Meaningful learning requires active teaching and learning approaches. Thus, with a specific focus on Mathematics teaching at university in Oramia, the study aimed to: • examine the extent to which active learning/student-centered approaches were implemented; • assess the attitudes of university lecturers towards active-learning; • investigate whether appropriate training and support have been provided for the implementation of an active learning approaches • assess the major challenges that hinder the implementation of active learning approaches and • recommend ways that could advance the use of active learning approaches in Mathematics teaching at university. A mixed-methods design was used. Among the six universities in the Oromia Regional State of Ethiopia, two of the newly established universities (younger than 5 years) and two of the old universities (15 years and older) were involved in the study. A total of 84 lecturers participated in the study and completed questionnaires. This was complemented by a qualitative approach that used observation checklists and interviews for data gathering: 16 lessons were observed while the lecturers taught their mathematics classes (two lecturers from each of the four sample universities were twice observed). In addition, semi-structured interviews were conducted with four mathematics department heads and eight of the observed lecturers. The study adhered to ethical principles and to applied several techniques to enhance the validity/trustworthiness of the findings. / Psychology of Education / D. Ed. (Psychology of Education)

The researcher thinks that there is a need to assess learning programmes for the Senior Phase learners at Environmental Education Centres (EEC' s) in Mpumalanga in order to ensure that resources provided by the Department of Agriculture Conservation and Environment in Mpumalanga(DACEM) are utilized for what they are intended. Thus the dissertation investigation is about whether learning programmes for the Senior Phase learners in Mpumalanga are assessed for their quality, namely, effectiveness and relevancy within the Outcomes-Based Education (OBE) system. Each directorate or section of the Mpumalangas' Department of Agriculture Conservation and Environment is obliged to ensure that appropriate policy guidelines are put in place to assist Environmental Officers (EO' s) to implement the Core Functions of the Environmental Education (EE) Directorate. Sometimes EO's need assistance in implementing policy guidelines. In this investigation EO' s were provided with an opportunity to translate policy into action by participating in the workshops conducted by the researcher. The participation of the EO' s meant that they had to learn how to develop learning programmes that are strongly guided by the EE Directorate's policy guidelines and Core Functions. / Educational Studies / M. Ed. (Environmental Education)

Este trabalho apresenta uma proposta para o ensino da Estatística e Probabilidade nas séries finais do Ensino Fundamental II. Seu objetivo é mostrar que a metodologia aqui adotada possibilita a aquisição de conceitos estatísticos e probabilísticos, assim como o desenvolvimento de habilidades pessoais e interpessoais. Trata de um projeto fundamentado em Planejamento de Experimentos com respaldo na aprendizagem ativa. Na sequência didática do projeto os alunos realizaram um experimento com aviões de papel no qual tiveram que responder, na prática, a seguinte questão \"Quais alterações podem ser feitas em um modelo de avião de papel para que ele permaneça mais tempo no ar?\". Para atestar a efetividade da sequência didática, foi construído e validado um Teste de Proficiência em Estatística e Probabilidade (TEPEP) com base nos fundamentos da Psicometria. A análise das características do teste foi feita por meio da Teoria Clássica dos Testes e da Teoria de Resposta ao Item. Foram sujeitos da pesquisa 391 alunos de escolas públicas e particulares da região do Vale do Paraíba, Estado de São Paulo. Desse total, 374 auxiliaram na validação do instrumento e os 17 alunos restantes participaram do projeto. Os resultados deste trabalho mostraram que o uso de Planejamento de Experimentos favoreceu a aprendizagem da Estatística e Probabilidade, desenvolvendo também outras competências. Em relação à validação do TEPEP, concluiu-se que os métodos psicométricos empregados têm grande potencial e devem ser mais explorados. Esta pesquisa apresenta, como produtos finais, a metodologia desenvolvida e o teste de proficiência construído, oferecendo ambos a professores e pesquisadores. / This work presents a proposal for teaching of Statistics and Probability, for the last years of Elementary School. Its objective is to show that the methodology adopted here allows the acquisition of statistical and probabilistic concepts, as well as the development of personal and interpersonal skills. It\'s a project with a didactic sequence grounded in Designs of Experiments, supported in active learning. In the didactic sequence of the project the students carried out an experiment with paper airplanes in which they had to answer, in practice, the following question \"What changes can be made to a paper airplane model so that it stays longer in the air?\". To attest the effectiveness of the didactic sequence, it was developed and validated a Proficiency Test in Statistics and Probability (PTSP), this using Psychometry. The analysis of the characteristics of the test was made through the Classical Test Theory and the Item Response Theory. The research subjects were a total of 391 students from public and private schools in the Vale do Paraíba region, State of São Paulo. Of this total, 17 students participated in the project. The other students (374) assisted in the test validation. The results of this research showed that the use of Design of Experiments favored the learning of Statistic and Probability, also to develop others competences. Regarding the validation of PTSP, it could be concluded that the psychometric methods used have potential and they should be more explored. This research acclaims, as final products, the developed methodology and the Proficiency test validated, both offered to teachers and researchers.

