Orientador: Silvana Aparecida Borsetti Gregorio Vidotti / Banca: Plácida Leopoldina Ventura Amorim da Costa Santos / Banca: Edberto Ferneda / Banca: Marcos Luiz Mucheroni / Banca: Guilherme de Ataíde Dias. / Resumo: A Arquitetura da Informação é uma área do conhecimento que fornece uma base teórica para estruturação e organização informacional dos ambientes digitais. Baseada nos princípios dessa área, esta pesquisa propõe uma metodologia de desenvolvimento de ambientes informacionais digitais, os quais podem contribuir de forma significativa para a produção e comunicação da informação e do conhecimento. A metodologia proposta consiste em um conjunto de passos que envolvem o tratamento funcional, estrutural, informacional, navegacional e visual dos ambientes. Esses passos estão estruturados hieraquicamente em fases, etapas, atividades e práticas. Essa estruturação possui uma ordem pré-estabelecida que guia os desenvolvedores e/ou arquitetos da informação por meio de uma sequência lógica e sistemática, fazendo com que eles possam se concentrar em pontos importantes e específicos e ao mesmo tempo terem consciência do andamento do processo como um todo. A pesquisa aborda ainda serviços de personalização e customização, fornecendo um conjunto de recursos interativos a fim de possibilitar maior flexibilidade aos usuários para adaptar a estrutura informacional e visual do ambiente de acordo com perfis e necessidades. Esta pesquisa foi elaborada por meio de levantamento bibliográfico e documental, análise descritiva e exploratória e observação direta nãoparticipativa. Também considerou várias metodologias já existentes de diversas áreas do conhecimento, em especial as apresentadas por Pressman (2006) e Sommerville (2007) oriundas da área da Ciência da Computação, as quais já são consolidadas e bem utilizadas pela comunidade de Engenharia de Software. A principal contribuição desta pesquisa é o oferecimento de um suporte metodológico aos desenvolvedores de sistemas na construção de ambientes informacionais digitais levando em conta princípios da Arquitetura da Informação. / Abstract: Information Architecture is an area of knowledge that provides a theoretical basis for structuring and organizing information inside digital environments.Based on the principles of this area, this research proposes a methodology for the development of digital informational environments, which can contributes significantly to the production and communication of information and knowledge. The proposed methodology consists of a set of steps, involving functional, structural, informational, navigational and visual treatment of environments and that are structured in phases, stages, activities and practices. This structure has a predetermined order to guide the developers and information architects by means of a logical and systematic sequence, so they can focus on important and specific points while being aware of the progress as a whole. This research also addresses service personalization and customization, providing a set of interactive features to allow more flexibility for users to adapt the structure of the visual and informational environment in accordance with profiles and needs. This research was developed through a literature and documentary review, descriptive and exploratory analysis and non-participant direct observation. The research also considered various existing methodologies from different fields of knowledge, especially those made by Pressman (2006) and Sommerville (2007) coming from the area of Computer Science, which are already consolidated and well used by the community of Software Engineering. The main contribution of this research is the offering of a methodological support to be used for developers in the construction of digital information environments taking into account the principles of Information Architecture. / Doutor

Literature supporting the use of informational texts with preschool children has increased in recent years. However, many preschool classrooms still focus on narrative text, and teachers are often unsure how to provide support for children's comprehension of informational texts. An assessment addressing preschool children's informational text comprehension will help teachers understand what children can do with informational texts and point out demands or tasks that children should be able to handle. A comprehension assessment for preschool children focusing on text purpose, text features, text retell, and comprehension of text structures has not been available. To fit this need, recent effort has focused on developing The Early Expository Text Comprehension Assessment (EECA), which previous studies have found to be reliable and valid. However, the latest iteration, developed in 2016, identified multiple problematic items based on a many-facets Rasch analysis, and problems with administrator consistency were noted. To further develop the EECA, changes were made to problematic items and the assessment was fully digitized. This pilot study tested a beta version of the next iteration of the EECA on twelve participants at the BYU preschool to identify additional changes that could be made before submitting the revised assessment to a more comprehensive full-scale study for analysis of reliability and validity. Results identified additional changes to apply to the assessment including suggestions for improving child engagement and responsiveness to the digitized format, administrator prompts, technical errors with the assessment program, and improvements to individual test items.

