information to the computer about its human collaborator, and establish a foundation for realizing mixed-initiative visual analytics systems.

Finding Waldo: Learning about Users from their Interactions

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Brown, Eli T.; Ottley, Alvitta; Zhao, Helen; Lin, Quan; Souvenir, Richard; Endert, Alex; Chang, Remco

2014-12-31

Visual analytics is inherently a collaboration between human and computer. However, in current visual analytics systems, the computer has limited means of knowing about its users and their analysis processes. While existing research has shown that a user’s interactions with a system reflect a large amount of the user’s reasoning process, there has been limited advancement in developing automated, real-time techniques that mine interactions to learn about the user. In this paper, we demonstrate that we can accurately predict a user’s task performance and infer some user personality traits by using machine learning techniques to analyze interaction data. Specifically, we conduct an experiment in which participants perform a visual search task and we apply well-known machine learning algorithms to three encodings of the users interaction data. We achieve, depending on algorithm and encoding, between 62% and 96% accuracy at predicting whether each user will be fast or slow at completing the task. Beyond predicting performance, we demonstrate that using the same techniques, we can infer aspects of the user’s personality factors, including locus of control, extraversion, and neuroticism. Further analyses show that strong results can be attained with limited observation time, in some cases, 82% of the final accuracy is gained after a quarter of the average task completion time. Overall, our findings show that interactions can provide information to the computer about its human collaborator, and establish a foundation for realizing mixed- initiative visual analytics systems.

78 FR 43091 - Technical Operations Safety Action Program (T-SAP) and Air Traffic Safety Action Program (ATSAP)

Science.gov (United States)

2013-07-19

... Administration 14 CFR Part 193 [Docket No.: FAA-2013-0375] Technical Operations Safety Action Program (T-SAP) and... Disclosure. SUMMARY: The FAA is proposing that safety information provided to it under the T-SAP, established... to the FAA under the T-SAP and ATSAP, so the FAA can learn about and address aviation safety hazards...

Recognizing human actions by learning and matching shape-motion prototype trees.

Science.gov (United States)

Jiang, Zhuolin; Lin, Zhe; Davis, Larry S

2012-03-01

A shape-motion prototype-based approach is introduced for action recognition. The approach represents an action as a sequence of prototypes for efficient and flexible action matching in long video sequences. During training, an action prototype tree is learned in a joint shape and motion space via hierarchical K-means clustering and each training sequence is represented as a labeled prototype sequence; then a look-up table of prototype-to-prototype distances is generated. During testing, based on a joint probability model of the actor location and action prototype, the actor is tracked while a frame-to-prototype correspondence is established by maximizing the joint probability, which is efficiently performed by searching the learned prototype tree; then actions are recognized using dynamic prototype sequence matching. Distance measures used for sequence matching are rapidly obtained by look-up table indexing, which is an order of magnitude faster than brute-force computation of frame-to-frame distances. Our approach enables robust action matching in challenging situations (such as moving cameras, dynamic backgrounds) and allows automatic alignment of action sequences. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves recognition rates of 92.86 percent on a large gesture data set (with dynamic backgrounds), 100 percent on the Weizmann action data set, 95.77 percent on the KTH action data set, 88 percent on the UCF sports data set, and 87.27 percent on the CMU action data set.

Using teacher action research to promote constructivist learning ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Erna Kinsey

2. To describe the learning environment of typical classrooms in. South African ... a more teacher-centred approach to more constructivist teaching ap- proaches and ... control over their lives within a framework promoted through action research ... cycles of questioning, planning, implementing, collecting data and reflecting ...

Learning about Bats and Rabies

Science.gov (United States)

... Rabies and Kids! Rabies Learning about bats and rabies Recommend on Facebook Tweet Share Compartir Most bats ... might contact people and pets. Bats and human rabies in the United States Rabies in humans is ...

Omani Pre-Service Science Teachers' Views about Global Warming: Beliefs about Actions and Willingness to Act

Science.gov (United States)

Ambusaidi, Abdullah; Boyes, Edward; Stanisstreet, Martin; Taylor, Neil

2012-01-01

A 44-item questionnaire was employed to determine pre-service teachers' beliefs about how useful various specific actions might be in helping to reduce global warming, their willingness to undertake these same actions, and the extent to which these two might be related. The instrument was administered to pre-service science teachers (n = 104) at…

Pre-Service EFL Teachers' Beliefs about Foreign Language Learning

Science.gov (United States)

Altan, Mustafa Zulkuf

2012-01-01

Beliefs are central constructs in every discipline which deals with human behaviour and learning. In addition to learner beliefs about language learning, language teachers themselves may hold certain beliefs about language learning that will have an impact on their instructional practices and that are likely to influence their students' beliefs…

Analytics4Action Evaluation Framework: A Review of Evidence-Based Learning Analytics Interventions at the Open University UK

Science.gov (United States)

Rienties, Bart; Boroowa, Avinash; Cross, Simon; Kubiak, Chris; Mayles, Kevin; Murphy, Sam

2016-01-01

There is an urgent need to develop an evidence-based framework for learning analytics whereby stakeholders can manage, evaluate, and make decisions about which types of interventions work well and under which conditions. In this article, we will work towards developing a foundation of an Analytics4Action Evaluation Framework (A4AEF) that is…

Step 1: Learn about Diabetes

Science.gov (United States)

... please turn JavaScript on. Feature: Type 2 Diabetes Step 1: Learn About Diabetes Past Issues / Fall 2014 ... the whole family healthy! Here are four key steps to help you control your diabetes and live ...

Understanding infants' and children's social learning about foods: previous research and new prospects.

Science.gov (United States)

Shutts, Kristin; Kinzler, Katherine D; DeJesus, Jasmine M

2013-03-01

Developmental psychologists have devoted significant attention to investigating how children learn from others' actions, emotions, and testimony. Yet most of this research has examined children's socially guided learning about artifacts. The present article focuses on a domain that has received limited attention from those interested in the development of social cognition: food. We begin by reviewing the available literature on infants' and children's development in the food domain and identify situations in which children evidence both successes and failures in their interactions with foods. We focus specifically on the role that other people play in guiding what children eat and argue that understanding patterns of successes and failures in the food domain requires an appreciation of eating as a social phenomenon. We next propose a series of questions for future research and suggest that examining food selection as a social phenomenon can shed light on mechanisms underlying children's learning from others and provide ideas for promoting healthy social relationships and eating behaviors early in development.

Tweeting about sexism: The well-being benefits of a social media collective action.

Science.gov (United States)

Foster, Mindi D

2015-12-01

Although collective action has psychological benefits in non-gendered contexts (Drury et al., 2005, Br. J. Soc. Psychol., 44, 309), the benefits for women taking action against gender discrimination are unclear. This study examined how a popular, yet unexplored potential form of collective action, namely tweeting about sexism, affects women's well-being. Women read about sexism and were randomly assigned to tweet or to one of three control groups. Content analyses showed tweets exhibited collective intent and action. Analyses of linguistic markers suggested public tweeters used more cognitive complexity in their language than private tweeters. Profile analyses showed that compared to controls, only public tweeters showed decreasing negative affect and increasing psychological well-being, suggesting tweeting about sexism may serve as a collective action that can enhance women's well-being. © 2015 The British Psychological Society.

Book Review ~ Action learning: Images and pathways. Author: Robert L. Dilworth and Verna J. Willis

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Reviewed by Patrick J. Fahy

2003-10-01

Full Text Available Action learning, as defined in this book, is “a process of reflecting on one’s work and beliefs in the supportive/ confrontational environment of one’s peers for the purpose of gaining new insights and resolving real business and community problems in real time” (p. 11. The claims made for action learning are impressive. Action learning: * Allows participants (who work in groups called sets to answer the question, “What is an honest man, and what do I need to do to become one?” (p. viii. * Is more than learning by doing, action learning “has the potential for putting control of lifelong learning directly in the hands of learners, in ways that alter their perceptions, amplify self-efficacy, and re-connect these individuals to spontaneous curiosity and confidence in the exercise of their own good judgment” (p. xi. * Is a “sleeping giant in the catalogue of individual and organizational change strategies” (p. xi. * Is believed to address the five most important needs facing organizations today: 1 problem-solving; 2 organizational learning; 3 leadership development; 4 professional growth; and 5 career development (p. xiii.

Developing Effective Corrective Action Plan in Krsko NPP

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Bach, Bruno; Cizmek, Rudi; Bozin, Bojan

2014-01-01

Experience shows that many events could have been prevented if lessons had been learned from previous incidents. Event reporting thus has become an increasingly important aspect of the operation and regulation of all safety-related and public health industries. Different industries such as aeronautics, chemicals, transport and of course nuclear depend on Operating Experience (OE) feedback programs to provide lessons learned about safety. The information available under an OE programme for these organizations comprises internal event reports and analysis and external operating experience including reports on low level events and near misses and other relevant operating performance information. The worldwide OE programme (such as WANO OE) in nuclear power plants provides opportunity to learn from events at other plants. In particular, it alerts plants to mistakes or events that have occurred at other nuclear power plants and enables them to take corrective actions to prevent similar occurrences at their own plant. The intent of the effective and efficient OE program is therefore to improve personnel/plant safety, reliability and commercial performance of the operating nuclear power plants. Such a programme ensures that operating experience is analysed, events important to safety are reviewed in depth, lessons learned are disseminated to the staff and to the relevant national and international organizations and corrective actions are effectively implemented. Learning and applying the lessons from operating experience is an integral part of station safety culture and is encouraged by managers throughout the top plant administrative programs and procedures. Krsko NPP is developed its own OE program by using the most relevant INPO/WANO/IAEA guidelines as well as its own knowledge, skills an operating practice. The OE is a part of the Corrective Action Program (CAP), which is among top management programs. The purpose of this article is to present a part of the Krško NPP

Learning about water resource sharing through game play

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

T. Ewen

2016-10-01

Full Text Available Games are an optimal way to teach about water resource sharing, as they allow real-world scenarios to be enacted. Both students and professionals learning about water resource management can benefit from playing games, through the process of understanding both the complexity of sharing of resources between different groups and decision outcomes. Here we address how games can be used to teach about water resource sharing, through both playing and developing water games. An evaluation of using the web-based game Irrigania in the classroom setting, supported by feedback from several educators who have used Irrigania to teach about the sustainable use of water resources, and decision making, at university and high school levels, finds Irrigania to be an effective and easy tool to incorporate into a curriculum. The development of two water games in a course for masters students in geography is also presented as a way to teach and communicate about water resource sharing. Through game development, students learned soft skills, including critical thinking, problem solving, team work, and time management, and overall the process was found to be an effective way to learn about water resource decision outcomes. This paper concludes with a discussion of learning outcomes from both playing and developing water games.

Learning about water resource sharing through game play

Science.gov (United States)

Ewen, Tracy; Seibert, Jan

2016-10-01

Games are an optimal way to teach about water resource sharing, as they allow real-world scenarios to be enacted. Both students and professionals learning about water resource management can benefit from playing games, through the process of understanding both the complexity of sharing of resources between different groups and decision outcomes. Here we address how games can be used to teach about water resource sharing, through both playing and developing water games. An evaluation of using the web-based game Irrigania in the classroom setting, supported by feedback from several educators who have used Irrigania to teach about the sustainable use of water resources, and decision making, at university and high school levels, finds Irrigania to be an effective and easy tool to incorporate into a curriculum. The development of two water games in a course for masters students in geography is also presented as a way to teach and communicate about water resource sharing. Through game development, students learned soft skills, including critical thinking, problem solving, team work, and time management, and overall the process was found to be an effective way to learn about water resource decision outcomes. This paper concludes with a discussion of learning outcomes from both playing and developing water games.

Learning Sequences of Actions in Collectives of Autonomous Agents

Science.gov (United States)

Turner, Kagan; Agogino, Adrian K.; Wolpert, David H.; Clancy, Daniel (Technical Monitor)

2001-01-01

In this paper we focus on the problem of designing a collective of autonomous agents that individually learn sequences of actions such that the resultant sequence of joint actions achieves a predetermined global objective. We are particularly interested in instances of this problem where centralized control is either impossible or impractical. For single agent systems in similar domains, machine learning methods (e.g., reinforcement learners) have been successfully used. However, applying such solutions directly to multi-agent systems often proves problematic, as agents may work at cross-purposes, or have difficulty in evaluating their contribution to achievement of the global objective, or both. Accordingly, the crucial design step in multiagent systems centers on determining the private objectives of each agent so that as the agents strive for those objectives, the system reaches a good global solution. In this work we consider a version of this problem involving multiple autonomous agents in a grid world. We use concepts from collective intelligence to design goals for the agents that are 'aligned' with the global goal, and are 'learnable' in that agents can readily see how their behavior affects their utility. We show that reinforcement learning agents using those goals outperform both 'natural' extensions of single agent algorithms and global reinforcement, learning solutions based on 'team games'.

Sport and Exercise Pedagogy and Questions about Learning

Science.gov (United States)

Quennerstedt, Mikael; Öhman, Marie; Armour, Kathleen

2014-01-01

One important challenge ahead for sport and exercise pedagogy (SEP) researchers is to consider afresh questions about learning. Learning in the fields of sport, physical activity and physical education (PE) is a particularly complex business. Most existing theories of learning are defined cognitively, yet learning in sport and physical activity…

Experience and learning in the workplace : conscious thinking about work and the self

NARCIS (Netherlands)

van Dellen, Teije

2015-01-01

Abstract In this article the question is raised what students in adult, in particular workplace, learning need to know and understand at least about the theory and practice of experience and learning of adults and moreover why they need to learn it. So contemporary adult learning theory is discussed

Learning about “wicked” problems in the Global South. Creating a film-based learning environment with “Visual Problem Appraisal”

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Loes Witteveen

2012-03-01

Full Text Available The current complexity of sustainable development in the Global South calls for the design of learning strategies that can deal with this complexity. One such innovative learning strategy, called Visual Problem Appraisal (VPA, is highlighted in this article. The strategy is termed visual as it creates a learning environment that is film-based. VPA enhances the analysis of complex issues, and facilitates stakeholder dialogue and action planning. The strategy is used in workshops dealing with problem analysis and policy design, and involves the participants “meeting” stakeholders through filmed narratives. The article demonstrates the value of using film in multi stakeholder learning environments addressing issues concerning sustainable development.

Do action learning sets facilitate collaborative, deliberative learning?: A focus group evaluation of Graduate Entry Pre-registration Nursing (GEN) students' experience.

Science.gov (United States)

Maddison, Charlotte; Strang, Gus

2018-01-01

The aim of this study was to investigate if by participating in action learning sets, Graduate Entry Pre-registration Nursing (GEN) students were able to engage in collaborative and deliberative learning. A single focus group interview involving eleven participants was used to collect data. Data analysis identified five themes; collaborative learning; reflection; learning through case study and problem-solving; communication, and rejection of codified learning. The themes are discussed and further analysed in the context of collaborative and deliberative learning. The evidence from this small scale study suggests that action learning sets do provide an environment where collaborative and deliberative learning can occur. However, students perceived some of them, particularly during year one, to be too 'teacher lead', which stifled learning. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Learning about Learning: A Conundrum and a Possible Resolution

Science.gov (United States)

Barnett, Ronald

2011-01-01

What is it to learn in the modern world? We can identify four "learning epochs" through which our understanding of learning has passed: a metaphysical view; an empirical view; an experiential view; and, currently, a "learning-amid-contestation" view. In this last and current view, learning has its place in a world in which, the more one learns,…

Incentives through Consumer Learning about Tastes

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Schumacher, Heiner

2014-01-01

We consider a long-lived firm that faces an infinite sequence of finitely-lived consumers. In each period, the firm can exert either high or low effort, which is the firm's private information. When consumers learn about the firm's talent from the outcomes of previous transactions, there exists n...... for advertising, advertising content, and consumer education.......We consider a long-lived firm that faces an infinite sequence of finitely-lived consumers. In each period, the firm can exert either high or low effort, which is the firm's private information. When consumers learn about the firm's talent from the outcomes of previous transactions, there exists...

Differential, but not opponent, effects of L -DOPA and citalopram on action learning with reward and punishment.