Esta pesquisa analisa fatores que sustentam o uso das metodologias ativas para o aumento do desempenho dos estudantes para a aprendizagem significativa, levando-se em consideração que o ato de aprender é intransferível, só o indivíduo pode fazê-lo e ninguém pode aprender por outro, mas pode-se incentivar o interesse dos estudantes, explorando novas oportunidades de aprendizagem, bem mais centradas na atividade dos estudantes, utilizando a hibridização, que é a mescla de técnicas e ferramentas que auxiliam e dinamizam o aprendizado com a combinação entre ambientes presenciais e virtuais de ensino - usando a ferramenta dos MOOCs pela concepção da sala de aula invertida. Para avaliar a interferência da metodologia ativa de aprendizagem no desempenho, participaram da análise estudantes universitários, de duas instituições particulares, na área de Ciências Sociais Aplicadas, que após um semestre responderam a dois questionários de escalas validadas estatisticamente: Academic Motivation Scale e Escala Estratégica de Aprendizagem para ambientes on-line. Utilizou-se técnicas de análise multivariada, composta pela análise de componentes principais e análise de agrupamento, para avaliar a presença de grupos de motivação. Para a caracterização dos grupos de motivação obtidos foram calculadas as frequências dos grupos formados e médias das componentes principais, bem como as marcações de significância estatística para o teste-t de diferença de médias e técnicas de modelo de regressão para avaliar as médias finais (notas) dos estudantes de acordo com as covariáveis (estudantes que participaram do curso na plataforma MOOC, turma, grupo de motivação e gênero). Os principais resultados demonstram que a escolha de um método ativo de aprendizagem, utilizando a plataforma MOOC interfere em todos os grupos, no aumento da nota final em comparação aos estudantes que não acessaram a plataforma, portanto, não participaram de todo o processo, sendo esse efeito ainda mais expressivo para o grupo de motivação 1 (motivados pela excelência acadêmica), a IES-1 obteve um desempenho superior a IES-2. O êxito da introdução das metodologias ativas está diretamente relacionado a importância do envolvimento de todos os atores desse processo, com destaque as instituições de ensino e professores, para a formação de um indivíduo capaz de transformar a sua vida, o seu meio e a nossa sociedade. / This research analyzes the factors that support the use of active methods to increase the performance of the students towards meaningful learning, taking into account that the act of learning is not transferable, only the individual can do it and no one can learn on the other, but can stimulate the interest of students, exploring new learning opportunities and more focused on the activity of the students, using the hybridization, which is the mixture of techniques and tools to assist and streamline the learning with the combination of classroom and virtual teaching environments - using MOOCs tools for the design of the inverted classroom. In order to evaluate the interference of active learning methodology over performance, students from two private universities in the area of Applied Social Sciences took part in this research and, after one semester answered two statistically validated scales questionnaires: Academic Motivation Scale and Strategic Learning Scale, suitable for online environments. Multivariate analysis techniques, composed by Principal Component Analysis and Cluster Analysis, have been used to assess the presence of motivation groups. In order to characterize obtained motivation groups, frequencies of formed groups and main components averages were calculated as well as markings of statistical significance for the t-test mean difference and regression techniques to assess students final average (grades) according to the covariates (students who took the course in MOOC platform, classroom, motivation group and gender). Main results show that the choice of an active learning method, using MOOC platform interferes in all groups, in the final score increase comparatively to students who had not accessed the platform, thus not participating in the process; this effect was even more significant on motivation of group 1 (motivated by academic excellence), PU-1 achieved a superior performance comparatively to PU-2. The active methods introduction success is directly related to the importance of the involvement of all actors in the process, especially educational institutions and teachers, for the formation of an individual able to transform his life, his environment and our society .

