Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston University

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston University / This study is an effort to discover whether the flash-card method or the Study-Test Method of My Spelling is more effective in teaching spelling in Grade Five.

No description available.

New PCI-e flash cards and SSDs supporting over 100,000 IOPs are now available, with several usecases in the design of a high performance storage system. By using an array of flash chips, arranged in multiple banks, large capacities are achieved. Such multi-banked architecture allow parallel read, write and erase operations. In a raw PCI-e flash card, such parallelism is directly available to the software layer. In addition, the devices have restrictions such as, pages within a block can only be written sequentially. The devices also have larger minimum write sizes (>4KB). Current flash translation layers (FTLs) in Linux are not well suited for such devices due to the high device speeds, architectural restrictions as well as other factors such as high lock contention. We present a FTL for Linux that takes into account the hardware restrictions, that also exploits the parallelism to achieve high speeds. We also consider leveraging the parallelism for garbage collection by scheduling the garbage collection activities on idle banks. We propose and evaluate an adaptive method to vary the amount of garbage collection according to the current I/O load on the device. For large scale distributed storage systems, flash memories are an excellent choice because flash memories consume less power, take lesser floor space for a target throughput and provide faster access to data. In a traditional distributed filesystem, even distribution is required to ensure load-balancing, balanced space utilisation and failure tolerance. In the presence of flash memories, in addition, we should also ensure that the numbers of writes to these different flash storage nodes are evenly distributed, to ensure even wear of flash storage nodes, so that unpredictable failures of storage nodes are avoided. This requires that we distribute updates and do garbage collection, across the flash storage nodes. We have motivated the distributed wearlevelling problem considering the replica placement algorithm for HDFS. Viewing the wearlevelling across flash storage nodes as a distributed co-ordination problem, we present an alternate design, to reduce the message communication cost across participating nodes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our design through simulation.

El propósito de nuestra investigación es analizar y comparar la efectividad de dos métodos de aprendizaje de palabras (el método del glosario y el método de aprendizaje por medio de las flash-cards) en una clase de grado séptimo en una ciudad de Suecia. La prueba realizada tiene un total de 32 palabras, divididas en dos grupos temáticos de 16 palabras cada uno, el primer grupo contiene palabras acerca de las partes del cuerpo y el segundo de la ropa. Nuestra investigación consta de tres pruebas, dos de ellas fueron respondidas por los estudiantes en el primer encuentro que tuvimos en el salón de clase y la prueba final se realizó una semana más tarde, después de utilizar los métodos de aprendizaje anteriormente mencionados. El resultado de este estudio muestra que la eficacia del método de aprendizaje de palabras con flash-cards es mayor y que los estudiantes muestran  mayor motivación al momento de trabajar con imágenes que cuando trabajan con el método del glosario, el cual es el más usado en las aulas de clase de español de las escuelas suecas.

No description available.

This research explores the efficacy of word cards as a deliberate vocabulary learning technique and investigates the effects of testing on motivation for deliberate vocabulary study. While word cards are a widely supported method of deliberately studying target foreign language vocabulary, there is a surprising lack of research-based evidence supporting them, and very few researchers have asked students how they feel about word card learning. In addition, it is well known that testing can increase extrinsic motivation, but the motivational effects of regular vocabulary testing has so far been largely overlooked. The first two experiments in this study investigated the learning outcomes associated with making and studying from word cards. Experiment 1 is unique in that it is the first known study to isolate the learning outcomes of making word cards. The results indicated that the process of making word cards results in significant initial vocabulary learning, but a substantial amount of this new knowledge is lost in a relatively short period of time if no further study is carried out. The second experiment compared the use of self-made word cards with premade cards. The results indicated that although both methods are effective in the short and long-term, learners might be better studying from premade cards. However, the results of the third experiment led to the conclusion that premade cards are best suited to motivated learners. Qualitative data analysis revealed that learners generally have positive views of word card learning and understand the benefits it offers over other methods such as learning from lists or notebooks. The final experiment in this study examined the motivational effects of regular student-generated vocabulary testing and investigated whether learners can act as reliable raters of their peers’ vocabulary development. Results indicated that peer-to-peer vocabulary testing increases motivation for deliberate vocabulary learning even if test scores do not affect the students’ grades. Surprisingly, the student-generated and administered tests were more intrinsically motivating than extrinsically so. Taken together, the results of the various experiments offer support for the use of word cards for foreign language vocabulary learning and indicate that motivation for such types of learning can be increased by through peer testing. / Teaching & Learning