Science.gov (United States)

Guitart-Masip, Marc; Economides, Marcos; Huys, Quentin J M; Frank, Michael J; Chowdhury, Rumana; Duzel, Emrah; Dayan, Peter; Dolan, Raymond J

2014-03-01

Decision-making involves two fundamental axes of control namely valence, spanning reward and punishment, and action, spanning invigoration and inhibition. We recently exploited a go/no-go task whose contingencies explicitly decouple valence and action to show that these axes are inextricably coupled during learning. This results in a disadvantage in learning to go to avoid punishment and in learning to no-go to obtain a reward. The neuromodulators dopamine and serotonin are likely to play a role in these asymmetries: Dopamine signals anticipation of future rewards and is also involved in an invigoration of motor responses leading to reward, but it also arbitrates between different forms of control. Conversely, serotonin is implicated in motor inhibition and punishment processing. To investigate the role of dopamine and serotonin in the interaction between action and valence during learning.Methods We combined computational modeling with pharmacological manipulation in 90 healthy human volunteers, using levodopa and citalopram to affect dopamine and serotonin, respectively. We found that, after administration of levodopa,action learning was less affected by outcome valence when compared with the placebo and citalopram groups. This highlights in this context a predominant effect of levodopa in controlling the balance between different forms of control.Citalopram had distinct effects, increasing participants'tendency to perform active responses independent of outcome valence, consistent with a role in decreasing motor inhibition. Our findings highlight the rich complexities of the roles played by dopamine and serotonin during instrumental learning.

Learning Similar Actions by Reinforcement or Sensory-Prediction Errors Rely on Distinct Physiological Mechanisms.

Science.gov (United States)

Uehara, Shintaro; Mawase, Firas; Celnik, Pablo

2017-09-14

Humans can acquire knowledge of new motor behavior via different forms of learning. The two forms most commonly studied have been the development of internal models based on sensory-prediction errors (error-based learning) and success-based feedback (reinforcement learning). Human behavioral studies suggest these are distinct learning processes, though the neurophysiological mechanisms that are involved have not been characterized. Here, we evaluated physiological markers from the cerebellum and the primary motor cortex (M1) using noninvasive brain stimulations while healthy participants trained finger-reaching tasks. We manipulated the extent to which subjects rely on error-based or reinforcement by providing either vector or binary feedback about task performance. Our results demonstrated a double dissociation where learning the task mainly via error-based mechanisms leads to cerebellar plasticity modifications but not long-term potentiation (LTP)-like plasticity changes in M1; while learning a similar action via reinforcement mechanisms elicited M1 LTP-like plasticity but not cerebellar plasticity changes. Our findings indicate that learning complex motor behavior is mediated by the interplay of different forms of learning, weighing distinct neural mechanisms in M1 and the cerebellum. Our study provides insights for designing effective interventions to enhance human motor learning. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

About symmetry of the gravitational action

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Tentyukov, M.N.

1991-01-01

The Einstein equations are investigated by imbedding of the metric tensor to the affinely connected space. It is shown that if using of the Einstein equations, then, despite the action functional invariance being violated with respect to the diffeomorphism group by the background object, a new infinite-parameter invariance appears, i.e., the action invariance can be extended from the group of motions of the background object to any infinite-parameter group. 10 refs

High Touch Approach and Its Relationship with Students’ Learning Outcomes at IAIN Bukittinggi

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Darul Ilmi

2017-07-01

Full Text Available Learning without students’ center tends to create less passionate students in following the lecture. They tend to ignore their lecturer. They have less attention, and try to create ineffective conditions, therefore, the learning atmosphere will become less effective to achieve the intended goals.  The purpose of the research is to determine the process of learning, the implementation of High Touch approach, and factors that influence its implementation. Classroom action research approach was used at  department of mathematics which involve students who enroll at academic year 2016/2017 IAIN Bukittinggi. The research was done in two cycles in which one cycle conducted three meetings. The instruments used were observation, essay questions, and tasks given to students. The results show that there is an improvement in students’ participation and activeness in learning when their lecturer builds learning experience through reinforcement, affection, guide, directive action, and good modeling by student–center andself-learning activities, and independent learning skill orientations showed in cycle I and II. It implies that implementing high touch may lead students to be more active, creative, and fun in learning

Two-step adaptive management for choosing between two management actions.

Science.gov (United States)

Moore, Alana L; Walker, Leila; Runge, Michael C; McDonald-Madden, Eve; McCarthy, Michael A

2017-06-01

Adaptive management is widely advocated to improve environmental management. Derivations of optimal strategies for adaptive management, however, tend to be case specific and time consuming. In contrast, managers might seek relatively simple guidance, such as insight into when a new potential management action should be considered, and how much effort should be expended on trialing such an action. We constructed a two-time-step scenario where a manager is choosing between two possible management actions. The manager has a total budget that can be split between a learning phase and an implementation phase. We use this scenario to investigate when and how much a manager should invest in learning about the management actions available. The optimal investment in learning can be understood intuitively by accounting for the expected value of sample information, the benefits that accrue during learning, the direct costs of learning, and the opportunity costs of learning. We find that the optimal proportion of the budget to spend on learning is characterized by several critical thresholds that mark a jump from spending a large proportion of the budget on learning to spending nothing. For example, as sampling variance increases, it is optimal to spend a larger proportion of the budget on learning, up to a point: if the sampling variance passes a critical threshold, it is no longer beneficial to invest in learning. Similar thresholds are observed as a function of the total budget and the difference in the expected performance of the two actions. We illustrate how this model can be applied using a case study of choosing between alternative rearing diets for hihi, an endangered New Zealand passerine. Although the model presented is a simplified scenario, we believe it is relevant to many management situations. Managers often have relatively short time horizons for management, and might be reluctant to consider further investment in learning and monitoring beyond collecting data

Two-step adaptive management for choosing between two management actions

Science.gov (United States)

Moore, Alana L.; Walker, Leila; Runge, Michael C.; McDonald-Madden, Eve; McCarthy, Michael A

2017-01-01

Adaptive management is widely advocated to improve environmental management. Derivations of optimal strategies for adaptive management, however, tend to be case specific and time consuming. In contrast, managers might seek relatively simple guidance, such as insight into when a new potential management action should be considered, and how much effort should be expended on trialing such an action. We constructed a two-time-step scenario where a manager is choosing between two possible management actions. The manager has a total budget that can be split between a learning phase and an implementation phase. We use this scenario to investigate when and how much a manager should invest in learning about the management actions available. The optimal investment in learning can be understood intuitively by accounting for the expected value of sample information, the benefits that accrue during learning, the direct costs of learning, and the opportunity costs of learning. We find that the optimal proportion of the budget to spend on learning is characterized by several critical thresholds that mark a jump from spending a large proportion of the budget on learning to spending nothing. For example, as sampling variance increases, it is optimal to spend a larger proportion of the budget on learning, up to a point: if the sampling variance passes a critical threshold, it is no longer beneficial to invest in learning. Similar thresholds are observed as a function of the total budget and the difference in the expected performance of the two actions. We illustrate how this model can be applied using a case study of choosing between alternative rearing diets for hihi, an endangered New Zealand passerine. Although the model presented is a simplified scenario, we believe it is relevant to many management situations. Managers often have relatively short time horizons for management, and might be reluctant to consider further investment in learning and monitoring beyond collecting data

The Design and Validation of the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey

Science.gov (United States)

Adams, W. K.; Perkins, K. K.; Dubson, M.; Finkelstein, N. D.; Wieman, C. E.

2005-09-01

The Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS) is a new instrument designed to measure various facets of student attitudes and beliefs about learning physics. This instrument extends previous work by probing additional facets of student attitudes and beliefs. It has been written to be suitably worded for students in a variety of different courses. This paper introduces the CLASS and its design and validation studies, which include analyzing results from over 2400 students, interviews and factor analyses. Methodology used to determine categories and how to analyze the robustness of categories for probing various facets of student learning are also described. This paper serves as the foundation for the results and conclusions from the analysis of our survey data.

Learning in non-formal education : is it “youthful” for youth in action?

OpenAIRE

Norqvist, Lars; Leffler, Eva

2017-01-01

This article offers insights into the practices of a non-formal education programme for youth provided by the European Union (EU). It takes a qualitative approach and is based on a case study of the European Voluntary Service (EVS). Data were collected during individual and focus group interviews with learners (the EVS volunteers), decision takers and trainers, with the aim of deriving an understanding of learning in non-formal education. The research questions concerned learning, the recogni...

Inquiring into the Dilemmas of Implementing Action Learning. Innovative Session 6. [Concurrent Innovative Session at AHRD Annual Conference, 2000.

Science.gov (United States)

Yorks, Lyle; Dilworth, Robert L.; Marquardt, Michael J.; Marsick, Victoria; O'Neil, Judy

Action learning is receiving increasing attention from human resource development (HRD) practitioners and the HRD management literature. Action learning has been characterized as follows: (1) working in small groups to take action on meaningful problems while seeking to learn from having taken the specified action lies at the foundation of action…

Perceptions about traditional and novel methods to learn about postoperative pain management: a qualitative study.

Science.gov (United States)

Ingadottir, Brynja; Blondal, Katrin; Jaarsma, Tiny; Thylen, Ingela

2016-11-01

The aim of this study was to explore the perceptions of surgical patients about traditional and novel methods to learn about postoperative pain management. Patient education is an important part of postoperative care. Contemporary technology offers new ways for patients to learn about self-care, although face-to-face discussions and brochures are the most common methods of delivering education in nursing practice. A qualitative design with a vignette and semi-structured interviews used for data collection. A purposeful sample of 13 postsurgical patients, who had been discharged from hospital, was recruited during 2013-2014. The patients were given a vignette about anticipated hospital discharge after surgery with four different options for communication (face-to-face, brochure, website, serious game) to learn about postoperative pain management. They were asked to rank their preferred method of learning and thereafter to reflect on their choices. Data were analysed using an inductive content analysis approach. Patients preferred face-to-face education with a nurse, followed by brochures and websites, while games were least preferred. Two categories, each with two sub-categories, emerged from the data. These conceptualized the factors affecting patients' perceptions: (1) 'Trusting the source', sub-categorized into 'Being familiar with the method' and 'Having own prejudgments'; and (2) 'Being motivated to learn' sub-categorized into 'Managing an impaired cognition' and 'Aspiring for increased knowledge'. To implement successfully novel educational methods into postoperative care, healthcare professionals need to be aware of the factors influencing patients' perceptions about how to learn, such as trust and motivation. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Participatory evaluation of community actions as a learning methodology for personal and community empowerment: case studies and empowerment processes

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Xavier Úcar Martínez

2014-06-01

Full Text Available Introduction: Participatory evaluation (PE is a hybrid methodology that can be used simultaneously to investigate and act in groups and communities. It can generate new knowledge about reality, but italso allows changes in the participants and their sociocultural context. This research project, developed over three years, aims to find out whether PE processes are useful and appropriate to evaluate community actionsand to generate learning that contribute to the empowerment of people who develop them.Method: The methodological structure of the research process design Participatory Evaluation processes that are applied in three selected communities-cases, over one year. The steering groups in each caseevaluated four dimensions of Community Development Plans: context, evolution, performance and results, using different techniques and group dynamics. Throughout this process, participants identify the acquiredknowledge and this is linked to indicators of empowerment, using questionnaires, content analysis and semi-structured interviews.Results: The development PE process in the three analyzed cases confirmed that PE is a useful strategy to assess participatory community actions of a territory; to report them to the people of the community; andto make shared decisions, about initiatives in order to improve community actions. The obtained results also verify that, throughout PE, there has been learning in the participants.Conclusions: The involvement of community members in the evaluation makes it more useful, fairer and more valid, but also a fourth positive consequence of PE is empowerment. From the process and the resultsof these cases of Participatory Evaluation, we consider that community EP is social transformation.

Bourdieu's Habitus and Field: Implications on the Practice and Theory of Critical Action Learning

Science.gov (United States)

Warwick, Rob; McCray, Janet; Board, Douglas

2017-01-01

This paper considers the logic of practice of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in relation to critical action learning: in particular "habitus" which is co-created with field and the interplay amongst the two in the form of misrecognition and risk. We draw on interviews with participants who have experienced action learning as part…

"Knowing Is Not Enough; We Must Apply": Reflections on a Failed Action Learning Application

Science.gov (United States)

Reese, Simon

2015-01-01

This paper reflects upon a sub-optimal action learning application with a strategic business re-design project. The objective of the project was to improve the long-term business performance of a subsidiary business and build the strategic plan. Action learning was introduced to aid the group in expanding their view of the real problems…

Goals for teacher learning about energy degradation and usefulness

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Abigail R. Daane

2014-08-01

Full Text Available The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS require teachers to understand aspects of energy degradation and the second law of thermodynamics, including energy’s availability and usefulness, changes in energy concentration, and the tendency of energy to spread uniformly. In an effort to develop learning goals that support teachers in building robust understandings of energy from their existing knowledge, we studied teachers’ impromptu conversations about these topics during professional development courses about energy. Many of these teachers’ ideas appear to align with statements from the NGSS, including the intuition that energy can be present but inaccessible, that energy can change in its usefulness as it transforms within a system, and that energy can lose its usefulness as it disperses, often ending up as thermal energy. Some teachers’ ideas about energy degradation go beyond what is articulated in the NGSS, including the idea that thermal energy can be useful in some situations and the idea that energy’s usefulness depends on the objects included in a scenario. Based on these observations, we introduce learning goals for energy degradation and the second law of thermodynamics that (1 represent a sophisticated physics understanding of these concepts, (2 originate in ideas that teachers already use, and (3 align with the NGSS.

Processing of action- but not stimulus-related prediction errors differs between active and observational feedback learning.

Science.gov (United States)

Kobza, Stefan; Bellebaum, Christian

2015-01-01

Learning of stimulus-response-outcome associations is driven by outcome prediction errors (PEs). Previous studies have shown larger PE-dependent activity in the striatum for learning from own as compared to observed actions and the following outcomes despite comparable learning rates. We hypothesised that this finding relates primarily to a stronger integration of action and outcome information in active learners. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated brain activations related to action-dependent PEs, reflecting the deviation between action values and obtained outcomes, and action-independent PEs, reflecting the deviation between subjective values of response-preceding cues and obtained outcomes. To this end, 16 active and 15 observational learners engaged in a probabilistic learning card-guessing paradigm. On each trial, active learners saw one out of five cues and pressed either a left or right response button to receive feedback (monetary win or loss). Each observational learner observed exactly those cues, responses and outcomes of one active learner. Learning performance was assessed in active test trials without feedback and did not differ between groups. For both types of PEs, activations were found in the globus pallidus, putamen, cerebellum, and insula in active learners. However, only for action-dependent PEs, activations in these structures and the anterior cingulate were increased in active relative to observational learners. Thus, PE-related activity in the reward system is not generally enhanced in active relative to observational learning but only for action-dependent PEs. For the cerebellum, additional activations were found across groups for cue-related uncertainty, thereby emphasising the cerebellum's role in stimulus-outcome learning. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Action Research in a Business Classroom--Another Lens to Examine Learning

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Smith, Janice Witt; Clark, Gloria

2010-01-01

This research study looks at the implementation of an action research project within a blended learning human resource management class in employee and labor relations. The internal and external environment created conditions that converged in the Perfect Storm and resulted in an almost disastrous learning experience for faculty and students. What…

When Will We Ever Learn? The After Action Review, Lessons Learned and the Next Steps in Training and Educating the Homeland Security Enterprise for the 21st Century

Science.gov (United States)

2013-06-01

such as emergent learning , experiential learning , and sense-making. It then ties these theories and concepts together into an emergency learning ...edition, loc. 3409–3414. 107 David Kolb , Experiential Learning : Experience as the Source of Learning and Development (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice...shows us that our theory needs developing again. And the process continues. Fundamental in the Kolb model is the role of action in any learning

Reinforcement Learning Explains Conditional Cooperation and Its Moody Cousin.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Takahiro Ezaki

2016-07-01

Full Text Available Direct reciprocity, or repeated interaction, is a main mechanism to sustain cooperation under social dilemmas involving two individuals. For larger groups and networks, which are probably more relevant to understanding and engineering our society, experiments employing repeated multiplayer social dilemma games have suggested that humans often show conditional cooperation behavior and its moody variant. Mechanisms underlying these behaviors largely remain unclear. Here we provide a proximate account for this behavior by showing that individuals adopting a type of reinforcement learning, called aspiration learning, phenomenologically behave as conditional cooperator. By definition, individuals are satisfied if and only if the obtained payoff is larger than a fixed aspiration level. They reinforce actions that have resulted in satisfactory outcomes and anti-reinforce those yielding unsatisfactory outcomes. The results obtained in the present study are general in that they explain extant experimental results obtained for both so-called moody and non-moody conditional cooperation, prisoner's dilemma and public goods games, and well-mixed groups and networks. Different from the previous theory, individuals are assumed to have no access to information about what other individuals are doing such that they cannot explicitly use conditional cooperation rules. In this sense, myopic aspiration learning in which the unconditional propensity of cooperation is modulated in every discrete time step explains conditional behavior of humans. Aspiration learners showing (moody conditional cooperation obeyed a noisy GRIM-like strategy. This is different from the Pavlov, a reinforcement learning strategy promoting mutual cooperation in two-player situations.