This research study took as its point of departure the general state of underperformance of the majority of schools in South Africa. A review of the literature uncovered evidence that suggested that the state of school management in the majority of schools was in disarray. The problem was compounded by the poor quality and haphazard nature of support that District and Circuit Officials of the Education Department rendered to schools. I therefore saw the need to conduct a scientific investigation into how Circuit Teams could be assisted to support School Management Teams towards whole-school development. Against this background, I formulated the following primary research question to guide the study: “How can Circuit Teams effectively support School Management Teams of underperforming schools towards whole-school development?” The following secondary research questions arose out of this to provide further direction to the study: How can Circuit Teams assist School Management Teams to develop and implement their respective School Improvement Plans? How can Circuit Teams be assisted to develop, implement and monitor their Circuit Improvement Plans? What recommendations can be made to improve service delivery to the schools?. The primary aim of the research was therefore to design an action learning model that would enable Circuit Teams to support School Management Teams of underperforming high schools towards whole-school development. A qualitative research approach was adopted for this study, as it best suited the purpose of the research, and the philosophical assumptions of the researcher. In addition, I drew on a constructivist-interpretative and a critical theory paradigm to guide the design. I chose action research as the specific methodology for the study as, in line with critical theory it aims to empower people to facilitate social change and improvement at a local level. Purposive sampling was used to select four underperforming high schools in the same township within the Cape Town Metro, belonging to the same education Circuit and District Office to participate in the research. In addition, the members of the Circuit Team that serviced these schools were also brought on board as participants. In total, 40 people participated in the research: 4 members from the Circuit Team, 4 Principals, 8 Deputy Principals and 24 Heads of Department. Data were generated in the period January to June 2012 using structured, semi-structured and unstructured interviews, participant observation, and document analysis. Data were analysed by following the eight steps for analysing qualitative data identified by Tesch. An Action Research cycle consisting of the following five steps was followed with participants during the fieldwork, viz.: Identification of the problem; Designing the action plan; Implementing the action plan; Evaluating the action, and Reflection and lessons learnt. Two Action Research cycles emerged from the fieldwork. The first cycle dealt with assisting the schools and Circuit Team to construct their improvement plans. The main findings from this cycle were (1) that the Circuit Team did not function as a team, due to the autocratic management style of the Circuit Team Manager, and the plan of action to address the underperforming schools was not developed in a participative manner. In addition, the Circuit Team had no Circuit Improvement Plan in place with which to support the schools. (2) The schools did not receive the required support to prepare their School Improvement Plans, and although they were able to articulate their areas of support needed, none of them undertook the process of School Self-Evaluation and therefore did not have School Improvement Plans in place. The second action r esearch cycle dealt with the support that schools needed from the other pillars of the District Office to implement their intervention plans. Three themes emerged from this action research cycle: (1) The School Management Teams required capacitybuilding to manage their schools effectively, (2) teachers needed support to implement the curriculum, and (3) learners required assistance to achieve better results. As the outcome of the research, a spiral model consisting of three distinctive phases, each having several loops that describe the particular action that Circuit Teams and School Management Teams have to undertake was developed as the ultimate outcome of the research. The structure of the model was explained, and explicit guidelines for operationalizing it in practice were provided. Based on the findings and the construction of the model, a number of recommendations were put forward to guide future research and practice in the area of Circuit Team support to nderperforming schools. In conclusion, this research study contributed to the body of knowledge by exploring, investigating and describing the working relationship between Circuit Teams and School Management Teams, which until now has not been adequately covered in the existing literature and research. The study culminated in a theoretical model which can be used to improve this relationship permitting Circuit Teams to better support School Management Teams towards whole-school development. The action research design also allowed a more participative and democratic relationship to develop between the Circuit Team and the School Management Teams of the four schools, which is also an innovative idea considering the traditional hierarchic and autocratic approach which has been the norm in the past. Hopefully the findings of this study will encourage the emergence of democratic partnerships between Departmental officials and school management, leading to the empowerment and transformation of school management.

