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Inattention is often associated with early reading difficulties and to non-responsiveness to reading interventions. The aim of the present study was to explore the relationships between attention skills and literacy skills over the course of the computer-based literacy intervention, ABRACADABRA. The design included a contrast of two interventions, Synthetic Phonics and Rime, against a classroom control, enabling a comparison of different types of literacy contexts for grade one students with varying attention skills. Attention skills, as measured by both parent ratings and a sustained attention task, were found to predict reading-related skills and students' improvement over the course of the intervention. However, the predictive power of attention changed across different literacy contexts. For students who did not participate in the intervention, sustained attention predicted growth in blending skills and inattention predicted reading comprehension improvement, while the Synthetic Phonics group no longer showed these associations. These results suggest that the literacy environment has an impact on the mapping of associations between literacy and attention skills.

This study has taken a problem solving approach in identifying the cognitive processes involved in designing computer-based instruction. The problem space essentially contains considerations of instructional goals and constraints, technological resources, and theoretical considerations. The problem space was augmented by an analysis of the strategic processes relevant in instructional design, in particular planning, and by an analysis of one specific technological resource, HyperCard. Concurrent think-aloud verbal protocols and computer operations protocols (video recordings of the users' interactions with the computer) were gathered from three university students enrolled in an educational technology course on developing courseware. Subjects were using HyperCard to develop instructional environments for individual course projects. The transcribed protocols were analyzed using a coding scheme based on the instructional-design problem space and planning model. Two types of analyses are reported: proportions of segments concerning different types of design and planning operations and descriptive representations of overall protocol goal structures and plans. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

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This study investigates the use of a new literacy software ABRACADABRA with pre-reading kindergarten students. The participants ( n=27) from one school were assigned randomly to one intervention group (rime or phoneme) and (n=17) school two served as a control. Ten hours of either a rime or phoneme ABRACADABRA intervention were employed to compare overall effectiveness of the software with regular classroom instruction. All participants were pre-tested at the onset of the study and post-tested following the intervention using eight highly sensitive measures to detect change in word reading strategies and phonemic skills specific to the two delivery methods. Measures were developed from previous studies and included blending and segmenting of matched CV (consonant-vowel), VC (vowel-consonant) words, high and low rime nonsense word reading, rime and coda articulation tasks. The results showed improvement in both interventions over the control on Letter-Sound knowledge and a combined reading task with a large advantage to the phoneme intervention in blending of VC words.

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This thesis describes the evaluation of several computer supported martial arts learning environments. These learning environments were designed, developed and implemented for practitioners of Rough and Tumble (RAT), a South African martial art, originally as a result of an increasing number of RAT practitioners relocating to other countries and yet wishing to continue their learning and practise of RAT. This project revolves mainly around the effectiveness evaluation of whether RAT martial arts knowledge, skills and attitudes can be learned in computer supported learning environments. The research is situated within design research and has pragmatic goals to provide a computer supported learning environment for the learning of RAT. Furthermore the design research was conducted to derive design principles for future design and development efforts. A brief account of the literature is provided, covering three main learning paradigms, with a focus on behaviourism and constructivism, followed by a description of issues in the computer supported learning field, an explanation of various definitions of martial arts and how the term is delimited in this study, and an overview of various evaluation paradigms. This account revealed inadequacies of the theories and terminology described pertaining to this study, resulting in the combined use of various underlying theoretical approaches to guide this research. These approaches include the eclectic-mixed methods-pragmatic paradigm as the overarching framework, a social constructivist learning approach, cognitive flexibility theory, Bloom’s Taxonomy, the RAT approach to martial arts learning and teaching, and a mixed methods research design. Two main components were developed as solutions, which included the development of a computer martial arts resource, the RAT CD-ROM, and four online courses, the RAT Online courses. Data were collected using a number of research instruments, such as questionnaires, interviews, observations, records, expert reviews and learner artefacts in an attempt to understand the data from multiple viewpoints and develop a more reliable depiction of evaluation events. The data were analysed using mainly qualitative coding in software, expert rating diagrams, basic frequency statistics, and martial arts assessments of physical performances. These analyses revealed that although there is significant work involved in mixed methods research and there are issues such as participants not meeting task deadlines, technology failures, software usability issues, and small participant numbers, the research approach has contributed to the pragmatic goal of providing computer supported learning environments to RAT practitioners, who otherwise would not have been able to participate in RAT. In addition a number of design principles for the creation of RAT computer supported learning environments were derived from this research, including the use of social constructivism, cognitive flexibility theory, Bloom’s Taxonomy, multiple contextual training, and using computers as learning and knowledge construction tools. These underlying theoretical principles translate to more practical procedural principles, such as amongst others, to design computer supported learning environments incorporating tools to enable knowledge construction and collaboration, provide learning designs that are complex and authentic, encourage multiple representations of learner knowledge, take on a mentor role as online course facilitator, and to build problem solving activities into the learning design. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2011.