Green Action through Education: A Model for Fostering Positive Attitudes about STEM

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Wheland, Ethel R.; Donovan, William J.; Dukes, J. Thomas; Qammar, Helen K.; Smith, Gregory A.; Williams, Bonnie L.

2013-01-01

This paper describes an innovative collaboration between instructors of non-STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) courses and scientists who teach STEM courses in the GATE (Green Action Through Education) learning community. The scientists in this project presented engaging science--in such diverse locations as a sewage…

All in a Knot of One Another's Labours: Self-Determination, Network Organising and Learning

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Pedler, Mike

2012-01-01

This essay is about how to learn to organise to tackle the intractable and most difficult problems of organisations and societies. It opens with a discussion of the nature of such problems, which are the spur for Revans' action learning and the focus of some recent thinking on leadership. Action learning works on the basis of peer relationships…

You Like It, You Learn It: Affectivity and Learning in Competitive Social Role Play Gaming

Science.gov (United States)

Brom, Cyril; Šisler, Vít; Slussareff, Michaela; Selmbacherová, Tereza; Hlávka, Zdenek

2016-01-01

Despite the alleged ability of digital game-based learning (DGBL) to foster positive affect and in turn improve learning, the link between affectivity and learning has not been sufficiently investigated in this field. Regarding learning from team-based games with competitive elements, even less is known about the relationship between…

Indian Secondary Students' Views about Global Warming: Beliefs about the Usefulness of Actions and Willingness to Act

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Chhokar, Kiran; Dua, Shweta; Taylor, Neil; Boyes, Edward; Stanisstreet, Martin

2011-01-01

A 44-item survey instrument was designed to determine secondary students' views about how useful various specific actions related to reducing global warming might be, their willingness to undertake these various actions and the extent to which these 2 might be linked. The instrument was administered to students in grades 6-10 (n = 768) from 4…

"I have learned - It is about something that happened in the past!"

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Maslo, Elina

2017-01-01

This article is based on the empirical material collected when piloting new methodology in the study on working places as learning spaces. The article deals with different perceptions of learning and illustrates how different understandings of learning are constructed by two employees working...... at the same workplace. Using categories of spatial analysis the article show a hybrid space – a space when work and life meet each other and create new dynamics and inspirations for learning. Keywords: working place, learning space, different perceptions, learning as multidimensional process...

Can Semi-Supervised Learning Explain Incorrect Beliefs about Categories?

Science.gov (United States)

Kalish, Charles W.; Rogers, Timothy T.; Lang, Jonathan; Zhu, Xiaojin

2011-01-01

Three experiments with 88 college-aged participants explored how unlabeled experiences--learning episodes in which people encounter objects without information about their category membership--influence beliefs about category structure. Participants performed a simple one-dimensional categorization task in a brief supervised learning phase, then…

Action Search: Learning to Search for Human Activities in Untrimmed Videos

KAUST Repository

Alwassel, Humam

2017-06-13

Traditional approaches for action detection use trimmed data to learn sophisticated action detector models. Although these methods have achieved great success at detecting human actions, we argue that huge information is discarded when ignoring the process, through which this trimmed data is obtained. In this paper, we propose Action Search, a novel approach that mimics the way people annotate activities in video sequences. Using a Recurrent Neural Network, Action Search can efficiently explore a video and determine the time boundaries during which an action occurs. Experiments on the THUMOS14 dataset reveal that our model is not only able to explore the video efficiently but also accurately find human activities, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

Preservation of information about the repository for spent nuclear fuels - proposal for action plan

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Bowen-Schrire, Monica; Eckerhall, Daniel; Jander, Hans; Waniewska, Katarina

2008-10-01

This report is a proposal for an action plan with the ultimate aim of ensuring that information about the repository for spent nuclear fuel can be preserved and transferred for future generations. The purpose of the proposal for an action plan is to present ideas on tangible measures and guidelines for information preservation and transfer, in the short and long term. The report deals with a number of aspects relating to information preservation as well as risks that can lead to the loss of important information. The proposal for an action plan is based on reasoning about these subjects. The main emphasis is on measures that need to be implemented in the near future to ensure that successive and direct information transfer is handled in a suitable manner. It is suggested that the following measures should be implemented within a five-year period: - Designate a person responsible for information preservation. - Work out guidelines for information preservation and transfer. - Form a network with other organizations in Sweden. - Initiate a dialogue with other countries, especially USA and France. - Participate in seminars, conferences and workgroups on an international level within the IAEA and NEA. In a longer time perspective the following measures should also be implemented: - Implement guidelines for information preservation and transfer. - Document the archiving system. - Establish a communication plan. - Archive information about the repository. - Keep the action plan up to date

Construction of a Learning Agent Handling Its Rewards According to Environmental Situations

Science.gov (United States)

Moriyama, Koichi; Numao, Masayuki

The authors aim at constructing an agent which learns appropriate actions in a Multi-Agent environment with and without social dilemmas. For this aim, the agent must have nonrationality that makes it give up its own profit when it should do that. Since there are many studies on rational learning that brings more and more profit, it is desirable to utilize them for constructing the agent. Therefore, we use a reward-handling manner that makes internal evaluation from the agent's rewards, and then the agent learns actions by a rational learning method with the internal evaluation. If the agent has only a fixed manner, however, it does not act well in the environment with and without dilemmas. Thus, the authors equip the agent with several reward-handling manners and criteria for selecting an effective one for the environmental situation. In the case of humans, what generates the internal evaluation is usually called emotion. Hence, this study also aims at throwing light on emotional activities of humans from a constructive view. In this paper, we divide a Multi-Agent environment into three situations and construct an agent having the reward-handling manners and the criteria. We observe that the agent acts well in all the three Multi-Agent situations composed of homogeneous agents.

Action Control, Motivated Strategies, and Integrative Motivation as Predictors of Language Learning Affect and the Intention to Continue Learning French

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MacIntyre, Peter D.; Blackie, Rebecca A.

2012-01-01

The present study examines the relative ability of variables from three motivational frameworks to predict four non-linguistic outcomes of language learning. The study examines Action Control Theory with its measures of (1) hesitation, (2) volatility and (3) rumination. The study also examined Pintrich's expectancy-value model that uses measures…

With you or against you: social orientation dependent learning signals guide actions made for others.

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Christopoulos, George I; King-Casas, Brooks

2015-01-01

In social environments, it is crucial that decision-makers take account of the impact of their actions not only for oneself, but also on other social agents. Previous work has identified neural signals in the striatum encoding value-based prediction errors for outcomes to oneself; also, recent work suggests that neural activity in prefrontal cortex may similarly encode value-based prediction errors related to outcomes to others. However, prior work also indicates that social valuations are not isomorphic, with social value orientations of decision-makers ranging on a cooperative to competitive continuum; this variation has not been examined within social learning environments. Here, we combine a computational model of learning with functional neuroimaging to examine how individual differences in orientation impact neural mechanisms underlying 'other-value' learning. Across four experimental conditions, reinforcement learning signals for other-value were identified in medial prefrontal cortex, and were distinct from self-value learning signals identified in striatum. Critically, the magnitude and direction of the other-value learning signal depended strongly on an individual's cooperative or competitive orientation toward others. These data indicate that social decisions are guided by a social orientation-dependent learning system that is computationally similar but anatomically distinct from self-value learning. The sensitivity of the medial prefrontal learning signal to social preferences suggests a mechanism linking such preferences to biases in social actions and highlights the importance of incorporating heterogeneous social predispositions in neurocomputational models of social behavior. Published by Elsevier Inc.

Valenced action/inhibition learning in humans is modulated by a genetic variant linked to dopamine D2 receptor expression

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Anni eRichter

2014-08-01

Full Text Available Motivational salience plays an important role in shaping human behavior, but recent studies demonstrate that human performance is not uniformly improved by motivation. Instead, action has been shown to dominate valence in motivated tasks, and it is particularly difficult for humans to learn the inhibition of an action to obtain a reward, but the neural mechanism behind this behavioral specificity is yet unclear. In all mammals, including humans, the monoamine neurotransmitter dopamine is particularly important in the neural manifestation of appetitively motivated behavior, and the human dopamine system is subject to considerable genetic variability. The well-studied TaqIA restriction fragment length polymorphism (rs1800497 has previously been shown to affect striatal dopamine metabolism. In this study we investigated a potential effect of this genetic variation on motivated action/inhibition learning. Two independent cohorts consisting of 87 and 95 healthy participants, respectively, were tested using the previously described valenced go/no-go learning paradigm in which participants learned the reward-associated no-go condition significantly worse than all other conditions. This effect was modulated by the TaqIA polymorphism, with carriers of the A1 allele showing a diminished learning-related performance enhancement in the rewarded no-go condition compared to the A2 homozygotes. This result highlights a modulatory role for genetic variability of the dopaminergic system in individual learning differences of action-valence interaction.

Leading Change in Tissue Viability Best Practice: An Action Learning Programme for Link Nurse Practitioners

Science.gov (United States)

Kellie, Jean; Henderson, Eileen; Milsom, Brian; Crawley, Hayley

2010-01-01

This account of practice reports on an action learning initiative designed and implemented in partnership between a regional NHS Acute Trust and a UK Business School. The central initiative was the implementation of an action learning programme entitled "Leading change in tissue viability best practice: a development programme for Link Nurse…

Application of Participatory Learning and Action Methods in Educational Technology Research A Rural Bangladeshi Case

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Khalid, Md. Saifuddin; Nyvang, Tom

2013-01-01

This chapter examines barriers and methods to identify barriers to educational technology in a rural technical vocational education and training institute in Bangladesh. It also examines how the application of participatory learning and action methods can provide information for barrier research ...

Improving IT Project Portfolio Management: Lessons Learned

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Pedersen, Keld

2013-01-01

The IT PPM improvement process is not well understood, and our knowledge about what makes IT PPM improvement succeed or fail is not well developed. This article presents lessons learned from organizations trying to improve their IT PPM practice. Based on this research IT PPM practitioners are adv...

STUDENTS’ PERCEPTION ABOUT CLINICAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT IN THE PRIMARY, SECONDARY AND TERTIARY MEDICAL FACILITIES

OpenAIRE

Dewi, Dian Puspita; Rahayu, Gandes Retno; Kristina, Tri Nur

2018-01-01

Background: Learning environment is an important factor in learning process and can affect students' competence and work-readiness. Learning environment is not only about physical facilities but also social and psychological condition. The complexity of clinical learning environments pose challenges and problems that may affect students learning process so it is necessary to monitoring and evaluating students learning environments. This study aims to assess students' perception of their learn...

An extreme case of action learning at BAT Niemeyer

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Eckstein, E.; Veenhoven, G.; De Loo, I.G.M.

2009-01-01

Becoming a 'winning organization' when one currently is an 'ugly ducking' can be a difficult and strenuous task. BAT Niemeyer in the Netherlands succeeded in making such a transformation over the course of four years. Action learning was used, among other methods, to steer part of this

Consulting Young Children about Barriers and Supports to Learning

Science.gov (United States)

Georgeson, Jan; Porter, Jill; Daniels, Harry; Feiler, Anthony

2014-01-01

From consideration of children's rights in general and equal opportunities for disabled children in particular, it is important to consult children about barriers and supports to learning and participation. Finding appropriate and feasible ways, however, to incorporate this into educational programmes for younger children can present challenges.…

A machine learning approach for predicting CRISPR-Cas9 cleavage efficiencies and patterns underlying its mechanism of action.

Science.gov (United States)

Abadi, Shiran; Yan, Winston X; Amar, David; Mayrose, Itay

2017-10-01

The adaptation of the CRISPR-Cas9 system as a genome editing technique has generated much excitement in recent years owing to its ability to manipulate targeted genes and genomic regions that are complementary to a programmed single guide RNA (sgRNA). However, the efficacy of a specific sgRNA is not uniquely defined by exact sequence homology to the target site, thus unintended off-targets might additionally be cleaved. Current methods for sgRNA design are mainly concerned with predicting off-targets for a given sgRNA using basic sequence features and employ elementary rules for ranking possible sgRNAs. Here, we introduce CRISTA (CRISPR Target Assessment), a novel algorithm within the machine learning framework that determines the propensity of a genomic site to be cleaved by a given sgRNA. We show that the predictions made with CRISTA are more accurate than other available methodologies. We further demonstrate that the occurrence of bulges is not a rare phenomenon and should be accounted for in the prediction process. Beyond predicting cleavage efficiencies, the learning process provides inferences regarding patterns that underlie the mechanism of action of the CRISPR-Cas9 system. We discover that attributes that describe the spatial structure and rigidity of the entire genomic site as well as those surrounding the PAM region are a major component of the prediction capabilities.

A machine learning approach for predicting CRISPR-Cas9 cleavage efficiencies and patterns underlying its mechanism of action.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Shiran Abadi

2017-10-01

Full Text Available The adaptation of the CRISPR-Cas9 system as a genome editing technique has generated much excitement in recent years owing to its ability to manipulate targeted genes and genomic regions that are complementary to a programmed single guide RNA (sgRNA. However, the efficacy of a specific sgRNA is not uniquely defined by exact sequence homology to the target site, thus unintended off-targets might additionally be cleaved. Current methods for sgRNA design are mainly concerned with predicting off-targets for a given sgRNA using basic sequence features and employ elementary rules for ranking possible sgRNAs. Here, we introduce CRISTA (CRISPR Target Assessment, a novel algorithm within the machine learning framework that determines the propensity of a genomic site to be cleaved by a given sgRNA. We show that the predictions made with CRISTA are more accurate than other available methodologies. We further demonstrate that the occurrence of bulges is not a rare phenomenon and should be accounted for in the prediction process. Beyond predicting cleavage efficiencies, the learning process provides inferences regarding patterns that underlie the mechanism of action of the CRISPR-Cas9 system. We discover that attributes that describe the spatial structure and rigidity of the entire genomic site as well as those surrounding the PAM region are a major component of the prediction capabilities.

Learning about Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID)

Science.gov (United States)

... immunodeficiency From The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology Learning About Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID) What is ... immunodeficiency From The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology Get Email Updates Privacy Copyright Contact Accessibility Plug- ...

Moderation and Teacher Learning: What Can Research Tell Us about Their Interrelationships?

Science.gov (United States)

Hipkins, Rosemary; Robertson, Sally

2011-01-01

This report is a synthesis that explores "opportunities for professional learning" that might occur when teachers work together to moderate their judgments about students' work. Since such conversations are inherently social, the synthesis employs the lens of sociocultural learning theory. It draws together key themes from the small…

What We Muggles Can Learn about Teaching from Hogwarts

Science.gov (United States)

Bixler, Andrea

2011-01-01

The Harry Potter series furnishes many instances of both good and bad teaching. From them, we can learn more about three principles outlined in "How People Learn" (National Research Council 2000a). (1) Teachers should question students about their prior knowledge, as Professor Lupin does before his lessons; (2) we should encourage students to…

Diagnosing Diabetes and Learning about Prediabetes

Science.gov (United States)

... Listen En Español Diagnosing Diabetes and Learning About Prediabetes There are several ways to diagnose diabetes. Each ... or equal to 200 mg/dl What is Prediabetes? Before people develop type 2 diabetes, they almost ...

A Study on Students Acquisition of IT Knowledge and Its Implication on M-Learning

OpenAIRE

Balavivekanandhan, A.; Arulchelvan, S.

2015-01-01

The boom in mobile technology has seen a dramatic rise in its usage. This has led to usage of mobiles even in the academic context for further learning. Although the advantages of m-learning (mobile learning) are visible, studies are required to address the aspects that shape its virtual expectations. The acceptance of mobile technology relies mostly on how the students feel about mobile technology fitting into their requirements. Yet, in spite of the significance in the potential of m-learni...