Many have argued for more informational text to be incorporated into the curriculum, even in the earliest grades. However, it has traditionally been thought that narrative text should precede informational text when introducing children to literacy. Still several studies have demonstrated that preschool children are capable of learning from these texts. Because informational texts are being introduced even in the earliest grades, preschool teachers are in need of ways to assess their students' ability to handle early forms of informational texts. The Early Expository Text Comprehension Assessment (EECA) was developed to help teachers understand the comprehension abilities of their preschool children across several informational text structures. As part of a larger study, the third iteration of this assessment measure, called the EECA-R3, was examined for concurrent validity with the Test of Story Comprehension (TSC), a subtest of the Narrative Language Measure (NLM). Data came from 108 preschool children between the ages of four and five who were attending one of six title one preschools or one of four private preschool classrooms. Correlations that were run between the TSC and the EECA-R3 to determine concurrent validity were positive and significant, suggesting that the EECA-R3 is valid.

While educators and speech-language pathologists have been found to utilize informational texts far less than fictional texts when working with young children, informational texts can support young children's academic and language development. This study qualitatively analyzed how children engaged in informationally-based activities and how instructors interacted with children to support their engagement and learning. Fifty-three children from 4 Head Start classrooms participated in small and large group STEM-based instructional activities for 2 days each across 2 weeks. The instructional unit related to how plants grow and how they are used for food. The researchers reviewed and transcribed video recordings and coded turn exchanges as the children participated in 2 small group science-based activities in the first week of the unit, for a total of 8 analyzed sessions. Overall, children demonstrated positive verbal and nonverbal responses while participating in the science-based activities. Instructors were found to use facilitative strategies such as bridging the contextualized experiences to remote concepts, but did not utilize strategies consistently. Instructors were responsive to children's contributions and exchanges between children and instructors were typically 2-3 turns. Instructors could have further developed these exchanges by elaborating or asking thought-provoking questions to highlight targeted concepts. This study supported the idea that young children can respond positively to informational content. Educators and speech-language pathologists can purposefully utilize informational texts with young children and should attempt to help children connect immediate experiences to abstract STEM-based content and concepts.

It is often difficult for people to understand speech when there are other ongoing conversations in the background. This dissertation investigates how different background maskers interfere with our ability to comprehend speech and the reasons why older listeners have more difficulties than younger listeners in these tasks. An ecologically valid approach was applied: instead of words or short sentences, participants were presented with two fairly lengthy lectures simultaneously, and their task was to listen to the target lecture, and ignore the competing one. Afterwards, they answered questions regarding the target lecture. Experiment 1 found that both normal-hearing and hearing-impaired older adults performed poorer than younger adults when everyone was tested in identical listening situations. However, when the listening situation was individually adjusted to compensate for age-related differences in the ability to recognize individual words in noise, age-related difference in comprehension disappeared. Experiment 2 compared the masking effects of a single-talker competing lecture to a babble of 12 voices, and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) was manipulated so that the masker was either of similar volume as the target, or much louder. The results showed that the competing speech was much more distracting than babble. Moreover, increasing the masker level negatively affected speech comprehension only when the masker was babble; when it was a single-talker lecture, the performance plateaued as the SNR decreased from -2 to -12 dB. Experiment 3 compared the effects of semantic content and acoustic similarity on speech comprehension by comparing a normal speech masker with a time-reversed one (to examine the effect of semantic content) and a normal speech masker with an 8-band vocoded speech (to examine the effect of acoustic similarity). The results showed that both semantic content and acoustic similarity contributed to informational masking, but the latter seemed to play a bigger role than the former. Together, the results indicated that older adults’ speech comprehension difficulties with maskers were mainly due to declines in their hearing capacities rather than their cognitive functions. The acoustic similarity between the target and competing speech may be the main reason for informational masking, with semantic interference playing a secondary role.

The business of healthcare management is changing rapidly, heading in the direction of managed care, capitation, and integrated delivery systems. Information management is crucial to the success and competitiveness of these new care delivery systems. A major goal of this work is to develop a model for a computer-based patient medical record system which could be accessed through the world wide web. The fundamental function of such system is to record, monitor, retrieve all events associated with an encounter between the patient and the healthcare system. This document presents a description of informational system in the field of biomedicine which is appointed to patients, with coronary heart disease. First of all, urgency, applicability and functions of such informative system are presented. Further the main points of the problem, which consists of system realization and publishing on the web, and its solutions are analyzed in details.

