Every year about 30000 people have a stroke. It is caused by either a bleeding or a blood clot, and depending on where the damage is, the patient can get different types of difficulties following after the stroke. About 40 % of all stroke patients sufferfrom some kind of speech and/or communication difficulty, like aphasia or dysarthria. As hospital staff it´s important to know how to communicate with these people, to get a deeper understanding regards their needs. Aim: The aim of this study is to out of a patient's perspectivedescribeexperiences ofcommunication difficulties that can follow after a stroke. Method: A content analysis with a qualitative approach was used to analyse five autobiographies. Results: The result showed in what way stroke patients experienced their communication difficulties, and how they felt about the hospital staffs treatment related to their communication difficulties. During the analysis two major themes emerged: suffering and wellbeing. Also eight subthemes emerged:encounters with hospital staff with a bad appearance,to be locked in, frustration, to lose identity, sorrow, chock, encounters with hospital staff with a good appearance andgratefulness. Conclusion: As hospital staff it's important to know how to communicatewith stroke patients suffering from communication difficulties, to be able to give them good care. It's necessary to be aware of these patients own experiences according to the communication difficulty, to know how to communicate with them properly.

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Despite the importance of offenders’ perspectives of the criminal justice system, inmates’ perceptions of prison life remain largely unexplored in correctional research. In the current study, data were analyzed from a survey of approximately 700 incarcerated felons, focusing on their perceptions regarding the perceived difficulty or severity of prison. The correlates of these perceptions were examined, as well as the impact of such perceptions on inmates’ intentions to avoid crime after release. The findings suggest that, while most inmates perceive prison life as difficult, a sizeable proportion of inmates do not find prison time to be overly difficult or severe. Further, inmates who do not view prison as difficult are less likely to report intentions to avoid crime after release. Implications for deterrence theory and future research are discussed.

Assessment is a well understood educational topic with a really long history and a wealth of literature. Given this level of understanding of the topic, educational practitioners are able to differentiate, for example, between valid and invalid assessments. Despite the fact that we can test for the validity of an assessment, knowing how to systematically generate a valid assessment is still challenging and needs to be understood. In this thesis we introduce a similarity-based method to generate a specific type of questions, namely multiple choice questions, and control their difficulty. This form of questions is widely used especially in contexts where automatic grading is a necessity. The generation of MCQs is more challenging than generating open-ended questions due to the fact that their construction includes the generation of a set of answers. These answers need to be all plausible, otherwise the validity of the question can be questionable. Our proposed generation method is applicable to both manual and automatic gener- ation. We show how to implement it by utilising ontologies for which we also develop similarity measures. Those measures are simply functions which compute the similarity, i.e., degree of resemblance, between two concepts based on how they are described in a given ontology. We show that it is possible to control the difficulty of an MCQ by varying the degree of similarity between its answers. The thesis and its contributions can be summarised in a few points. Firstly, we provide literature reviews for the two main pillars of the thesis, namely question generation and similarity measures. Secondly, we propose a method to automatically generate MCQs from ontologies and control their difficulty. Thirdly, we introduce a new family of similarity measures. Fourthly, we provide a protocol to evaluate a set of automatically generated assessment questions. The evaluation takes into account experts' reviews and students' performance. Finally, we introduce an automatic approach which makes it possible to evaluate a large number of assessment questions by simulating a student trying to answer the questions.

This report discusses the design and development of Wu, a 2D action game intended to serve as a means for exporting Chinese popular culture to Western players. Developed with the Unity engine, the game features a dynamic difficulty system that monitors player behavior and automatically modifies the content to better match the observed level of skill. Feedback from playtesting confirmed that the dynamic difficulty adjustment significantly increased the probability of completing the game, and that most players acquired a better understanding of the Wuxia genre on which the game is based.

Despite good intentions, people often encounter challenges and obstacles in pursuit of their goals. The types of difficulties people experience each day have been well-documented (e.g., desires and temptations, resource depletion, social influences). However, despite these difficulties, some people are still able to attain their goals. Research on self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000) suggests that relative autonomous motivation (RAM) may explain inter-individual (and intra-individual) differences in effort and persistence when self-regulation is difficult (e.g., Ntoumanis et al., 2014). In two manuscripts, a series of daily diary designs are used to examine the role of motivation when self-regulation is difficult. The first focuses on the role of RAM during goal striving in a healthy eating across each day (Study 1) and during lunches (Study 2). These studies provide some evidence that students with higher (vs. lower) RAM are more likely to attain more difficult healthy eating goals, which may be due to perceiving fewer obstacles in pursuit of these goals, or through the use of more effective (i.e., approach-based) strategies. Then, the second manuscript involves undergraduate students enrolled in online (Study 1) and in-person classes (Study 2) during the Covid-19 pandemic, and focuses on how their situational motivation to do schoolwork may be impacted when they experience motivational interference. Mixed findings emerged regarding the impact of motivational interference on students’ situational motivation but further evidence highlighted the protective effects of RAM when interference occurred. Taken together, these manuscripts contribute to a growing body of research on the study of self-regulation in daily life and on the role of RAM when difficulties arise. / Graduate / 2022-12-14