Associative vocabulary learning: development and testing of two paradigms for the (re-) acquisition of action- and object-related words.

Science.gov (United States)

Freundlieb, Nils; Ridder, Volker; Dobel, Christian; Enriquez-Geppert, Stefanie; Baumgaertner, Annette; Zwitserlood, Pienie; Gerloff, Christian; Hummel, Friedhelm C; Liuzzi, Gianpiero

2012-01-01

Despite a growing number of studies, the neurophysiology of adult vocabulary acquisition is still poorly understood. One reason is that paradigms that can easily be combined with neuroscientfic methods are rare. Here, we tested the efficiency of two paradigms for vocabulary (re-) acquisition, and compared the learning of novel words for actions and objects. Cortical networks involved in adult native-language word processing are widespread, with differences postulated between words for objects and actions. Words and what they stand for are supposed to be grounded in perceptual and sensorimotor brain circuits depending on their meaning. If there are specific brain representations for different word categories, we hypothesized behavioural differences in the learning of action-related and object-related words. Paradigm A, with the learning of novel words for body-related actions spread out over a number of days, revealed fast learning of these new action words, and stable retention up to 4 weeks after training. The single-session Paradigm B employed objects and actions. Performance during acquisition did not differ between action-related and object-related words (time*word category: p = 0.01), but the translation rate was clearly better for object-related (79%) than for action-related words (53%, p = 0.002). Both paradigms yielded robust associative learning of novel action-related words, as previously demonstrated for object-related words. Translation success differed for action- and object-related words, which may indicate different neural mechanisms. The paradigms tested here are well suited to investigate such differences with neuroscientific means. Given the stable retention and minimal requirements for conscious effort, these learning paradigms are promising for vocabulary re-learning in brain-lesioned people. In combination with neuroimaging, neuro-stimulation or pharmacological intervention, they may well advance the understanding of language learning

Student and Faculty Beliefs about Learning in Higher Education: Implications for Teaching

Science.gov (United States)

Dandy, Kristina L.; Bendersky, Karen

2014-01-01

Beliefs about learning can influence whether or not a student learns course material. However, few studies in higher education have compared student and faculty beliefs about learning. In the current study, students and faculty agreed on many aspects of learning--including the definition of learning, which most hinders learning and where learning…

Learning about Learning

Science.gov (United States)

Siegler, Robert S.

2004-01-01

The field of children's learning was thriving when the Merrill-Palmer Quarterly was launched; the field later went into eclipse and now is in the midst of a resurgence. This commentary examines reasons for these trends, and describes the emerging field of children's learning. In particular, the new field is seen as differing from the old in its…

Vicarious birth experiences and childbirth fear: does it matter how young canadian women learn about birth?

Science.gov (United States)

Stoll, Kathrin; Hall, Wendy

2013-01-01

In our secondary analysis of a cross-sectional survey, we explored predictors of childbirth fear for young women (n = 2,676). Young women whose attitudes toward pregnancy and birth were shaped by the media were 1.5 times more likely to report childbirth fear. Three factors that were associated with reduced fear of birth were women's confidence in reproductive knowledge, witnessing a birth, and learning about pregnancy and birth through friends. Offering age-appropriate birth education during primary and secondary education, as an alternative to mass-mediated information about birth, can be evaluated as an approach to reduce young women's childbirth fear.

Learning About Climate and Atmospheric Models Through Machine Learning

Science.gov (United States)

Lucas, D. D.

2017-12-01

From the analysis of ensemble variability to improving simulation performance, machine learning algorithms can play a powerful role in understanding the behavior of atmospheric and climate models. To learn about model behavior, we create training and testing data sets through ensemble techniques that sample different model configurations and values of input parameters, and then use supervised machine learning to map the relationships between the inputs and outputs. Following this procedure, we have used support vector machines, random forests, gradient boosting and other methods to investigate a variety of atmospheric and climate model phenomena. We have used machine learning to predict simulation crashes, estimate the probability density function of climate sensitivity, optimize simulations of the Madden Julian oscillation, assess the impacts of weather and emissions uncertainty on atmospheric dispersion, and quantify the effects of model resolution changes on precipitation. This presentation highlights recent examples of our applications of machine learning to improve the understanding of climate and atmospheric models. This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344.

Robot learning and error correction

Science.gov (United States)

Friedman, L.

1977-01-01

A model of robot learning is described that associates previously unknown perceptions with the sensed known consequences of robot actions. For these actions, both the categories of outcomes and the corresponding sensory patterns are incorporated in a knowledge base by the system designer. Thus the robot is able to predict the outcome of an action and compare the expectation with the experience. New knowledge about what to expect in the world may then be incorporated by the robot in a pre-existing structure whether it detects accordance or discrepancy between a predicted consequence and experience. Errors committed during plan execution are detected by the same type of comparison process and learning may be applied to avoiding the errors.

Implementing Action Research and Professional Learning Communities in a Professional Development School Setting to Support Teacher Candidate Learning

Science.gov (United States)

Shanks, Joyce

2016-01-01

The paper reviews teacher candidates' use of action research and the Professional Learning Community (PLC) concept to support their work in their pre-student teaching field experience. In this research study, teacher candidates are involved in a professional development school relationship that uses action research and PLCs to support candidate…

Counselling and knowledge about contraceptive mode of action among married women; a cross-sectional study

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ciğerli Özlem

2006-08-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Family planning counselling which covers knowledge transfer about contraceptive mode of action, by enabling informed choice, improves compliance to and efficiency of contraceptive methods. The objective of this study was to investigate associations between family planning counselling, counsellor and correct knowledge about mode of action of modern contraceptive methods among married women. Methods For this cross-sectional study, stratified (according to current modern contraceptive method in use random sampling was performed from the registries of two primary health care centres. Main outcomes were; prevalence of family planning counselling, professional background of the counsellor and correct knowledge about mode of action. A semi-structured questionnaire developed by the researchers was applied via face-to-face interview. The answers about mode of action were categorized as correct vs. incorrect by consensus rating. Results Prevalence of counselling and correct knowledge about mode of action was 49.0% and 39.3%, respectively. Higher educated women were significantly more likely to know the mode of action (p p = 0.79. Non-barrier method users were less educated (p = 0.001, more often counselled (60.8% vs. 8.0% and less knowledgeable (p p = 0.021 than counselled condom users. Conclusion The beneficial effect of counselling on knowledge about mode of action of the more complicated, medical (non-barrier contraceptive methods suggests that the use of family planning counselling services in primary health care should be promoted; furthermore, counselling strategies and content should be re-structured for better efficacy.

An Extreme Case of Action Learning at BAT Niemeyer

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Eckstein, Emiel; Veenhoven, Gert; De Loo, Ivo

2009-01-01

Becoming a "winning organization" when one currently is an "ugly ducking" can be a difficult and strenuous task. BAT Niemeyer in the Netherlands succeeded in making such a transformation over the course of four years. Action learning was used, among other methods, to steer part of this transformation, in which employee…

BDNF Val66Met Polymorphism Influences Visuomotor Associative Learning and the Sensitivity to Action Observation

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Taschereau-Dumouchel, Vincent; Hétu, Sébastien; Michon, Pierre-Emmanuel; Vachon-Presseau, Etienne; Massicotte, Elsa; De Beaumont, Louis; Fecteau, Shirley; Poirier, Judes; Mercier, Catherine; Chagnon, Yvon C.; Jackson, Philip L.

2016-01-01

Motor representations in the human mirror neuron system are tuned to respond to specific observed actions. This ability is widely believed to be influenced by genetic factors, but no study has reported a genetic variant affecting this system so far. One possibility is that genetic variants might interact with visuomotor associative learning to configure the system to respond to novel observed actions. In this perspective, we conducted a candidate gene study on the Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) Val66Met polymorphism, a genetic variant linked to motor learning in regions of the mirror neuron system, and tested the effect of this polymorphism on motor facilitation and visuomotor associative learning. In a single-pulse TMS study carried on 16 Met (Val/Met and Met/Met) and 16 Val/Val participants selected from a large pool of healthy volunteers, Met participants showed significantly less muscle-specific corticospinal sensitivity during action observation, as well as reduced visuomotor associative learning, compared to Val homozygotes. These results are the first evidence of a genetic variant tuning sensitivity to action observation and bring to light the importance of considering the intricate relation between genetics and associative learning in order to further understand the origin and function of the human mirror neuron system. PMID:27703276

The Relationship among Pre-Service EFL Teachers' Beliefs about Language Learning, Pedagogical Beliefs, and Beliefs about ICT Integration

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Inayati, Dian; Emaliana, Ive

2017-01-01

This paper elucidates the relationship among pre-service teachers' beliefs about language learning, pedagogical beliefs, and beliefs about ICT Integration through survey methodology. This study employed a quantitative approach, particularly a correlational relationship to investigate the relationships among beliefs about language learning,…

Prefrontal involvement in imitation learning of hand actions: effects of practice and expertise.

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Vogt, Stefan; Buccino, Giovanni; Wohlschläger, Afra M; Canessa, Nicola; Shah, N Jon; Zilles, Karl; Eickhoff, Simon B; Freund, Hans-Joachim; Rizzolatti, Giacomo; Fink, Gereon R

2007-10-01

In this event-related fMRI study, we demonstrate the effects of a single session of practising configural hand actions (guitar chords) on cortical activations during observation, motor preparation and imitative execution. During the observation of non-practised actions, the mirror neuron system (MNS), consisting of inferior parietal and ventral premotor areas, was more strongly activated than for the practised actions. This finding indicates a strong role of the MNS in the early stages of imitation learning. In addition, the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) was selectively involved during observation and motor preparation of the non-practised chords. This finding confirms Buccino et al.'s [Buccino, G., Vogt, S., Ritzl, A., Fink, G.R., Zilles, K., Freund, H.-J., Rizzolatti, G., 2004a. Neural circuits underlying imitation learning of hand actions: an event-related fMRI study. Neuron 42, 323-334] model of imitation learning: for actions that are not yet part of the observer's motor repertoire, DLPFC engages in operations of selection and combination of existing, elementary representations in the MNS. The pattern of prefrontal activations further supports Shallice's [Shallice, T., 2004. The fractionation of supervisory control. In: Gazzaniga, M.S. (Ed.), The Cognitive Neurosciences, Third edition. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 943-956] proposal of a dominant role of the left DLPFC in modulating lower level systems and of a dominant role of the right DLPFC in monitoring operations.

Action-Emotion Style, Learning Approach and Coping Strategies, in Undergraduate University Students

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Jesús de la Fuente

Full Text Available Action-Emotion Style (AES is an affective-motivational construct that describes the achievement motivation that is characteristic of students in their interaction with stressful situations. Using elements from the Type-A Behavior Pattern (TABP, characteristics of competitiveness and overwork occur in different combinations with emotions of impatience and hostility, leading to a classification containing five categories of action-emotion style (Type B, Impatient-hostile type, Medium type, Competitive-Overworking type and Type A. The objective of the present research is to establish how characteristics of action-emotion style relate to learning approach (deep and surface approaches and to coping strategies (emotion-focused and problem-focused. The sample was composed of 225 students from the Psychology degree program. Pearson correlation analyses, ANOVAs and MANOVAs were used. Results showed that competitiveness-overwork characteristics have a significant positive association with the deep approach and with problem-focused strategies, while impatience-hostility is thus related to surface approach and emotion-focused strategies. The level of action-emotion style had a significant main effect. The results verified our hypotheses with reference to the relationships between action-emotion style, learning approaches and coping strategies.

Learning about the Dynamic Sun through Sounds

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Quinn, M.; Peticolas, L. M.; Luhmann, J.; MacCallum, J.

2008-06-01

Can we hear the Sun or its solar wind? Not in the sense that they make sound. But we can take the particle, magnetic field, electric field, and image data and turn it into sound to demonstrate what the data tells us. We present work on turning data from the two-satellite NASA mission called STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) into sounds and music (sonification). STEREO has two satellites orbiting the Sun near Earth's orbit to study the coronal mass ejections (CMEs) from the Corona. One sonification project aims to inspire musicians, museum patrons, and the public to learn more about CMEs by downloading STEREO data and using it to make music. We demonstrate the software and discuss the way in which it was developed. A second project aims to produce a museum exhibit using STEREO imagery and sounds from STEREO data. We demonstrate a "walk across the Sun" created for this exhibit so people can hear the features on solar images. We show how pixel intensity translates into pitches from selectable scales with selectable musical scale size and octave locations. We also share our successes and lessons learned.

Organising Collective Action for Effective Environmental Management and Social Learning in Wales

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Mills, Jane; Gibbon, David; Ingram, Julie; Reed, Matt; Short, Christopher; Dwyer, Janet

2011-01-01

The paper explored key factors that might lead to successful agri-environmental social learning and collective action in order to deliver landscape-scale resource management within agri-environment schemes. Using the theory of collective action as an analytical framework the paper examined findings from in-depth interviews with 20 members of two…

Action Learning: A New Method to Increase Tractor Rollover Protective Structure (ROPS) Adoption

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Biddle, Elyce Anne; Keane, Paul R.

2016-01-01

Action Learning is a problem-solving process that is used in various industries to address difficult problems. This project applied Action Learning to a leading problem in agricultural safety. Tractor overturns are the leading cause of fatal injury to farmworkers. This cause of injury is preventable using rollover protective structures (ROPS), protective equipment that functions as a roll bar structure to protect the operator in the event of an overturn. For agricultural tractors manufactured after 1976 and employee operated, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) regulation requires employers to equip them with ROPS and seat belts. By the mid-1980s, US tractor manufacturers began adding ROPS on all farm tractors over 20 horsepower sold in the United States (http://www.nasdonline.org/document/113/d001656/rollover-protection-for-farm-tractor-operators.html). However, many older tractors remain in use without ROPS, putting tractor operators at continued risk for traumatic injury and fatality. For many older tractor models ROPS are available for retrofit, but for a variety of reasons, tractor owners have not chosen to retrofit those ROPS. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) attempted various means to ameliorate this occupational safety risk, including the manufacture of a low-cost ROPS for self-assembly. Other approaches address barriers to adoption. An Action Learning approach to increasing adoption of ROPS was followed in Virginia and New York, with mixed results. Virginia took action to increase the manufacturing and adoption of ROPS, but New York saw problems that would be insurmountable. Increased focus on team composition might be needed to establish effective Action Learning teams to address this problem. PMID:22994641

Learn about Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV)

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... the Planet and Lung Health by Reducing Air Pollution Blog: JUUL: A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing '; } else { ... while processing XML file."); } }); } } --> Blank Section Header Lung Disease Lookup RSV Learn About Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) RSV Symptoms, Causes & Risk Factors ...

Action learning for health system governance: the reward and challenge of co-production.

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Lehmann, Uta; Gilson, Lucy

2015-10-01

Health policy and systems research (HPSR) is centrally concerned with people, their relationships and the actions and practices they can implement towards better health systems. These concerns suggest that HPS researchers must work in direct engagement with the practitioners and practice central to the inquiry, acknowledging their tacit knowledge and drawing it into generating new insights into health system functioning. Social science perspectives are of particular importance in this field because health policies and health systems are themselves social and political constructs. However, how can social science methodologies such as action research and narrative and appreciative enquiry enable such research, and how can methodologies from different disciplines be woven together to construct and make meaning of evidence for 'this' field? This article seeks to present 'methodological musings' on these points, to prompt wider discussion on the practice of HPSR. It draws on one long-term collaborative action learning research project being undertaken in Cape Town, South Africa. The District Innovation and Action Learning for Health System Development project is an action research partnership between two South African academic institutions and two health authorities focused, ultimately, on strengthening governance in primary health care.Drawing on this experience, the article considers three interrelated issues: The diversity and complexities of practitioner and research actors involved in co-producing HPSR; The nature of co-production and the importance of providing space to grapple across different systems of meaning;The character of evidence and data in co-production. There is much to be learnt from research traditions outside the health sector, but HPSR must work out its own practices--through collaboration and innovation among researchers and practitioners. In this article, we provide one set of experiences to prompt wider reflection and stimulate engagement on the

The Ghost Condition: Imitation Versus Emulation in Young Children's Observational Learning.

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Thompson, Doreen E.; Russell, James

2004-01-01

Although observational learning by children may occur through imitating a modeler's actions, it can also occur through learning about an object's dynamic affordances- a process that M. Tomasello (1996) calls "emulation." The relative contributions of imitation and emulation within observational learning were examined in a study with 14- to…

A Study on Students Acquisition of IT Knowledge and Its Implication on M-Learning.