Les travaux présentés dans cette thèse relèvent de l'étude des méthodes de classification linéaires, c'est à dire l'étude de méthodes ayant pour but la catégorisation de données en différents groupes à partir d'un jeu d'exemples, préalablement étiquetés, disponible en amont et appelés ensemble d'apprentissage. En pratique, l'acquisition d'un tel ensemble d'apprentissage peut être difficile et/ou couteux, la catégorisation d'un exemple étant de fait plus ardu que l'obtention de dudit exemple. Cette disparité entre la disponibilité des données et notre capacité à constituer un ensemble d'apprentissage étiqueté a été un des problèmes centraux de l'apprentissage automatique et ce manuscrit s’intéresse à deux solutions usuellement considérées pour contourner ce problème : l'apprentissage en présence de données bruitées et l'apprentissage actif. / The works presented in this thesis fall within the general framework of linear classification, that is the problem of categorizing data into two or more classes based on on a training set of labelled data. In practice though acquiring labeled examples might prove challenging and/or costly as data are inherently easier to obtain than to label. Dealing with label scarceness have been a motivational goal in the machine learning literature and this work discuss two settings related to this problem: learning in the presence of noise and active learning.

The South African government has shown enormous commitment to the achievement of “Education for All” (EFA) through its policies premised on the right to basic education for all which is enshrined in the constitution. Central to the South African constitution, is a fundamental right of all citizens to basic education, equity, redress, and the improvement of quality of schooling. Further, pro-poor funding policies such as school fee exemptions, social grants and, most recently, the designation of 60% of all schools as ‘no fee’ schools, have made it possible for even the poorest learners to attend school. This has affirmed South Africa’s commitment to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015. In light of Notwithstanding the progress made in South Africa in universalising education, there are concerns regarding learner access to quality education, especially in poor provinces such as the Eastern Cape where this study is situated. Thus, the purpose of this study is to further understanding of the interface between learners’ agency and access to education in two township public high schools in Makana District in the Eastern Cape Province. In doing so, the research addresses the current under-representation in the literature of the voices of learners about their experiences of access to education. Drawing on Margaret Archer’s social realist approach to the relationship between structure and agency, the study explores learner agency with the aim of understanding how learners exercise their agency as they struggle to negotiate and overcome difficult and challenging circumstances in order to access education. The data collection was carried out during the academic year 2011, using a qualitative case study approach. Multiple methods of data collection were used. First, data was collected through questionnaires administered to learners. This questionnaire asked for basic information about the schools (for example, subjects, resources and teachers ), parents ( their education, employment, qualification etc.) and learners’ aspirations (their role model; where they see themselves in 5 years; which university they would like to attend; and what they would like to become in future). Secondly, observation method was used to collect data that would inform an assessment of the school’s structure and cultural practices and the impact these have on learners’ access to education. The focus here was also on classroom interaction between learners and teachers, as well as classroom participation, participation in extra-mural activities and voluntary activities, and interaction with peers and others in a variety of school settings. Thirdly, interviews with learners, educators, principals, and parents were used to provide insight about how participants construct their social worlds. In this study the primary data was collected through semi-structured individual and focus group interview. And finally, document analysis was used to analyse the attendance and performance of learners on attendance registers. Findings from this research have enabled new themes and areas for reflection about learner agency to emerge. These themes reflect current and ongoing constraints and enablements towards learners’ educational experiences. In particular, themes such as the following have surfaced: learners changing their lives; the desire to succeed; shaping the future; the value of education; family pride; aspirations and careers. This study addressed these developments by examining agency as temporally located reflexive deliberations of learners upon their future goals and present social environment. This allowed for the identification of individuals’ future goals in relation to access to education and the strategies that they intend to pursue to achieve them, in relation to their personal and social contexts. The findings show the choices and decisions learners are prepared to make and the strategies they use as they engage with socio-cultural environments. Archer’s nuanced approach to agency and structure offers tools to help make sense of learners’ equally nuanced way of engaging with various social structures and making considered decisions about their social environment. Key findings of this research suggest that despite the constraining social structures in their homes, communities and schools, learners make decisions and choices that enable them to navigate social contexts to their advantage. Put differently, for learners, social structures provided the impetus for the projects they created, and to this extent enabled rather than constrained their courses of action.

