Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1981. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 124-135).

Thesis--University of Wisconsin--Madison. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 185-199).

No description available.

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The impact of technology in society nowadays has led to significant curricular reforms around the world that aim to achieve a higher quality in education. Mexico has not been the exception and in 2008, the Reforma Integral de la Educación Media Superior, RIEMS (the Comprehensive Reform of Upper Secondary Education) was launched with the aim to overcome three challenges in upper secondary education in Mexico: access to education, quality and equity. The proper development of this educational level would represent a fundamental assumption that the country could respond to the challenges of the global economy in a context of equity and diversity. In this context, the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in schools has become a required tool considered as the necessary action for the qualitative improvement of the teaching and learning process. This provides many possibilities, but also new demands. One of the most important challenges concerns the teaching task and the fact that teachers are required to play a different role from the traditional approach that they are used to using in class and which is common in classrooms in Mexico, becoming instead facilitators of the learning process. This thesis was carried out to explore how EFL teachers engage with ICT in their practice in the context of Mexican reform initiatives. Specifically, the study focused on teacher cognition to understand what teachers think, know, believe and do related to ICT adoption. A case study approach was used to collect data from three EFL teachers in a high school in Mexico through interviews, observations and stimulated recall sessions. The results show that the participant teachers face a challenging, complex, multifactorial situation that hinders their adoption of ICT. The organisational structures of schooling and the social dimension of the particular school setting impact negatively on the conceptions that teachers bring to their practice making it difficult for ICT tools to be explored and appropriated pedagogically.

During collaboration, people communicate using verbal and non-verbal cues, including gaze cues. Spoken language is usually the primary medium of communication in these interactions, yet despite this co-occurrence of speech and gaze cueing, most experiments have used paradigms without language. Furthermore, previous research has shown that myriad social factors influence behaviour during interactions, yet most studies investigating responses to gaze have been conducted in a lab, far removed from any natural interaction. It was the aim of this thesis to investigate the relationship between language and gaze cue utilisation in natural collaborations. For this reason, the initial study was largely observational, allowing for spontaneous natural language and gaze. Participants were found to rarely look at their partners, but to do so strategically, with listeners looking more at speakers when the latter were of higher social status. Eye movement behaviour also varied with the type of language used in instructions, so in a second study, a more controlled (but still real-world) paradigm was used to investigate the effect of language type on gaze utilisation. Participants used gaze cues flexibly, by seeking and following gaze more when the cues were accompanied by distinct featural verbal information compared to overlapping spatial verbal information. The remaining three studies built on these findings to investigate the relationship between language and gaze using a much more controlled paradigm. Gaze and language cues were reduced to equivalent artificial stimuli and the reliability of each cue was manipulated. Even in this artificial paradigm, language was preferred when cues were equally reliable, supporting the idea that gaze cues are supportive to language. Typical gaze cueing effects were still found, however the size of these effects was modulated by gaze cue reliability. Combined, the studies in this thesis show that although gaze cues may automatically and quickly affect attention, their use in natural communication is mediated by the form and content of concurrent spoken language.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Melbourne, The Mental Health Research Institute of Victoria and the Dept. of Psychiatry, 2010. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (p. 193-229)

No description available.