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Balavivekanandhan, A; Arulchelvan, S

2015-01-01

The boom in mobile technology has seen a dramatic rise in its usage. This has led to usage of mobiles even in the academic context for further learning. Although the advantages of m-learning (mobile learning) are visible, studies are required to address the aspects that shape its virtual expectations. The acceptance of mobile technology relies mostly on how the students feel about mobile technology fitting into their requirements. Yet, in spite of the significance in the potential of m-learning, research studies have only inadequate data to identify the factors that influence their decision to adapt the mobile technology for the purpose of learning. To deal with this space, the present study was undertaken to correlate the IT skills of students with their impact on their acceptance of m-learning. The research study found that the perceived usability along with the usefulness of m-learning impacts the association between IT expertise and the objective of learners' acceptance of m-learning. A survey of 892 students from Engineering, Arts, and Science Colleges found that IT skills influence student's acquisition of m-learning technology. Specialized and advanced skills in mobile technology along with basic skills play a significant role in influencing a student to accept m-learning. But no specific substantiation has been established to support the statement that highly developed IT skills have influenced the students to accept m-learning.

Using E-Learning Portfolio Technology To Support Visual Art Learning

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Greer Jones-Woodham

2009-08-01

Full Text Available Inspired by self-directed learning (SDL theories, this paper uses learning portfolios as a reflective practice to improve student learning and develop personal responsibility, growth and autonomy in learning in a Visual Arts course. Students use PowerPoint presentations to demonstrate their concepts by creating folders that are linked to e-portfolios on the University website. This paper establishes the role of learning e-portfolios to improve teaching and learning as a model of reflection, collaboration and documentation in the making of art as a self-directed process. These portfolios link students' creative thinking to their conceptual frameworks. They also establish a process of inquiry using journals to map students' processes through their reflections and peer feedback. This practice argues that learning e-portfolios in studio art not only depends on a set of objectives whose means are justified by an agreed end but also depends on a practice that engages students' reflection about their actions while in their art- making practice. Using the principles of the maker as the intuitive and reflective practitioner, the making as the process in which the learning e-portfolios communicate the process and conceptual frameworks of learning and the eventual product, and the made as evidence of that learning in light of progress made, this paper demonstrates that learning-in-action and reflecting-in and-on-action are driven by self-direction. With technology, students bring their learning context to bear with the use of SDL. Students' use of PowerPoint program technology in making their portfolios is systematic and builds on students' competencies as this process guides students' beliefs and actions about their work that is based on theory and concepts in response to a visual culture that is Trinidad and Tobago. Students' self–directed art-making process as a self directed learning, models the process of articulated learning. Communicating about

Global Connections for Lasting Impressions: Experiential Learning about TCP

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Allison, Colin; Miller, Alan; Oliver, Iain; Sturgeon, Thomas

“Tell me and I forget, Show me and I remember, Involve me and I understand”. This paper discusses the motivation for, and design of, a learning resource which allows students to explore the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). TCP is responsible for transporting over 80% of the traffic on the Internet - all web and e-mail for example - and in addition is the primary means of achieving Internet congestion control. TCP is therefore core to modern life. It is a protocol under constant study with a view to evolution, and it is incumbent on all ICT curricula to provide education at appropriate levels about its dynamics, strengths and weaknesses. There are no shortages of good textbooks which provide information on TCP, but these are no substitute for experiential learning in order to provide a lasting understanding. The TCP Live learning resource allows students to explore the behavior of TCP on the global Internet, and see the wide variety of conditions that the protocol has to cope with, thereby extending their viewpoint outwith the limited scope of their own institutional firewalls.

Effect of an Educational Game on University Students' Learning about Action Potentials

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Luchi, Kelly Cristina Gaviao; Montrezor, Luís Henrique; Marcondes, Fernanda K.

2017-01-01

The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of an educational game that is used for teaching the mechanisms of the action potentials in cell membranes. The game was composed of pieces representing the intracellular and extracellular environments, ions, ion channels, and the Na+-K+-ATPase pump. During the game activity, the students arranged…

Moral Learning: Conceptual foundations and normative relevance.

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Railton, Peter

2017-10-01

What is distinctive about a bringing a learning perspective to moral psychology? Part of the answer lies in the remarkable transformations that have taken place in learning theory over the past two decades, which have revealed how powerful experience-based learning can be in the acquisition of abstract causal and evaluative representations, including generative models capable of attuning perception, cognition, affect, and action to the physical and social environment. When conjoined with developments in neuroscience, these advances in learning theory permit a rethinking of fundamental questions about the acquisition of moral understanding and its role in the guidance of behavior. For example, recent research indicates that spatial learning and navigation involve the formation of non-perspectival as well as ego-centric models of the physical environment, and that spatial representations are combined with learned information about risk and reward to guide choice and potentiate further learning. Research on infants provides evidence that they form non-perspectival expected-value representations of agents and actions as well, which help them to navigate the human environment. Such representations can be formed by highly-general mental processes such as causal and empathic simulation, and thus afford a foundation for spontaneous moral learning and action that requires no innate moral faculty and can exhibit substantial autonomy with respect to community norms. If moral learning is indeed integral with the acquisition and updating of casual and evaluative models, this affords a new way of understanding well-known but seemingly puzzling patterns in intuitive moral judgment-including the notorious "trolley problems." Copyright © 2016 The Author. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Development of Social Learning in Infants and Young Children

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Eydam, Angelique

2017-01-01

Social learning is one important way that children learn about the world. This thesis presents and discusses several current social learning theories, exploring how they explain different facets of social learning. In particular, I examined the naïve theory of rational action, the theory of natural pedagogy, the ideomotor approach to social and imitative learning, and the normative account of social learning. Each theory is reviewed on how it explains four facets of social learning: imitation...

Interactive Videos Enhance Learning about Socio-Ecological Systems

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Smithwick, Erica; Baxter, Emily; Kim, Kyung; Edel-Malizia, Stephanie; Rocco, Stevie; Blackstock, Dean

2018-01-01

Two forms of interactive video were assessed in an online course focused on conservation. The hypothesis was that interactive video enhances student perceptions about learning and improves mental models of social-ecological systems. Results showed that students reported greater learning and attitudes toward the subject following interactive video.…

Implementing Experiential Action Learning in International Management Education: The Global Business Strategic (GLOBUSTRAT) Consulting Program

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Kamath, Shyam; Agrawal, Jagdish; Krickx, Guido

2008-01-01

This paper discusses the theoretical foundations and implementation challenges and outcomes of a unique "hands-on" global consulting program that is integrated into an international EMBA program for mid-career and senior American and European managers. It details the challenges for the integration of experiential action learning, double-loop…

Finite Action-Set Learning Automata for Economic Dispatch Considering Electric Vehicles and Renewable Energy Sources

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Junpeng Zhu

2014-07-01

Full Text Available The coming interaction between a growing electrified vehicle fleet and the desired growth in renewable energy provides new insights into the economic dispatch (ED problem. This paper presents an economic dispatch model that considers electric vehicle charging, battery exchange stations, and wind farms. This ED model is a high-dimensional, non-linear, and stochastic problem and its solution requires powerful methods. A new finite action-set learning automata (FALA-based approach that has the ability to adapt to a stochastic environment is proposed. The feasibility of the proposed approach is demonstrated in a modified IEEE 30 bus system. It is compared with continuous action-set learning automata and particle swarm optimization-based approaches in terms of convergence characteristics, computational efficiency, and solution quality. Simulation results show that the proposed FALA-based approach was indeed capable of more efficiently obtaining the approximately optimal solution. In addition, by using an optimal dispatch schedule for the interaction between electric vehicle stations and power systems, it is possible to reduce the gap between demand and power generation at different times of the day.

Learning about Students' Culture and Language through Family Stories Elicited by "Dichos"

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Sanchez, Claudia

2009-01-01

Teachers' knowing about students and their families is critical to ensuring relevant classroom instruction. The "Family Storytelling through Dichos" approach is explored as a culturally and linguistically appropriate mechanism for learning about students' backgrounds. This article posits that this approach may be a viable one, since it is rooted…

Beyond You and Me: Stories for Collective Action and Learning? Perspectives from an Action Research Project

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Gearty, Margaret

2015-01-01

This paper explores the combination of storytelling and reflective action research as a means to effect change and learning within and across communities and organizations. Taking the complex challenge of "pro-environmental behaviour change" as an example, the paper reflects on the experiences of a pilot project run for the UK government…

Producing More Actionable Science Isn't the Problem; It's Providing Decision-Makers with Access to Right Actionable Knowledge

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Trexler, M.

2017-12-01

Policy-makers today have almost infinite climate-relevant scientific and other information available to them. The problem for climate change decision-making isn't missing science or inadequate knowledge of climate risks; the problem is that the "right" climate change actionable knowledge isn't getting to the right decision-maker, or is getting there too early or too late to effectively influence her decision-making. Actionable knowledge is not one-size-fit-all, and for a given decision-maker might involve scientific, economic, or risk-based information. Simply producing more and more information as we are today is not the solution, and actually makes it harder for individual decision-makers to access "their" actionable knowledge. The Climatographers began building the Climate Web five years ago to test the hypothesis that a knowledge management system could help navigate the gap between infinite information and individual actionable knowledge. Today the Climate Web's more than 1,500 index terms allow instant access to almost any climate change topic. It is a curated public-access knowledgebase of more than 1,000 books, 2,000 videos, 15,000 reports and articles, 25,000 news stories, and 3,000 websites. But it is also much more, linking together tens of thousands of individually extracted ideas and graphics, and providing Deep Dives into more than 100 key topics from changing probability distributions of extreme events to climate communications best practices to cognitive dissonance in climate change decision-making. The public-access Climate Web is uniquely able to support cross-silo learning, collaboration, and actionable knowledge dissemination. The presentation will use the Climate Web to demonstrate why knowledge management should be seen as a critical component of science and policy-making collaborations.

Talking about teaching and learning mathematics in indigenous schools

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Lucélida de Fátima Maia da Costa

2012-09-01

Full Text Available To teach and to learn mathematics are not always conjugated concomitantly, particularly in the context of formal indigenous schools. This article puts in discussion some facts about the role of schools in indigenous communities, often mistakenly called Indian schools, as well as questions about the meaning of teaching mathematics in those contexts. Based on the concepts of ethnomathematics, it shows that a dialogue is possible between the traditional mathematical knowledge of various ethnic groups of the Amazon and the knowledge disseminated by formal school teaching practice.

Place-based Learning About Climate with Elementary GLOBE

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Hatheway, B.; Gardiner, L. S.; Harte, T.; Stanitski, D.; Taylor, J.

2017-12-01

Place-based education - helping students make connections between themselves, their community, and their local environment - is an important tool to help young learners understand their regional climate and start to learn about climate and environmental change. Elementary GLOBE storybooks and learning activities allow opportunities for place-based education instructional strategies about climate. In particular, two modules in the Elementary GLOBE unit - Seasons and Climate - provide opportunities for students to explore their local climate and environment. The storybooks and activities also make connections to other parts of elementary curriculum, such as arts, geography, and math. Over the long term, place-based education can also encourage students to be stewards of their local environment. A strong sense of place may help students to see themselves as stakeholders in their community and its resilience. In places that are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate and environmental change and the economic, social, and environmental tradeoffs of community decisions, helping young students developing a sense of place and to see the connection between Earth science, local community, and their lives can have a lasting impact on how a community evolves for decades to come. Elementary GLOBE was designed to help elementary teachers (i.e., grades K-4) integrate Earth system science topics into their curriculum as they teach literacy skills to students. This suite of instructional materials includes seven modules. Each module contains a science-based storybook and learning activities that support the science content addressed in the storybooks. Elementary GLOBE modules feature air quality, climate, clouds, Earth system, seasons, soil, and water. New eBooks allow students to read stories on computers or tablets, with the option of listening to each story with an audio recording. A new Elementary GLOBE Teacher Implementation Guide, published in 2017, provides

Chile: educational game, "Learning about AIDS: the Responsibility of All".

Science.gov (United States)

1993-01-01

For more than 10 years, People's Health Education (EPES) has developed educational materials which call upon target audiences to integrate their practical experiences into a collective learning process based upon games. The methodology and materials aim to meet the needs of the most underprivileged sections of the population. EPES produced "Learning about AIDS: the responsibility of all," a game which can be used as it is or adapted to meet the needs of differing groups. The objectives of the game are to provide basic information on AIDS; to facilitate the expression of ideas, beliefs, and myths about AIDS; to promote forums for discussion in order to exchange opinions and views on sexuality and AIDS; to create awareness on how AIDS affects the community; and to create awareness of the need to prevent the disease. Played in couples to strengthen the level of interpersonal communication on such issues, the game is played because AIDS is a fact of everyday life which is affecting the community, because learning about AIDS will help people to protect themselves and their communities from the disease and groundless associated fears, and because open discussion is needed to help prevent more people from becoming infected with HIV.

On the influence of reward on action-effect binding

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Paul Simon Muhle-Karbe

2012-11-01

Full Text Available Ideomotor theory states that the formation of anticipatory representations about the perceptual consequences of an action (i.e. action-effect (A-E binding provides the functional basis of voluntary action control. A host of studies has demonstrated that A-E binding occurs fast and effortlessly, yet only little is known about cognitive and affective factors that influence this learning process. In the present study, we sought to test whether the motivational value of an action modulates the acquisition of A-E associations. To this end, we associated specific actions with monetary incentives during the acquisition of novel A-E mappings. In a subsequent test phase, the degree of binding was assessed by presenting the former effect stimuli as task-irrelevant response primes in a forced-choice response task in the absence of any reward. Binding, as indexed by response priming through the former action effects, was only found for reward-related A-E mappings. Moreover, the degree to which reward associations modulated the binding strength was predicted by individuals’ trait sensitivity to reward. These observations indicate that the association of actions and their immediate outcomes depends on the motivational value of the action during learning, as well as on the motivational disposition of the individual. On a larger scale, these findings also highlight the link between ideomotor theories and reinforcement-learning theories, providing an interesting perspective for future research on anticipatory regulation of behavior.

Action Research to Improve the Learning Space for Diagnostic Techniques

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Ellen Ariel

2015-08-01

Full Text Available The module described and evaluated here was created in response to perceived learning difficulties in diagnostic test design and interpretation for students in third-year Clinical Microbiology. Previously, the activities in lectures and laboratory classes in the module fell into the lower cognitive operations of “knowledge” and “understanding.” The new approach was to exchange part of the traditional activities with elements of interactive learning, where students had the opportunity to engage in deep learning using a variety of learning styles. The effectiveness of the new curriculum was assessed by means of on-course student assessment throughout the module, a final exam, an anonymous questionnaire on student evaluation of the different activities and a focus group of volunteers. Although the new curriculum enabled a major part of the student cohort to achieve higher pass grades (p < 0.001, it did not meet the requirements of the weaker students, and the proportion of the students failing the module remained at 34%. The action research applied here provided a number of valuable suggestions from students on how to improve future curricula from their perspective. Most importantly, an interactive online program that facilitated flexibility in the learning space for the different reagents and their interaction in diagnostic tests was proposed. The methods applied to improve and assess a curriculum refresh by involving students as partners in the process, as well as the outcomes, are discussed.

Action Research to Improve the Learning Space for Diagnostic Techniques.

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Ariel, Ellen; Owens, Leigh

2015-12-01

The module described and evaluated here was created in response to perceived learning difficulties in diagnostic test design and interpretation for students in third-year Clinical Microbiology. Previously, the activities in lectures and laboratory classes in the module fell into the lower cognitive operations of "knowledge" and "understanding." The new approach was to exchange part of the traditional activities with elements of interactive learning, where students had the opportunity to engage in deep learning using a variety of learning styles. The effectiveness of the new curriculum was assessed by means of on-course student assessment throughout the module, a final exam, an anonymous questionnaire on student evaluation of the different activities and a focus group of volunteers. Although the new curriculum enabled a major part of the student cohort to achieve higher pass grades (p < 0.001), it did not meet the requirements of the weaker students, and the proportion of the students failing the module remained at 34%. The action research applied here provided a number of valuable suggestions from students on how to improve future curricula from their perspective. Most importantly, an interactive online program that facilitated flexibility in the learning space for the different reagents and their interaction in diagnostic tests was proposed. The methods applied to improve and assess a curriculum refresh by involving students as partners in the process, as well as the outcomes, are discussed. Journal of Microbiology & Biology Education.