Changing demographics impact our schools as children come from more linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds. The various social, cultural, and economic backgrounds of the students affect their early language learning experiences which expose them to the academic language needed to succeed in school. Teachers can help students acquire academic language by introducing words that are within their Zone of Proximal Development and increasing exposure to and use of academic language. This study investigated the effects of increasing structured activities for students to orally interact with informational text on their scientific academic language development and comprehension of expository text. The Academic Text Talk activities, designed to scaffold verbalization of new words and ideas, included discussion, retelling, games, and sentence walls. This study also evaluated if there were differences in scientific language proficiency and comprehension between boys and girls, and between English language learners and native English speakers. A quasi-experimental design was used to determine the relationship between increasing students’ oral practice with academic language and their academic language proficiency. Second graders (n = 91) from an urban public school participated in two science units over an 8 week period and were pre and post tested using the Woodcock Muñoz Language Survey-Revised and vocabulary tests from the National Energy Education Project. Analysis of covariance was performed on the pre to post scores by treatment group to determine differences in academic language proficiency for students taught using Academic Text Talk compared to students taught using a text-centered method, using the initial Florida Assessment for Instruction in Reading test as a covariate. Students taught using Academic Text Talk multimodal strategies showed significantly greater increases in their pre to posttest means on the Woodcock Muñoz Language Survey-Revised Oral Language Totals and National Energy Education Development Project Vocabulary tests than students taught using the text-centered method, ps < .05. Boys did not show significantly greater increases than girls, nor did English language learners show significantly greater increases than the native English speakers. This study informs the field of reading research by evaluating the effectiveness of a multimodal combination of strategies emphasizing discourse to build academic language.

Machine translation is a fundamental technology that is gaining more importance each day in our multilingual society. Companies and particulars are turning their attention to machine translation since it dramatically cuts down their expenses on translation and interpreting. However, the output of current machine translation systems is still far from the quality of translations generated by human experts. The overall goal of this thesis is to narrow down this quality gap by developing new methodologies and tools that improve the broader and more efficient deployment of machine translation technology. We start by proposing a new technique to improve the quality of the translations generated by fully-automatic machine translation systems. The key insight of our approach is that different translation systems, implementing different approaches and technologies, can exhibit different strengths and limitations. Therefore, a proper combination of the outputs of such different systems has the potential to produce translations of improved quality. We present minimum Bayes¿ risk system combination, an automatic approach that detects the best parts of the candidate translations and combines them to generate a consensus translation that is optimal with respect to a particular performance metric. We thoroughly describe the formalization of our approach as a weighted ensemble of probability distributions and provide efficient algorithms to obtain the optimal consensus translation according to the widespread BLEU score. Empirical results show that the proposed approach is indeed able to generate statistically better translations than the provided candidates. Compared to other state-of-the-art systems combination methods, our approach reports similar performance not requiring any additional data but the candidate translations. Then, we focus our attention on how to improve the utility of automatic translations for the end-user of the system. Since automatic translations are not perfect, a desirable feature of machine translation systems is the ability to predict at run-time the quality of the generated translations. Quality estimation is usually addressed as a regression problem where a quality score is predicted from a set of features that represents the translation. However, although the concept of translation quality is intuitively clear, there is no consensus on which are the features that actually account for it. As a consequence, quality estimation systems for machine translation have to utilize a large number of weak features to predict translation quality. This involves several learning problems related to feature collinearity and ambiguity, and due to the ¿curse¿ of dimensionality. We address these challenges by adopting a two-step training methodology. First, a dimensionality reduction method computes, from the original features, the reduced set of features that better explains translation quality. Then, a prediction model is built from this reduced set to finally predict the quality score. We study various reduction methods previously used in the literature and propose two new ones based on statistical multivariate analysis techniques. More specifically, the proposed dimensionality reduction methods are based on partial least squares regression. The results of a thorough experimentation show that the quality estimation systems estimated following the proposed two-step methodology obtain better prediction accuracy that systems estimated using all the original features. Moreover, one of the proposed dimensionality reduction methods obtained the best prediction accuracy with only a