Modeling pedagogical interactions with machine learning

Zusammenfassung. Dieser Artikel beschreibt einen Ansatz zur Codierung und Analyse pädagogischer Interaktionen zwischen Lernenden und Experten im Bereich der Luftfahrt-Technik im Rahmen einer intelligenten tutoriellen Lernumgebung zur Fehlererkennung und -behebung (Sherlock 2). Es werden zwei prototypische maschinelle Lernverfahren dargestellt, welche bei der Analyse eines Corpus von Dialogprotokollen eingesetzt werden. Die Verfahren generieren der Diskursstruktur möglichst gut entsprechende Grammatiken. Die gefundenen Grammatiken führten zu neuen Einsichten hinsichtlich der Funktion bestimmter Sprechakte in tutoriellen Dialogen sowie zu klaren und präzisen Modellen von Erklärungsdialogen bei Diagnoseproblemen. Summary. This paper describes our approach to coding pedagogical interactions that took place between avionics students and domain experts in an ITS for electronic troubleshooting called Sherlock 2. We also describe prototype machine learning systems that we developed to learn grammars of discourse structure. The grammars revealed instructional functions of particular speech acts that we had not been aware of, and provided concise models of explanations common in diagnostic tasks.     

Assessing the Prevalence of Body Dysmorphic Disorder in an Ethnically Diverse Group of Adolescents

We investigated the prevalence of Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) in an ethnically diverse sample of adolescents (N = 566) using the Body Image Rating Scale, a brief self-report measure for assessing body dissatisfaction. Results showed that adolescent girls were more dissatisfied with their bodies than adolescent boys, and that African-Americans of both genders were less dissatisfied with their bodies than Caucasians, Asians, and Hispanics. The interaction between gender and ethnicity was not significant. We found an overall prevalence for BDD of 2.2%. Although these are the first data on the prevalence of BDD in an ethnically diverse group of adolescents, they are consistent with the other study on the prevalence of BDD in a predominantly Caucasian group of college students.     

Posture and Prediction on the Attitudes Toward Women Scale

A study was performed investigating the relationship between stated attitudes toward the feminist movement and willingness to help that movement. Results suggested that Attitudes Toward Women Scale (AWS) measures of feminist commitment may be limited by a social desirability variable and that high scores on the AWS do not correlate with a behavioral measure of commitment.     

Improved motor sequence retention by motionless listening

This study examined the effect of listening to a newly learned musical piece on subsequent motor retention of the piece. Thirty-six non-musicians were trained to play an unfamiliar melody on a piano keyboard. Next, they were randomly assigned to participate in three follow-up listening sessions over 1 week. Subjects who, during their listening sessions, listened to the same initial piece showed significant improvements in motor memory and retention of the piece despite the absence of physical practice. These improvements included increased pitch accuracy, time accuracy, and dynamic intensity of key pressing. Similar improvements, though to a lesser degree, were observed in subjects who, during their listening sessions, were distracted by another task. Control subjects, who after learning the piece had listened to nonmusical sounds, showed impaired motoric retention of the piece at 1 week from the initial acquisition day. These results imply that motor sequences can be established in motor memory without direct access to motor-related information. In addition, the study revealed that the listening-induced improvements did not generalize to the learning of a new musical piece composed of the same notes as the initial piece learned, limiting the effects to musical motor sequences that are already part of the individual’s motor repertoire.     

When affective cues broaden thought: Evidence from event-related potentials associated with identifying emotionally expressive faces

Divergent theoretical perspectives predict that the valence of affective cues impacts the breadth and flexibility of cognition, but extant data have not clarified whether such effects transpire extemporaneously or only later via processes of evaluation or selection from among thoughts already generated. The present investigation found more prominent electro-cortical event-related-potential (P3) responses among participants focused on identifying a positively valenced social target (an individual with a happy facial expression) than a negatively valenced social target (an individual with a disgusted facial expression). Indeed, even obvious non-targets (scrambled faces) evoked more-prominent P3 responses among participants in the happy-target than the disgusted-target condition, thereby implicating an effect of the valence of affective cues on the extent of cognitive processing as it unfolds.     

THE SECULAR HERO

This article examines the ideas of a number of leading Israeli intellectuals on basic questions of secularism and the link between secular Jews and their Jewish heritage. The secular Jews at the focus of the intellectuals’ thinking are individualists, men and women of outstanding personality and aptitude. Most of the article discusses their trend towards individualism (which is often only implied). The last part of the article tries to classify the reasons for that trend—some of which are rooted in the political tension inherent in questions of identity and tradition in Israeli society, and others that are the apolitical legacy of spiritual Zionism.