A Study on Students Acquisition of IT Knowledge and Its Implication on M-Learning

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A. Balavivekanandhan

2015-01-01

Full Text Available The boom in mobile technology has seen a dramatic rise in its usage. This has led to usage of mobiles even in the academic context for further learning. Although the advantages of m-learning (mobile learning are visible, studies are required to address the aspects that shape its virtual expectations. The acceptance of mobile technology relies mostly on how the students feel about mobile technology fitting into their requirements. Yet, in spite of the significance in the potential of m-learning, research studies have only inadequate data to identify the factors that influence their decision to adapt the mobile technology for the purpose of learning. To deal with this space, the present study was undertaken to correlate the IT skills of students with their impact on their acceptance of m-learning. The research study found that the perceived usability along with the usefulness of m-learning impacts the association between IT expertise and the objective of learners’ acceptance of m-learning. A survey of 892 students from Engineering, Arts, and Science Colleges found that IT skills influence student’s acquisition of m-learning technology. Specialized and advanced skills in mobile technology along with basic skills play a significant role in influencing a student to accept m-learning. But no specific substantiation has been established to support the statement that highly developed IT skills have influenced the students to accept m-learning.

Improving student midwives’ practice learning in Uganda through action research: the MOMENTUM project

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Joy Kemp

2018-05-01

Full Text Available Background and context: The Royal College of Midwives is engaged in a long-term twinning partnership with the Uganda Private Midwives Association. Uganda is one of the poorest countries in the world and only 27% of women and newborns have their needs met (UNFPA, 2014. A well-skilled, competent midwifery workforce is required to meet these needs yet Ugandan student midwives often receive poor-quality clinical education. The Ugandan Nurses and Midwives Council approached the Royal College of Midwives for assistance in designing a system of mentorship for Ugandan midwifery to address this gap. The project was funded by UK-Aid through the Tropical Health and Education Trust. Aims of the project: MOMENTUM was a 20-month action research project that aimed to develop and pilot a model of mentorship for student midwives in Uganda. This article focuses on one workstream relating to practice development, a twinning project that used workbased learning and appreciative inquiry, embedded in an action research approach, to facilitate practice development. Conclusions: This project added to the body of knowledge about midwifery twinning for building capacity in mentorship, research, and cross-cultural competence. MOMENTUM created a powerful community of practice that was enabling, fulfilling and transformative. Replication of this would require funding, management capacity and sufficient lead time for participatory planning and piloting. MOMENTUM’s audit tool was a bespoke design for this pilot project and so may not be transferable to other settings without further development, testing and validation. Implications for practice: •\tTwinning, action research, appreciative enquiry and workbased learning can be effective in enabling practice development •\tThe impact of midwifery twinning on leadership development requires further investigation, together with greater evidence on the reciprocal impact of twinning on the sending country

Grade 8 students' capability of analytical thinking and attitude toward science through teaching and learning about soil and its' pollution based on science technology and society (STS) approach

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Boonprasert, Lapisarin; Tupsai, Jiraporn; Yuenyong, Chokchai

2018-01-01

This study reported Grade 8 students' analytical thinking and attitude toward science in teaching and learning about soil and its' pollution through science technology and society (STS) approach. The participants were 36 Grade 8 students in Naklang, Nongbualumphu, Thailand. The teaching and learning about soil and its' pollution through STS approach had carried out for 6 weeks. The soil and its' pollution unit through STS approach was developed based on framework of Yuenyong (2006) that consisted of five stages including (1) identification of social issues, (2) identification of potential solutions, (3) need for knowledge, (4) decision-making, and (5) socialization stage. Students' analytical thinking and attitude toward science was collected during their learning by participant observation, analytical thinking test, students' tasks, and journal writing. The findings revealed that students could gain their capability of analytical thinking. They could give ideas or behave the characteristics of analytical thinking such as thinking for classifying, compare and contrast, reasoning, interpreting, collecting data and decision making. Students' journal writing reflected that the STS class of soil and its' pollution motivated students. The paper will discuss implications of these for science teaching and learning through STS in Thailand.

Learner Views about Cooperative Learning in Social Learning Networks

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Cankaya, Serkan; Yunkul, Eyup

2018-01-01

The purpose of this study was to reveal the attitudes and views of university students about the use of Edmodo as a cooperative learning environment. In the research process, the students were divided into groups of 4 or 5 within the scope of a course given in the department of Computer Education and Instructional Technology. For each group,…

Hebbian learning and predictive mirror neurons for actions, sensations and emotions

OpenAIRE

Keysers, C.; Gazzola, Valeria

2014-01-01

Spike-timing-dependent plasticity is considered the neurophysiological basis of Hebbian learning and has been shown to be sensitive to both contingency and contiguity between pre- and postsynaptic activity. Here, we will examine how applying this Hebbian learning rule to a system of interconnected neurons in the presence of direct or indirect re-afference (e.g. seeing/hearing one's own actions) predicts the emergence of mirror neurons with predictive properties. In this framework, we analyse ...

New instrument for measuring student beliefs about physics and learning physics: The Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey

Science.gov (United States)

Adams, W. K.; Perkins, K. K.; Podolefsky, N. S.; Dubson, M.; Finkelstein, N. D.; Wieman, C. E.

2006-06-01

The Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS) is a new instrument designed to measure student beliefs about physics and about learning physics. This instrument extends previous work by probing additional aspects of student beliefs and by using wording suitable for students in a wide variety of physics courses. The CLASS has been validated using interviews, reliability studies, and extensive statistical analyses of responses from over 5000 students. In addition, a new methodology for determining useful and statistically robust categories of student beliefs has been developed. This paper serves as the foundation for an extensive study of how student beliefs impact and are impacted by their educational experiences. For example, this survey measures the following: that most teaching practices cause substantial drops in student scores; that a student’s likelihood of becoming a physics major correlates with their “Personal Interest” score; and that, for a majority of student populations, women’s scores in some categories, including “Personal Interest” and “Real World Connections,” are significantly different from men’s scores.

Pre-Service Teachers’ Beliefs about Foreign Language Learning: A Study of Three Different Teacher Training Study Programmes in Slovenia

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Darija Skubic

2017-12-01

Full Text Available It has been determined that beliefs about language learning are significant for the learning and teaching process, and that learners may differ in their beliefs towards learning a new language. Similarly, student-teachers of different subjects may differ in their beliefs about language learning. The main aim of this study was thus to investigate pre-service preschool teachers’, primary school teachers’, and special education teachers’ beliefs about foreign language learning in Slovenia. Three different areas were researched more closely: beliefs about foreign language aptitude, beliefs about the nature of learning and beliefs about foreign language motivations and expectations. The BALLI questionnaire was used to gather data, with responses provided by170 first-year students. The results show that despite attending different teacher training study programmes, students do not differ significantly in their beliefs about language learning; however, in comparison to other studies, the results imply that learners from different cultures see language learning differently.

You plan, you test and then it happens: Lessons learned from the Schneider warehouse tornado recovery.

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Marotz, William T

2017-12-01

This paper is about the experience gained and lessons learned while dealing with the long-term recovery of Schneider's Port Logistics Division following extensive damage to three warehouse/ office facilities in Savannah, GA on 25th April, 2015. This paper will provide insight into how the initial assessments were handled, how the skill sets needed by the response teams were determined, and what further actions were triggered as more detailed information was received and assessed by the leadership team. This paper will also provide information as to how closely the company followed its existing contingency and disaster recovery plans, as well as where those plans fell short and where it was necessary to make adjustments as the recovery progressed.

Exploring multiple intelligences theory in the context of science education: An action research approach

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Goodnough, Karen Catherine

2000-10-01

Since the publication of Frames of Mind: The Theory in Practice, multiple intelligences, theory (Gardner, 1983) has been used by practitioners in a variety of ways to make teaching and learning more meaningful. However, little attention has been focused on exploring the potential of the theory for science teaching and learning. Consequently, this research study was designed to: (1) explore Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences (1983) and its merit for making science teaching and learning more meaningful; (2) provide a forum for teachers to engage in critical self-reflection about their theory and practice in science education; (3) study the process of action research in the context of science education; and (4) describe the effectiveness of collaborative action research as a framework for teacher development and curriculum development. The study reports on the experiences of four teachers (two elementary teachers, one junior high teacher, and one high school teacher) and myself, a university researcher-facilitator, as we participated in a collaborative action research project. The action research group held weekly meetings over a five-month period (January--May, 1999). The inquiry was a qualitative case study (Stake, 1994) that aimed to understand the perspectives of those directly involved. This was achieved by using multiple methods to collect data: audiotaped action research meetings, fieldnotes, semi-structured interviews, journal writing, and concept mapping. All data were analysed on an ongoing basis. Many positive outcomes resulted from the study in areas such as curriculum development, teacher development, and student learning in science. Through the process of action research, research participants became more reflective about their practice and thus, enhanced their pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman, 1987) in science. Students became more engaged in learning science, gained a greater understanding of how they learn, and experienced a

Molecular substrates of action control in cortico-striatal circuits.

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Shiflett, Michael W; Balleine, Bernard W

2011-09-15

The purpose of this review is to describe the molecular mechanisms in the striatum that mediate reward-based learning and action control during instrumental conditioning. Experiments assessing the neural bases of instrumental conditioning have uncovered functional circuits in the striatum, including dorsal and ventral striatal sub-regions, involved in action-outcome learning, stimulus-response learning, and the motivational control of action by reward-associated cues. Integration of dopamine (DA) and glutamate neurotransmission within these striatal sub-regions is hypothesized to enable learning and action control through its role in shaping synaptic plasticity and cellular excitability. The extracellular signal regulated kinase (ERK) appears to be particularly important for reward-based learning and action control due to its sensitivity to combined DA and glutamate receptor activation and its involvement in a range of cellular functions. ERK activation in striatal neurons is proposed to have a dual role in both the learning and performance factors that contribute to instrumental conditioning through its regulation of plasticity-related transcription factors and its modulation of intrinsic cellular excitability. Furthermore, perturbation of ERK activation by drugs of abuse may give rise to behavioral disorders such as addiction. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

A Safe Place to Stay Sharp: Action Learning Meets Cooperative Inquiry in the Service of NHS OD Capacity Building

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Traeger, James; Norgate, Carolyn

2015-01-01

This is an account of practice. It explores the meeting point between action learning and action research, as a way of doing capacity building in organisational development (OD) in the NHS in the UK. The authors were part of a short cooperative inquiry (Heron, J. 1996. "Co-operative Inquiry: Research into the Human Condition." London:…

Primitive Based Action Representation and recognition

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Baby, Sanmohan

The presented work is aimed at designing a system that will model and recognize actions and its interaction with objects. Such a system is aimed at facilitating robot task learning. Activity modeling and recognition is very important for its potential applications in surveillance, human-machine i......The presented work is aimed at designing a system that will model and recognize actions and its interaction with objects. Such a system is aimed at facilitating robot task learning. Activity modeling and recognition is very important for its potential applications in surveillance, human......-machine interface, entertainment, biomechanics etc. Recent developments in neuroscience suggest that all actions are a compositions of smaller units called primitives. Current works based on primitives for action recognition uses a supervised framework for specifying the primitives. We propose a method to extract...... primitives automatically. These primitives are to be used to generate actions based on certain rules for combining. These rules are expressed as a stochastic context free grammar. A model merging approach is adopted to learn a Hidden Markov Model to t the observed data sequences. The states of the HMM...

Baccalaureate nursing students' perspectives on learning about caring in China: a qualitative descriptive study.

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Ma, Fang; Li, Jiping; Liang, Hongmin; Bai, Yangjuan; Song, Jianhua

2014-03-04

The need to provide humanistic care in the contemporary healthcare system is more imperative now and the importance of cultivating caring in nursing education is urgent. Caring as the primary work of nursing has been discussed extensively, such as the meaning of caring, and teaching and learning strategies to improve nursing students' caring ability. Yet attempts to understand students' perspectives on learning about caring and to know their learning needs are seldom presented. The aim of this qualitative descriptive study was to explore the baccalaureate nursing students' perspectives on learning about caring in China. A qualitative descriptive study using focus group interviews were undertaken in two colleges in Yunnan Province, China from February 2010 to April 2010. Purposeful sampling of 20 baccalaureate nursing students were recruited. Content analysis of the transcribed data was adopted to identify the themes. Four categories with some sub-categories related to students' perspectives on learning about caring were identified from the data: 1) Learning caring by role model; 2) conducive learning environment as the incentive to the learning about caring; 3) lack of directive substantive way of learning as the hindrance to the learning about caring; 4) lack of cultural competency as the barrier to the learning about caring. Both caring and uncaring experiences can promote the learning about caring in a way of reflective practice. The formal, informal and hidden curricula play an important role in the learning about caring. Cultural awareness, sensitivity and humility are important in the process of learning to care in a multicultural area.

Baccalaureate nursing Students’ perspectives on learning about caring in China: a qualitative descriptive study

Science.gov (United States)

2014-01-01

Background The need to provide humanistic care in the contemporary healthcare system is more imperative now and the importance of cultivating caring in nursing education is urgent. Caring as the primary work of nursing has been discussed extensively, such as the meaning of caring, and teaching and learning strategies to improve nursing students’ caring ability. Yet attempts to understand students’ perspectives on learning about caring and to know their learning needs are seldom presented. The aim of this qualitative descriptive study was to explore the baccalaureate nursing students’ perspectives on learning about caring in China. Methods A qualitative descriptive study using focus group interviews were undertaken in two colleges in Yunnan Province, China from February 2010 to April 2010. Purposeful sampling of 20 baccalaureate nursing students were recruited. Content analysis of the transcribed data was adopted to identify the themes. Results Four categories with some sub-categories related to students’ perspectives on learning about caring were identified from the data: 1) Learning caring by role model; 2) conducive learning environment as the incentive to the learning about caring; 3) lack of directive substantive way of learning as the hindrance to the learning about caring; 4) lack of cultural competency as the barrier to the learning about caring. Conclusions Both caring and uncaring experiences can promote the learning about caring in a way of reflective practice. The formal, informal and hidden curricula play an important role in the learning about caring. Cultural awareness, sensitivity and humility are important in the process of learning to care in a multicultural area. PMID:24589087

Learning progressions from a sociocultural perspective: response to "co-constructing cultural landscapes for disciplinary learning in and out of school: the next generation science standards and learning progressions in action"

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Tytler, Russell

2016-10-01

This article discusses a case for a different, socio-cultural way of looking at learning progressions as treated in the next generation science standards (NGSS) as described by Ralph Cordova and Phyllis Balcerzak's paper "Co-constructing cultural landscapes for disciplinary learning in and out of school: the next generation science standards and learning progressions in action". The paper is interesting for a number of reasons, and in this response I will identify different aspects of the paper and link the points made to my own research, and that of colleagues, as complementary perspectives. First, the way that the science curriculum is conceived as an expanding experience that moves from the classroom into the community, across subjects, and across time, links to theoretical positions on disciplinary literacies and notions of learning as apprenticeship into the discursive tools, or `habits of mind' as the authors put it, that underpin disciplinary practice. Second, the formulation of progression through widening communities of practice is a strong feature of the paper, and shows how children take on the role of scientists through this expanding exposure. I will link this approach to some of our own work with school—community science partnerships, drawing on the construct of boundary crossing to tease out relations between school science and professional practice. Third, the demonstration of the expansion of the children's view of what scientists do is well documented in the paper, illustrated by Figure 13 for instance. However I will, in this response, try to draw out and respond to what the paper is saying about the nature of progression; what the progression consists of, over what temporal or spatial dimensions it progresses, and how it can productively frame curriculum processes.