fraction of the original features. This feature reduction ratio is important because it implies a dramatic reduction of the operating times of the quality estimation system. An alternative use of current machine translation systems is to embed them within an interactive editing environment where the system and a human expert collaborate to generate error-free translations. This interactive machine translation approach have shown to reduce supervision effort of the user in comparison to the conventional decoupled post-edition approach. However, interactive machine translation considers the translation system as a passive agent in the interaction process. In other words, the system only suggests translations to the user, who then makes the necessary supervision decisions. As a result, the user is bound to exhaustively supervise every suggested translation. This passive approach ensures error-free translations but it also demands a large amount of supervision effort from the user. Finally, we study different techniques to improve the productivity of current interactive machine translation systems. Specifically, we focus on the development of alternative approaches where the system becomes an active agent in the interaction process. We propose two different active approaches. On the one hand, we describe an active interaction approach where the system informs the user about the reliability of the suggested translations. The hope is that this information may help the user to locate translation errors thus improving the overall translation productivity. We propose different scores to measure translation reliability at the word and sentence levels and study the influence of such information in the productivity of an interactive machine translation system. Empirical results show that the proposed active interaction protocol is able to achieve a large reduction in supervision effort while still generating translations of very high quality. On the other hand, we study an active learning framework for interactive machine translation. In this case, the system is not only able to inform the user of which suggested translations should be supervised, but it is also able to learn from the user-supervised translations to improve its future suggestions. We develop a value-of-information criterion to select which automatic translations undergo user supervision. However, given its high computational complexity, in practice we study different selection strategies that approximate this optimal criterion. Results of a large scale experimentation show that the proposed active learning framework is able to obtain better compromises between the quality of the generated translations and the human effort required to obtain them. Moreover, in comparison to a conventional interactive machine translation system, our proposal obtained translations of twice the quality with the same supervision effort. / González Rubio, J. (2014). On the effective deployment of current machine translation technology [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/37888 / TESIS

Le problème d’intérêt est un problème d’optimisation discrète dont on tente d’approximer les solutions des instances particulières à l’aide de réseaux de neurones. Un obstacle à résoudre ce problème par apprentissage automatique réside dans le coût d’étiquettage élevé (et variable) des différentes instances, rendant coûteuse et difficile la génération d’un ensemble de données étiquettées. On propose une architecture d’apprentissage actif, qu’on nomme architecture de méta-enseignement, dans le but de pallier à ce problème. On montre comment on combine plusieurs modèles afin de résoudre ce problème d’apprentissage actif, formulé comme un problème de méta-apprentissage, en utilisant un agent d’apprentissage par renforcement pour la génération active d’exemples. Ainsi, on utilise des concepts de plusieurs domaines de l’apprentissage automatique dont des notions d’apprentissage supervisé, d’apprentissage actif, d’apprentissage par renforcement, ainsi que des réseaux récurrents. Dans ce travail exploratoire, on évalue notre méthodologie sur un problème simple, soit celui de classifier des mains de poker en 10 classes pré-établies. On teste notre architecture sur ce problème jouet dans le but de simplifier l’analyse. Malheureusement, l’avantage d’utiliser l’architecture de génération active n’est pas significatif. On expose ensuite plusieurs pistes de réflexion sur certaines observations à approfondir dans de futurs travaux, comme la définition de la fonction de récompense. Dans de futurs projets, il serait également intéressant d’utiliser un problème plus similaire au problème d’optimisation initial qui comporterait, entre autres, des coûts d’étiquettage variables. / The motivating application behind this architecture is a discrete optimisation problem whose solution we aim to predict using neural networks. A main challenge of solving this problem by machine learning lies in the high (and variable) labelling cost associated to the various instances, which leads to an expensive and difficult dataset generation. We propose an active learning architecture, called meta-teaching, to address this problem. We show how we combine several models to solve the active learning problem, formulated as a metalearning problem, by using a reinforcement learning agent to actively generate new instances. Therefore, we use concepts from various areas of machine learning, including supervised learning, active learning, reinforcement learning and recurrent networks. In this exploratory work, we evaluate our method on a simpler problem, which is to classify poker hands in 10 predefined classes. We test our architecture on this toy dataset in order to simplify the analysis. Unfortunately, we do not achieve a significant advantage using our active generation architecture on this dataset. We outline avenues for further reflections, including the definition of the reward function. In future projects, using a more similar problem to our problem of interest having, among others, a variable labelling cost, would be interesting.