The study aimed to investigate the difficulties English teachers in Sweden experience when teaching English to students studying English as an L3. A second aim is to investigate what students at the upper secondary level in Sweden experience as difficult when learning English as an L3. The study was conducted with three teachers and ten students using semi-structured interviews and observations. Results suggest several difficulties in teaching and learning English as an L3. Most students agree that listening comprehension is one of the most challenging parts of learning English as an L3. The teachers agreed that language structure was the most difficult for L3 learners. Several students and teachers also bring up spoken English. Writing is not brought up to any great extent as a primary issue for the students. Among the issues regarding spoken English, pronunciation is brought up, and the fear of speaking a foreign language. As for strategies, the teachers mention a few, such as tests at the beginning of the term and adjusted assignments. However, one teacher mentioned that there is not enough time to help the students even though he has resource class after school hours. On the other hand, the students do not have specific strategies other than translations of words they do not understand. There seems to be a lack of knowledge for both teachers and students regarding how to use strategies for learning English as an L3

Dans ce travail de thèse, nous proposons d'étudier les méthodes d'évaluation de l'attention ainsi que son implication dans la gestion de la difficulté dans le contexte du jeu vidéo. La prise en compte des processus attentionnels joue un rôle important dans la construction des interfaces homme-machine. La perturbation de ces processus peut, symétriquement, servir de variable d'ajustement des difficultés rencontrées dans les challenges proposés par les game designers. Notre première démarche a consisté à mesurer des temps de réaction de l'utilisateur dans un contexte de jeu sérieux. L'algorithme développé a permis, par une analyse des trajectoires du pointeur contrôlé par le joueur, de détecter des valeurs anormales de temps de réaction. Cela nous a amené à étudier dans quelle mesure la quantité d'information présentée à l'écran pouvait altérer les performances d'un joueur. Notre deuxième approche a consisté donc à mesurer les effets produits par une variation du champ de vision choisi sur la caméra virtuelle dans les jeux à la première personne. Dans la suite de ce travail, nous avons étudié dans quelle mesure la distribution de l'attention d'un utilisateur sur plusieurs dispositifs pour réaliser une simple tâche pouvait modifier les performances comparativement à un dispositif unique. Cette étude a montré que l'utilisation de deux dispositifs en parallèle provoque une augmentation significative de la difficulté. / In this thesis, we study attention evaluation methods and their application to the management of difficulty within the context of video games. The consideration of attentional processes plays an important role in the development of human-computer interfaces. The disruption of these attentional processes can be used symmetrically as a variable for adjusting game difficulty. Our first approach was to measure user reaction time, which we did in the context of a serious game. By analyzing the trajectories of a mouse cursor controlled by the player, our approach allows us to detect abnormal reaction time values. This led us to consider how the amount of information displayed on screen could alter player performance. Our second approach, therefore, was to measure the effects produced by variations in the field of view of the virtual camera in a 3D first-person game. Finally, we studied how the distribution of user attention across multiple devices for the execution of a simple task could affect performance relative to the use of a single device. This study showed that the use of two devices in parallel causes a significant increase in difficulty.

The aim of this thesis on the Victorian poet/novelist George Meredith is to analyse the philosophical and psychological aspects of some of his poetry in relation to his reputation as a ‘difficult’ author. The study attempts to create a working definition of poetic difficulty by referring to George Steiner’s influential work in this regard, while also discussing some of the limitations of Steiner’s theory. A consideration of Rita Felski’s examination of critique in the field of literary studies is used to frame the debate around formalist versus ideological criticism and to introduce the conciliatory and reparative approach aimed at in this study, which, though mostly focusing on formalist close readings, also acknowledges the importance of context. The introduction includes a discussion of Meredith’s reputation as a difficult author, and argues that this is one of the main reasons for his critical and popular neglect, with his poetry being seen as particularly obscure. In the first chapter I look at Meredith’s response to the mythological past, elements of which are evident throughout his writing. I suggest that a lack of familiarity with Meredith’s sources can lead to misreadings of his poems, and look at two longer narrative poems, ‘Cassandra’ and ‘The Day of the Daughter of Hades’, to illustrate these claims. The second chapter focuses on Meredith’s Modern Love sequence, and includes detailed analyses of a large selection of the sequence’s 16-line sonnets to show how Meredith makes use of indeterminate narration and other ambiguities to create a complex depiction of mid-Victorian married life. The last chapter is concerned with Meredith’s philosophy of nature, an aspect of his thought which received a great deal of critical attention in the early and mid-twentieth century, though not as much in terms of Meredith’s obscurity. I provide a detailed close reading of his long poem ‘Earth and Man’ to illustrate some of the philosophical underpinnings of his poetry, while also suggesting that his was not a rigorous or fully thought-through system, but rather a lyrical exploration of the implications of evolutionary theory for nature-poetry. I conclude my study by considering how the Modernists T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound responded to the troubling question of poetic influence from their Victorian predecessors. By referring to Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’, I suggest how Meredith’s difficult legacy — and legacy of difficulty — continues to reverberate even in the work of poets who attempted to reject Meredith and his Victorian contemporaries. / Thesis (PhD (English))--University of Pretoria, 2021. / English / PhD (English) / Restricted

Endless runner (ER) is a game genre where the player controls a constantly running character. The player's enjoyment is closely tied to the difficulty of the game, which makes it an interesting platform for dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA). DDA is a way of balancing game's difficulty by the use of computer-aided adjusting methods. First, we have developed an endless runner type of game using Unity and utilizing client-server architecture. Second, we have implemented a DDA system using player modeling and genetic algorithms. We have tested the validity of our approach on live users. We were able to adjust the game difficulty to increase player enjoyment and reduce player death rates in levels. This approach can be used in a production environment to improve players' enjoyment of endless runner games.