Procuring a Sustainable Future: An Action Learning Approach to the Development and Modelling of Ethical and Sustainable Procurement Practices

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Boak, George; Watt, Peter; Gold, Jeff; Devins, David; Garvey, Robert

2016-01-01

This paper contributes to an understanding of the processes by which organisational actors learn how to affect positive and sustainable social change in their local region through action learning, action research and appreciative inquiry. The paper is based on a critically reflective account of key findings from an ongoing action research project,…

Neural dynamics of learning sound-action associations.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Adam McNamara

Full Text Available A motor component is pre-requisite to any communicative act as one must inherently move to communicate. To learn to make a communicative act, the brain must be able to dynamically associate arbitrary percepts to the neural substrate underlying the pre-requisite motor activity. We aimed to investigate whether brain regions involved in complex gestures (ventral pre-motor cortex, Brodmann Area 44 were involved in mediating association between novel abstract auditory stimuli and novel gestural movements. In a functional resonance imaging (fMRI study we asked participants to learn associations between previously unrelated novel sounds and meaningless gestures inside the scanner. We use functional connectivity analysis to eliminate the often present confound of 'strategic covert naming' when dealing with BA44 and to rule out effects of non-specific reductions in signal. Brodmann Area 44, a region incorporating Broca's region showed strong, bilateral, negative correlation of BOLD (blood oxygen level dependent response with learning of sound-action associations during data acquisition. Left-inferior-parietal-lobule (l-IPL and bilateral loci in and around visual area V5, right-orbital-frontal-gyrus, right-hippocampus, left-para-hippocampus, right-head-of-caudate, right-insula and left-lingual-gyrus also showed decreases in BOLD response with learning. Concurrent with these decreases in BOLD response, an increasing connectivity between areas of the imaged network as well as the right-middle-frontal-gyrus with rising learning performance was revealed by a psychophysiological interaction (PPI analysis. The increasing connectivity therefore occurs within an increasingly energy efficient network as learning proceeds. Strongest learning related connectivity between regions was found when analysing BA44 and l-IPL seeds. The results clearly show that BA44 and l-IPL is dynamically involved in linking gesture and sound and therefore provides evidence that one of

An Investigation of Undergraduate Students' Beliefs about Autonomous Language Learning

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Orawiwatnakul, Wiwat; Wichadee, Saovapa

2017-01-01

The concept of learner autonomy is now playing an important role in the language learning field. An emphasis is put on the new form of learning which enables learners to direct their own learning. This study aimed to examine how undergraduate students believed about autonomous language learning in a university setting and to find out whether some…

Sensitivity of the Action Observation Network to Physical and Observational Learning

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Cross, E.S.; Kraemer, D.J.M.; Hamilton, A.F.D.C.; Kelley, W.M.; Grafton, S.T.

2009-01-01

Human motor skills can be acquired by observation without the benefit of immediate physical practice. The current study tested if physical rehearsal and observational learning share common neural substrates within an action observation network (AON) including premotor and inferior parietal regions,

Inspiring and Training Students for Social Action: Renewing a Needed Tradition

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Lane, Shannon R.; Altman, Julie Cooper; Goldberg, Gertrude Schaffner; Kagotho, Njeri; Palley, Elizabeth; Paul, Marilyn S.

2012-01-01

In social work, it is believed that certain knowledge and skills are learned more effectively through experience than through didactic classroom content. Members of the faculty of a school of social work have developed a Social Action Day to reinforce curriculum and translate into practice material about advocacy and ethical responsibilities for…

Convergence and divergence, a concept for explaining drug actions.

Science.gov (United States)

Watanabe, Takehiko; Kamisaki, Yoshinori; Timmerman, Henk

2004-10-01

For the teaching and/or learning about drug actions and for the discovery and development of new drugs, it is important to understand how drugs act on living bodies. So far, there has been no clear description on the general principle of drug action in pharmacology textbooks. We propose two principles to depict the action mechanism of drugs. The first is that most, if not all, drugs act on proteins at the molecular level, that is, enzymes, receptors, ion channels, and transporters. The second is that a drug may cause divergent or convergent responses, resulting in changes of a physiological or pathological function of the human body. The concept of divergence and convergence can be used to explain the complex individuality of drug actions.

Evaluation of Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey

Science.gov (United States)

Douglas, K. A.; Yale, M. S.; Bennett, D. E.; Haugan, M. P.; Bryan, L. A.

2014-12-01

The Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS) is a widely used instrument designed to measure student attitudes toward physics and learning physics. Previous research revealed a fairly complex factor structure. In this study, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted on data from an undergraduate introductory physics course (n =3844 ) to determine whether a more parsimonious factor structure exists. Exploratory factor analysis results indicate that many of the items from the original CLASS have poor psychometric properties and could not be used in a revised factor structure. The cross validation showed acceptable fit statistics for a three factor model found in the exploratory factor analysis. This research suggests that a more optimum measurement of students' attitudes about physics and learning physics is obtained with a 15-item instrument, which describes the factors of personal application, personal effort, and problem solving. The proposed revised version of the CLASS offers researchers the opportunity to test a shortened version of the instrument that may be able to provide information about students' attitudes in the areas of personal application of physics, personal effort in a physics course, and approaches to problem solving.

Evaluation of Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

K. A. Douglas

2014-11-01

Full Text Available The Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS is a widely used instrument designed to measure student attitudes toward physics and learning physics. Previous research revealed a fairly complex factor structure. In this study, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted on data from an undergraduate introductory physics course (n=3844 to determine whether a more parsimonious factor structure exists. Exploratory factor analysis results indicate that many of the items from the original CLASS have poor psychometric properties and could not be used in a revised factor structure. The cross validation showed acceptable fit statistics for a three factor model found in the exploratory factor analysis. This research suggests that a more optimum measurement of students’ attitudes about physics and learning physics is obtained with a 15-item instrument, which describes the factors of personal application, personal effort, and problem solving. The proposed revised version of the CLASS offers researchers the opportunity to test a shortened version of the instrument that may be able to provide information about students’ attitudes in the areas of personal application of physics, personal effort in a physics course, and approaches to problem solving.

Action observation versus motor imagery in learning a complex motor task: a short review of literature and a kinematics study.

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Gatti, R; Tettamanti, A; Gough, P M; Riboldi, E; Marinoni, L; Buccino, G

2013-04-12

Both motor imagery and action observation have been shown to play a role in learning or re-learning complex motor tasks. According to a well accepted view they share a common neurophysiological basis in the mirror neuron system. Neurons within this system discharge when individuals perform a specific action and when they look at another individual performing the same or a motorically related action. In the present paper, after a short review of literature on the role of action observation and motor imagery in motor learning, we report the results of a kinematics study where we directly compared motor imagery and action observation in learning a novel complex motor task. This involved movement of the right hand and foot in the same angular direction (in-phase movement), while at the same time moving the left hand and foot in an opposite angular direction (anti-phase movement), all at a frequency of 1Hz. Motor learning was assessed through kinematics recording of wrists and ankles. The results showed that action observation is better than motor imagery as a strategy for learning a novel complex motor task, at least in the fast early phase of motor learning. We forward that these results may have important implications in educational activities, sport training and neurorehabilitation. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

An investigation about learning burnout in medical college students and its influencing factors

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Li Ling

2014-03-01

Conclusion: Learning burnout in students is of a moderate level. We should help and guide students according to their profession, grade, learning characteristics, and whether they have existing attributional style problems; these interventions should help to reduce learning burnout.

The power of prepositions: learning with, from and about others in the context of interprofessional education.

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Bainbridge, Lesley; Wood, Victoria Isobel

2012-11-01

This paper is the first of a two-part series. It presents a research study that aimed to provide a more contextual description of the commonly applied definition of interprofessional education (IPE) offered in 2002 by the Centre for the Advancement of Interprofessional Education (CAIPE) in the UK: "when two or more professions learn with, from and about each other to improve collaboration and quality of care." The study confirmed and consolidated key characteristics of IPE by exploring the meaning of with, from and about. The words with, from and about were regarded as complex. Words describing learning with each other included active engagement, co-location and equally valued. Concepts linked to learning about included knowing about people outside their professional role and interaction. Learning from others was characterized by trust, respect and confidence in others' knowledge. Although learning about others was described as the first part of learning with, from and about, there were mixed views on whether learning with or from formed the second part of the definition. Based on this work, the second paper in this series presents a proposed taxonomy for IPE that may serve to inform emerging applications for IPE in the context of education, service delivery and policy. This research contributes to an emerging understanding of IPE that will support competency development and sound curriculum design, continuing professional development and evaluation of the impact of IPE and collaboration on health outcomes.

Banners for Books: "Mighty-Hearted" Kindergartners Take Action through Arts-Based Service Learning

Science.gov (United States)

Montgomery, Sarah E.; Miller, Wendy; Foss, Page; Tallakson, Denise; Howard, Maria

2017-01-01

Teaching about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, is one way to support students' learning about issues of fairness. However, learning about this document is not enough. Students need to have experiences where they explore issues of justice and equity in order to learn about…

The Trajectory of Scholarship about Self-Regulated Learning

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Winne, Philip H.

2017-01-01

The trajectory of scholarship about self-regulated learning (SRL) originates in mid-19th-century writings about learners' sense of responsibility in self education. Although Descartes's 17th-century writings implied mental activities consistent with metacognition, a central feature of SRL, these were inarticulate until Flavell and colleagues'…

Inconvenient Truths about Teacher Learning: Towards Professional Development 3.0

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Korthagen, Fred

2017-01-01

Based on recent findings about teacher learning, a critical analysis of traditional and new approaches to professional development is presented. To a large degree, teacher learning takes place unconsciously and involves cognitive, emotional and motivational dimensions. Moreover, teacher learning takes place at various levels. Although these…

DAPs: Deep Action Proposals for Action Understanding

KAUST Repository

Escorcia, Victor

2016-09-17

Object proposals have contributed significantly to recent advances in object understanding in images. Inspired by the success of this approach, we introduce Deep Action Proposals (DAPs), an effective and efficient algorithm for generating temporal action proposals from long videos. We show how to take advantage of the vast capacity of deep learning models and memory cells to retrieve from untrimmed videos temporal segments, which are likely to contain actions. A comprehensive evaluation indicates that our approach outperforms previous work on a large scale action benchmark, runs at 134 FPS making it practical for large-scale scenarios, and exhibits an appealing ability to generalize, i.e. to retrieve good quality temporal proposals of actions unseen in training.

Joint Facial Action Unit Detection and Feature Fusion: A Multi-conditional Learning Approach.

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Eleftheriadis, Stefanos; Rudovic, Ognjen; Pantic, Maja

2016-10-05

Automated analysis of facial expressions can benefit many domains, from marketing to clinical diagnosis of neurodevelopmental disorders. Facial expressions are typically encoded as a combination of facial muscle activations, i.e., action units. Depending on context, these action units co-occur in specific patterns, and rarely in isolation. Yet, most existing methods for automatic action unit detection fail to exploit dependencies among them, and the corresponding facial features. To address this, we propose a novel multi-conditional latent variable model for simultaneous fusion of facial features and joint action unit detection. Specifically, the proposed model performs feature fusion in a generative fashion via a low-dimensional shared subspace, while simultaneously performing action unit detection using a discriminative classification approach. We show that by combining the merits of both approaches, the proposed methodology outperforms existing purely discriminative/generative methods for the target task. To reduce the number of parameters, and avoid overfitting, a novel Bayesian learning approach based on Monte Carlo sampling is proposed, to integrate out the shared subspace. We validate the proposed method on posed and spontaneous data from three publicly available datasets (CK+, DISFA and Shoulder-pain), and show that both feature fusion and joint learning of action units leads to improved performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods for the task.

Mimetic Learning

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Christoph Wulf

2008-03-01

Full Text Available Mimetic learning, learning by imitation, constitutes one of the most important forms of learning. Mimetic learning does not, however, just denote mere imitation or copying: Rather, it is a process by which the act of relating to other persons and worlds in a mimetic way leads to an en-hancement of one’s own world view, action, and behaviour. Mimetic learning is productive; it is related to the body, and it establishes a connection between the individual and the world as well as other persons; it creates practical knowledge, which is what makes it constitutive of social, artistic, and practical action. Mimetic learning is cultural learning, and as such it is crucial to teaching and education (Wulf, 2004; 2005.

Company learning about corporate social responsibility

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Cramer, J.M.

2005-01-01

This article analyses the learning experiences gained by 19 Dutch companies when implementing the concept of corporate social responsibility in their own business practices. It is concluded that learning processes took place at individual level and, in certain cases, at group level. Learning at

What Is Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASDs) and Why Is It Important That I Know about It?

Science.gov (United States)

... about to help with your Quest. Step 6: Learn about movies and books that can give you information. Step ... or she can be born with an FASD. Children with FASDs often have problems with learning, attention, memory, and problem solving, along with poor ...

Thought about ICRP TG84 report. What beyond it

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Niwa, Ohtsura

2013-01-01

Explained was the ICRP TG84 Report (Report of ICRP Task Group 84 on Initial Lessons Learned from the Nuclear Power Plant Accident in Japan vis-a-vis the ICRP System of Radiological Protection: Issues Identified from the NPP Accident in Japan and Recommendations to Improve the System of Radiation Protection; presented in October, 2012), together with author's thought about it. The Report contained 18 items and their related proposals: Inferring radiation risks (and the misunderstanding of nominal risk coefficients), Attributing radiation effects from low dose exposures, Quantifying radiation exposure, Assessing the importance of internal exposures, Managing emergency crisis, Protecting rescuers and volunteers, Responding with medical aid, Justifying necessary but disruptive protective actions, Transiting from an emergency to an existing situation, Rehabilitating evacuated areas, Categorizing public exposures due to an accident, Restricting individual doses of members of the public, Caring for infants and children, Considering pregnant women and their foetuses and embryos, Monitoring public protection, Dealing with 'contamination' of territories, rubble and residues, and consumer products, Recognizing the importance of psychological consequences, and Fostering the sharing of information. The Report also contained 11 Recommendations of actions for the Commission to take. The author had been installed as the Chair of Radiation Council in February, 2011, just before the Accident in March, and had had to concern the definition of various post-Accident dose limits in Japan, having had often faced the inefficiency of measures. He thought the ICRP protecting system was difficult to understand due to 2 reasons: one was that the system had been written aiming at experts of radiological protection and the other, that the system had been composed not only from science but also from an incorporated standard of social values, which resulted in inconsiderateness to the general

A cooperative inquiry into action learning and praxis development in a community nursing module.

Science.gov (United States)

Jenkins, Emrys R; Mabbett, Gaynor M; Surridge, Andrea G; Warring, Joanna; Gwynn, Elizabeth D

2009-09-01

As nurse lecturers we investigated practice development and action learning approaches aimed at enabling postregistration bachelor's- and master's-level nursing students (Community Health Studies, Nursing in the Home) to advance practice in the context of policy and professional developments. A patchwork text was used to assess summatively what students achieved (practice change/development) and how this was informed critically, via an extended epistemology. First-person inquiry supplemented by cooperative inquiry postcourse completion (including reflective discussions with 16 students and 16 practice mentors) were used to assist coresearcher constructions of meaning. A relational, tripartite approach to learning and assessment (students', teachers', and practice mentors' collective contributions) depends on continuing reflective attention. Action learning enhances interrelation of experience with dialectic thinking. The patchwork text functions to promote creative writing, evaluative thinking, and praxis development. Role modeling by all, being genuine and not just "talking" genuine, is challenging yet crucial if people are to function as mutual resources for learning.

Putting into practice error management theory: Unlearning and learning to manage action errors in construction.

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Love, Peter E D; Smith, Jim; Teo, Pauline

2018-05-01

Error management theory is drawn upon to examine how a project-based organization, which took the form of a program alliance, was able to change its established error prevention mindset to one that enacted a learning mindfulness that provided an avenue to curtail its action errors. The program alliance was required to unlearn its existing routines and beliefs to accommodate the practices required to embrace error management. As a result of establishing an error management culture the program alliance was able to create a collective mindfulness that nurtured learning and supported innovation. The findings provide a much-needed context to demonstrate the relevance of error management theory to effectively address rework and safety problems in construction projects. The robust theoretical underpinning that is grounded in practice and presented in this paper provides a mechanism to engender learning from errors, which can be utilized by construction organizations to improve the productivity and performance of their projects. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Becoming Life-Long Learners--"A Pedagogy for Learning about Visionary Leadership"

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McNeil, Mary, Ed.; Nevin, Ann, Ed.