Competing speech seems to pose a greater challenge to spoken language comprehension than does competing noise, especially for older adults. The difficulties of older adults may be due to declines in auditory and cognitive processing. However, evidence suggests that the use of top-down information processing to overcome this interference may be preserved in aging. This research investigated the effect of speech- and noise masking on language comprehension, as well as age-related differences in the use of top-down processing to overcome masking. Topic I examined whether younger and older adults gain the same release from masking given a partial preview of a target sentence in quiet (auditory prime) prior to hearing the full sentence in noise, and investigated the auditory factors contributing to the advantage provided by the primes. Results showed that despite age-related declines in overall performance, younger and older listeners benefited similarly from priming. This benefit was not attributable to cues about the target talker’s voice or fluctuations in the amplitude envelope of the target sentences. Topics II and III examined the effect of speech- and noise masking on the time-course of stream segregation. The analyses revealed that stream segregation takes time to build up when a speech target is masked by other speech, but not when it is masked by noise. Subsequent analyses showed that in younger adults, the delay in segregation under speech masking was primarily due to the vocal similarities between the talkers, with interference from the semantic content of the masker playing a secondary role in impeding performance. The results also showed that older listeners were less efficient than younger listeners in segregating speech from speech-like maskers. Furthermore, older listeners benefited less than younger listeners when the amplitude envelope modulations of maskers were limited. Overall, the findings indicate that some of the language comprehension difficulties experienced by older listeners in noisy environments may be due to age-related declines in stream segregation and a decreased ability to benefit from fluctuations in the amplitude envelopes of maskers. However, benefit from priming may help offset some of these age-related declines in auditory scene analysis.

It is often difficult for people to understand speech when there are other ongoing conversations in the background. This dissertation investigates how different background maskers interfere with our ability to comprehend speech and the reasons why older listeners have more difficulties than younger listeners in these tasks. An ecologically valid approach was applied: instead of words or short sentences, participants were presented with two fairly lengthy lectures simultaneously, and their task was to listen to the target lecture, and ignore the competing one. Afterwards, they answered questions regarding the target lecture. Experiment 1 found that both normal-hearing and hearing-impaired older adults performed poorer than younger adults when everyone was tested in identical listening situations. However, when the listening situation was individually adjusted to compensate for age-related differences in the ability to recognize individual words in noise, age-related difference in comprehension disappeared. Experiment 2 compared the masking effects of a single-talker competing lecture to a babble of 12 voices, and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) was manipulated so that the masker was either of similar volume as the target, or much louder. The results showed that the competing speech was much more distracting than babble. Moreover, increasing the masker level negatively affected speech comprehension only when the masker was babble; when it was a single-talker lecture, the performance plateaued as the SNR decreased from -2 to -12 dB. Experiment 3 compared the effects of semantic content and acoustic similarity on speech comprehension by comparing a normal speech masker with a time-reversed one (to examine the effect of semantic content) and a normal speech masker with an 8-band vocoded speech (to examine the effect of acoustic similarity). The results showed that both semantic content and acoustic similarity contributed to informational masking, but the latter seemed to play a bigger role than the former. Together, the results indicated that older adults’ speech comprehension difficulties with maskers were mainly due to declines in their hearing capacities rather than their cognitive functions. The acoustic similarity between the target and competing speech may be the main reason for informational masking, with semantic interference playing a secondary role.

This is an exploratory study, using quantitative and qualitative tools, studying younger adult students (aged 18 to 25) at a college in Ontario and proposes that younger adult notions of possible selves are strengthened through engaging with models for possible selves by conducting informational interviews with them. Research was conducted in the classroom and outside of the classroom (but on campus) using a methodological framework informed by the scholarship of teaching and learning. Anticipated outcomes include a further understanding of the researcher’s own practice in order to improve it, a further grounding of the researcher’s personal theory of practice, and useful data for other researchers interested in using possible selves as a lens to understand their teaching. The results of the study indicate that there are other issues and concerns related to notions of possible selves, including goal-setting and a sense of having choice and control over one’s fate. Implications for practice include recommendations that more opportunities and tools for the development of possible selves be offered to students and that these opportunities can be found in existing courses and programs. / Thesis (Master, Education) -- Queen's University, 2011-04-06 14:36:02.109

In this work object-oriented patterns were used for development of gata processing system on the Web. Nowadays a lot of systems are developing for they use in internet. In my final work these patterns were used: MVC, Page Controller, Front Controller, Intercepting Filter and others. Model-View-Controller pattern separates the modeling of domain, the presentation, and the actions based on user input into three separate classes: Model, View, Controller. This pattern is a fundamental design pattern for separation of user interface logic from business logic. Unfortunately, the popularity of the pattern has resulted in a number of faulty descriptions. Using a Page controller for a Web application is such a common need that most Web application frameworks provide a default implementation of the page controller. Most frameworks incorporate the page controller in the front of server page. Server pages actually combine the functions of view and controller and do not provide the desired separation between the presentation code and controller code.A common implementation of Page Controller invokes creating a base class for behavior shared among individual pages. Front Controller solves the decentralization problem present i Page Controller by chanelling all requests through a single controller. The controller itself is usually implemented in two parts: a handler and a hierarchy of commands. A straightforward implementation of Interceptong Filter is a filter chain that iterates through a... [to full text]