2014-01-01

In this volume we apply a personal narrative methodology to understanding what we have learned about visionary leadership. Authors in this volume developed their reflections of life-long learning as they investigated existing leadership theories and theories about future leadership. Graduate program faculty and authors read and critically reviewed…

Learning about self: leadership skills for public health

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Rob Moodie

2016-04-01

Full Text Available As public health practitioners and as clinicians we are taught to care for our patients, and for our community members. But how much do we teach and learn about how to lead, manage and care for our colleagues, our team members and ourselves? This paper emphasizes the need for leadership learning and teaching to become an essential element of the practice of public health. The paper presents the author’s perspective on the leadership skills required for public health and describes a five-day intensive course designed to enable participants to develop these skills over time. The paper briefly covers leadership definitions, styles and types and key leadership skills. It mainly focuses on the design and ethos of the course, skills self-assessment, group interaction and methods for developing and refining leadership skills. The course uses a collaborative learning approach where the power differential between teachers, facilitators, guests and participants is minimized. It is based on creating an environment where any participant can reveal his or her stories, successes, failures, preferences and dislikes in a safe manner. It encourages continual, constructive individual reflection, self-assessment and group interaction. The course is aimed at the practice of public health leadership, with a particular emphasis on the leadership of self, of knowing oneself, and of knowing and understanding colleagues retrospectively as well as prospectively. The most important outcome is the design and implementation of participants’ own plans for developing and nurturing their leadership skills.

Fast Facts about Online Learning

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International Association for K-12 Online Learning, 2013

2013-01-01

This report explores the latest data concerning online and blended learning, enrollment, access, courses, and key policies indicators. It also reviews online learning statistics, trends, policy issues, and iNACOL strategic priorities. This report provides a snapshot view of state funding models for both full-time and supplemental online learning…

Spatial learning and memory in male mice with altered growth hormone action.

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Basu, Amrita; McFarlane, Hewlet G; Kopchick, John J

2017-07-01

Growth hormone (GH) has a significant influence on cognitive performance in humans and other mammals. To understand the influence of altered GH action on cognition, we assessed spatial learning and memory using a Barnes maze (BM) comparing twelve-month old, male, bovine GH (bGH) and GH receptor antagonist (GHA) transgenic mice and their corresponding wild type (WT) littermates. During the acquisition training period in the BM, bGH mice showed increased latency, traveled longer path lengths and made more errors to reach the target than WT mice, indicating significantly poorer learning. Short-term memory (STM) and long-term memory (LTM) trials showed significantly suppressed memory retention in bGH mice when compared to the WT group. Conversely, GHA mice showed significantly better learning parameters (latency, path length and errors) and increased use of an efficient search strategy than WT mice. Our study indicates a negative impact of GH excess and a beneficial effect of the inhibition of GH action on spatial learning and memory and, therefore, cognitive performance in male mice. Further research to elucidate GH's role in brain function will facilitate identifying therapeutic applications of GH or GHA for neuropathological and neurodegenerative conditions. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Un cas particulier du scénario dans l'apprentissage des langues : le labyrinthe (action maze Action Mazes: a special case of the scenario for language learning

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Joseph Rézeau

2008-03-01

Full Text Available En didactique des langues l'approche actionnelle et les scénarios sont d'actualité, en lien avec les Tice (Technologies de l'Information et de la Communication pour l'Enseignement. Cependant, des activités de type labyrinthe (action mazes, courantes dans les années 1980 et souvent portées sur les micro-ordinateurs de l'époque, semblent quelque peu tombées dans l'oubli. Cet article entend montrer qu'il est relativement aisé de concevoir et de réaliser de telles activités sur une plateforme d'enseignement à distance telle que Moodle. Nous analyserons également l'impact d'une activité de type labyrinthe sur une population d'étudiants dans le cadre d'un enseignement d'anglais de type Lansad (langues pour spécialistes d'autres disciplines.The development of ICT in language teaching concurs with an interest in task-based approaches and scenarios. Surprisingly, however, such activities as "adventure games" and "action mazes" which were quite popular in CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning in the 1980s seem to have fallen into oblivion. This article aims at demonstrating that it is relatively easy to design and implement "action mazes" on an LMS (Learning Management System such as Moodle. We shall then analyse the impact of an "action maze" learning activity on a population of students of ESP (English for Specific Purposes.

Finding minimal action sequences with a simple evaluation of actions

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Shah, Ashvin; Gurney, Kevin N.

2014-01-01

Animals are able to discover the minimal number of actions that achieves an outcome (the minimal action sequence). In most accounts of this, actions are associated with a measure of behavior that is higher for actions that lead to the outcome with a shorter action sequence, and learning mechanisms find the actions associated with the highest measure. In this sense, previous accounts focus on more than the simple binary signal of “was the outcome achieved?”; they focus on “how well was the outcome achieved?” However, such mechanisms may not govern all types of behavioral development. In particular, in the process of action discovery (Redgrave and Gurney, 2006), actions are reinforced if they simply lead to a salient outcome because biological reinforcement signals occur too quickly to evaluate the consequences of an action beyond an indication of the outcome's occurrence. Thus, action discovery mechanisms focus on the simple evaluation of “was the outcome achieved?” and not “how well was the outcome achieved?” Notwithstanding this impoverishment of information, can the process of action discovery find the minimal action sequence? We address this question by implementing computational mechanisms, referred to in this paper as no-cost learning rules, in which each action that leads to the outcome is associated with the same measure of behavior. No-cost rules focus on “was the outcome achieved?” and are consistent with action discovery. No-cost rules discover the minimal action sequence in simulated tasks and execute it for a substantial amount of time. Extensive training, however, results in extraneous actions, suggesting that a separate process (which has been proposed in action discovery) must attenuate learning if no-cost rules participate in behavioral development. We describe how no-cost rules develop behavior, what happens when attenuation is disrupted, and relate the new mechanisms to wider computational and biological context. PMID:25506326

Understanding Digital Learning and Its Variable Effects

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Means, B.

2016-12-01

An increasing proportion of undergraduate courses use an online or blended learning format. This trend signals major changes in the kind of instruction students receive in their STEM courses, yet evidence about the effectiveness of these new approaches is sparse. Existing syntheses and meta-analyses summarize outcomes from experimental or quasi-experimental studies of online and blended courses and document how few studies incorporate proper controls for differences in student characteristics, instructor behaviors, and other course conditions. The evidence that is available suggests that on average blended courses are equal to or better than traditional face-to-face courses and that online courses are equivalent in terms of learning outcomes. But these averages conceal a tremendous underlying variability. Results vary markedly from course to course, even when the same technology is used in both. Some research suggests that online instruction puts lower-achieving students at a disadvantage. It is clear that introducing digital learning per se is no guarantee that student engagement and learning will be enhanced. Getting more consistently positive impacts out of learning technologies is going to require systematic characterization of the features of learning technologies and associated instructional practices as well as attention to context and student characteristics. This presentation will present a framework for characterizing essential features of digital learning resources, implementation practices, and conditions. It will also summarize the research evidence with respect to the learning impacts of specific technology features including spaced practice, immediate feedback, mastery learning based pacing, visualizations and simulations, gaming features, prompts for explanations and reflection, and tools for online collaboration.

Myths about Technology-Supported Professional Learning

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Killion, Joellen; Treacy, Barbara

2014-01-01

The future of professional learning is shaped by its present and past. As new technologies emerge to increase affordability, access, and appropriateness of professional learning, three beliefs are visible in current practices related to online learning. Each contains a premise that merits identification and examination. The authors call these…

Defining and comparing learning actions in two simulation modalities: students training on a latex arm and each other's arms.

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Ravik, Monika; Havnes, Anton; Bjørk, Ida Torunn

2017-12-01

To explore, describe and compare learning actions that nursing students used during peripheral vein cannulation training on a latex arm or each other's arms in a clinical skills centre. Simulation-based training is thought to enhance learning and transfer of learning from simulation to the clinical setting and is commonly recommended in nursing education. What students actually are doing during simulation-based training is, however, less explored. The analysis of learning actions used during simulation-based training could contribute to development and improvement of simulation as a learning strategy in nursing education. A qualitative explorative and descriptive research design, involving content analysis of video recordings, was used. Video-supported observation of nine nursing students practicing vein cannulation was conducted in a clinical skills centre in late 2012. The students engaged in various learning actions. Students training on a latex arm used a considerably higher number of learning actions relative to those training on each other's arms. In both groups, students' learning actions consisted mainly of seeking and giving support. The teacher provided students training on each other's arms with detailed feedback regarding insertion of the cannula into the vein, while those training on a latex arm received sparse feedback from the teacher and fellow students. The teacher played an important role in facilitating nursing students' practical skill learning during simulation. The provision of support from both teachers and students should be emphasised to ensure that nursing students' learning needs are met. This study suggest that student nurses may be differently and inadequately prepared in peripheral vein cannulation in two simulation modalities used in the academic setting; training on a latex arm and on each other's arms. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Significant Learning and Civic Education: Shifting Frameworks for Teaching in Light of Learning about the Financial Crisis

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

KimMarie McGoldrick

2011-10-01

Full Text Available The recent financial crisis has motivated economic educators to rethink what economics should be taught, acknowledging disconnects between classroom content and real world events. We introduce a learning theory approach that is broader, one that goes beyond such context specific discussions of foundational knowledge and application (i.e., teaching about this specific crisis and provide a framework to address the broader issue of how teaching practices can, by their very nature, minimize such disconnects and provide more effective processes for teaching about current economic conditions. The theory of significant learning (Fink 2003 is presented as a model of how experiences can be used to develop a deep approach to learning, learning that lasts. Experiential learning pedagogies are timeless in that they can be readily modified to promote deeper understanding over a wide range of economic environments. Focusing on one category of significant learning, the human dimension, and one component of the financial crisis, unemployment, examples which modify existing experiential learning practices are described to demonstrate how such pedagogic practices can be readily adapted to teaching and learning about current economic conditions. In short, we demonstrate that incorporating student experiences into pedagogic practice provides a natural alignment of teaching content and real world events, regardless of how those change over time.

What’s about Peer Tutoring Learning Model?

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Muthma'innah, M.

2017-09-01

Mathematics learning outcomes in Indonesia in general is still far from satisfactory. One effort that could be expected to solve the problem is to apply the model of peer tutoring learning in mathematics. This study aims to determine whether the results of students’ mathematics learning can be enhanced through peer tutoring learning models. This type of research is the study of literature, so that the method used is to summarize and analyze the results of relevant research that has been done. Peer tutoring learning model is a model of learning in which students learn in small groups that are grouped with different ability levels, all group members to work together and help each other to understand the material. By paying attention to the syntax of the learning, then learning will be invaluable peer tutoring for students who served as teachers and students are taught. In mathematics, the implementation of this learning model can make students understand each other mathematical concepts and help students in solving mathematical problems that are poorly understood, due to the interaction between students in learning. Then it will be able to improve learning outcomes in mathematics. The impact, it can be applied in mathematics learning.

A literature review about usability evaluation methods for e-learning platforms.

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Freire, Luciana Lopes; Arezes, Pedro Miguel; Campos, José Creissac

2012-01-01

The usability analysis of information systems has been the target of several research studies over the past thirty years. These studies have highlighted a great diversity of points of view, including researchers from different scientific areas such as Ergonomics, Computer Science, Design and Education. Within the domain of information ergonomics, the study of tools and methods used for usability evaluation dedicated to E-learning presents evidence that there is a continuous and dynamic evolution of E-learning systems, in many different contexts -academics and corporative. These systems, also known as LMS (Learning Management Systems), can be classified according to their educational goals and their technological features. However, in these systems the usability issues are related with the relationship/interactions between user and system in the user's context. This review is a synthesis of research project about Information Ergonomics and embraces three dimensions, namely the methods, models and frameworks that have been applied to evaluate LMS. The study also includes the main usability criteria and heuristics used. The obtained results show a notorious change in the paradigms of usability, with which it will be possible to discuss about the studies carried out by different researchers that were focused on usability ergonomic principles aimed at E-learning.

[Perceptions of students and teachers about clinical medicine learning].

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Bitran, Marcela; Zúñiga, Denisse; Leiva, Isabel; Calderón, Maribel; Tomicic, Alemka; Padilla, Oslando; Riquelme, Arnoldo

2014-06-01

The transition to the clinical courses represents a major challenge for medical students who are expected to become experiential learners, able to integrate theory and practice in the context of patient care. There are questions about how students face this challenge. To understand and compare the perceptions of students and clinical tutors on how medical students learn during the transition to the clinical levels of the curriculum. We performed eight focus group discussions with 54 students enrolled in years three to seven and we interviewed eight clinical tutors. Both students' focus group discussions and tutors' interviews were audio recorded, transcribed and analyzed according to the Grounded Theory. Nine main themes emerged from the analysis of students' opinions and six from the tutors' views. The following themes were common to both students and educators: educational activities, actors, clinical settings, learning strategies, transition markers and tutor's role. Educators emphasized the importance of curricular courses' design and students, that of emotions, adaptation and self-care strategies, and threats to learning. There is a common core of students' and clinical tutors' perceptions about the relevance of practical activities, social interactions and context in the development of students' learning and adaptation strategies during the transition to the clinical levels of the curriculum. These results are related to social and cultural theories of learning. Thus we propose a model for early clinical learning that might help to stimulate the reflection of students and medical educators regarding clinical learning and contribute to the development of interventions that improve the clinical learning and teaching practices.

Intuitive Action Set Formation in Learning Classifier Systems with Memory Registers

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Simões, L.F.; Schut, M.C.; Haasdijk, E.W.

2008-01-01

An important design goal in Learning Classifier Systems (LCS) is to equally reinforce those classifiers which cause the level of reward supplied by the environment. In this paper, we propose a new method for action set formation in LCS. When applied to a Zeroth Level Classifier System with Memory

Investigating students' view on STEM in learning about electrical current through STS approach

Science.gov (United States)

Tupsai, Jiraporn; Yuenyong, Chokchai

2018-01-01

This study aims to investigate Grade 11 students' views on Science Technology Engineering Mathematics (STEM) with the integration of learning about electrical current based on Science Technology Society (STS) approach [8]. The participants were 60 Grade 11 students in Demonstration Secondary School, Khon Kaen University, Khon Kaen Province, Thailand. The methodology is in the respect of interpretive paradigm. The teaching and learning about Electrical Current through STS approach carried out over 6 weeks. The Electrical Current unit through STS approach was developed based on framework[8] that consists of five stages including (1) identification of social issues, (2) identification of potential solutions, (3) need for knowledge, (4) decision making, and (5) socialization stage. To start with, the question "what if this world is lack of electricity" was challenged in the class in order to move students to find the problem of how to design Electricity Generation from Clean Energy. Students were expected to apply scientific and other knowledge to design of Electricity Generation. Students' views on STEM were collected during their learning by participant' observation and students' tasks. Their views on STEM were categorized when they applied their knowledge for designing the Electricity Generation. The findings indicated that students cooperatively work to solve the problem when applying knowledge about the content of Science and Mathematics and processing skill of Technology and Engineering. It showed that students held the integration of science, technology, engineering and mathematics to design their possible solutions in learning about Electrical Current. The paper also discusses implications for science teaching and learning through STS in Thailand.

Automatic planning for robots: review of methods and some ideas about structure and learning

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Cuena, J.; Salmeron, C.

1983-01-01

After a brief review of the problems involved in the design of an automatic planner system, the attention is focused in the particular problems that appear when the planner is used to control the actions of a robot. As conclusion, the introduction of techniques for learning in order to improve the efficiency of a planner are suggested, and a method for it, at present in development, is presented. 14 references.

Reinforcement learning for microgrid energy management

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Kuznetsova, Elizaveta; Li, Yan-Fu; Ruiz, Carlos; Zio, Enrico; Ault, Graham; Bell, Keith

2013-01-01

We consider a microgrid for energy distribution, with a local consumer, a renewable generator (wind turbine) and a storage facility (battery), connected to the external grid via a transformer. We propose a 2 steps-ahead reinforcement learning algorithm to plan the battery scheduling, which plays a key role in the achievement of the consumer goals. The underlying framework is one of multi-criteria decision-making by an individual consumer who has the goals of increasing the utilization rate of the battery during high electricity demand (so as to decrease the electricity purchase from the external grid) and increasing the utilization rate of the wind turbine for local use (so as to increase the consumer independence from the external grid). Predictions of available wind power feed the reinforcement learning algorithm for selecting the optimal battery scheduling actions. The embedded learning mechanism allows to enhance the consumer knowledge about the optimal actions for battery scheduling under different time-dependent environmental conditions. The developed framework gives the capability to intelligent consumers to learn the stochastic environment and make use of the experience to select optimal energy management actions. - Highlights: • A consumer exploits a 2 steps-ahead reinforcement learning for battery scheduling. • The Q-learning based mechanism is fed by the predictions of available wind power. • Wind speed state evolutions are modeled with a Markov chain model. • Optimal scheduling actions are learned through the occurrence of similar scenarios. • The consumer manifests a continuous enhance of his knowledge about optimal actions