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Educational research has a long history of investigating factors that are linked to improved academic performance. Here I examined research on three factors that impact academic performance—working memory (WM), cognitive load, and motivation. Although each of these factors were known to impact academic performance, there were no studies that examined the combined effect of these three factors on performance. The current study attempted to examine the potential connections between these factors, and their collective impact on strategies for learning in the context of math performance. Experiment 1 tested the impact of WM, cognitive load, and motivation for a math task in an online population, and Experiment 2 tested these impacts for an in-lab sample. In both samples, manipulations of cognitive load and motivation were ineffective, but significant relationships were discovered for individual differences on these constructs. Motivation and cognitive load were related, and so were cognitive load and WM. In addition, all of these variables were related to performance. Further research on the connections among these variables is needed to understand their relative impacts on math performance.

Suggestibility occurs when inaccurate information is incorporated into currently existing memories. The present study examined the effect of forewarning on suggestibility, including the influence of working memory capacity (WMC). The main hypotheses are that forewarnings will reduce suggestibility compared to the control group and that high-WMC will yield lower suggestibility compared to medium- and low-WMC. The final hypothesis is that WMC and forewarning will interact such that low-WMC individuals will benefit more than high-WMC individuals from the forewarning. A sample of 123 college students was recruited. Participants watched a clip of the TV-show 24. WMC was then assessed followed by the presentation of a misleading narrative. Prior to listening to the narrative, they read a set of instructions that sometimes contained the forewarning. After listening to the misleading narrative, participants took a test over their memories of the film. A 2 X 3 ANOVA was conducted and found a main effect for forewarning. No other effect was significant. The current results only support the first main hypothesis that forewarning reduces suggestibility. These results could be used to help prepare eyewitnesses to resist misinformation in the period between witnessing an event and reporting the event during a later trial.

This research focuses on the language environment of children with Down syndrome (DS) in primary and secondary classrooms. In contrast to much of the previous work in this area, the study takes both qualitative and quantitative approaches to data collection. In particular, it highlights teachers’ speech rates and speech strategies in relation to children’s individual listening comprehension. Previous research shows that the listening comprehension of children with DS may be limited by deficits in phonological loop capacity and hearing loss. However, most of this previous research has used quantitative measures to compare the memory performances of children with DS with their typically developing or mental agematched peers. This has tended to result in conclusions that regard children with DS as a homogeneous group. This study, however, aims to consider each child with DS as an individual and to explore in depth the relationship between their listening comprehension and teachers’ speech rates and speech strategies in classroom settings. The study was conducted in 2 stages, both using case-study approach to investigate individual children’s interactions with their class teachers (CTs) and teaching assistants (TAs). The Stage 1 research was conducted with three case-study children in four distinct phases and used an inductive approach to collect data. Phase one observed each child in their classroom environment, involving the interactions between teaching staff and the case-study child. Phase two identified the child’s language ability by using standardised language assessments. Phase three then assessed the impact of speech rates on children’s understandings and, finally, Phase four tested the research validity by representing the stories with a counter-balanced design. The results of the Stage 1 research suggested that the use of the slow speech rate improves the children’s listening comprehension although there were clear indications that there would be more significant benefit if they could be given more time to process information. The Stage 2 research focused on speech strategies, with an emphasis on clustered speech and a deductive approach was adopted. Six additional children with DS were assessed by the BPVS and WISC-IV to investigate further speech rate but also in the context of speech strategies. This further examined whether clustered speech could be beneficial to improving the children’s listening comprehension. The findings show that the clustered speech strategy can improve the listening comprehension of all of the children in this phase, particularly at the slow normal speech rate. The key benefit of this strategy is that it can be used to offset problems in processing information that the children experience because of their limited memory capacity. The outcome of my research can provide teaching staff with knowledge that will enable them to enhance the listening comprehension of children with DS.

Laboratory work is considered to be a vital part of the entire learning experience in physics and work in the laboratory has the potential to help make physics more real and tangible for the students while they can develop experimental design skills as well as developing observational and problem-solving skills. Sometimes, difficult concepts can be illustrated while laboratory work also offers opportunities for learners to develop skills in thinking, questioning, planning, and interpreting data as well as an opportunity to develop group working skills. Above all, physics, like all other sciences, gains its insights by means of experimentation and learners need experience of this. In addition, laboratory work has an important role in understanding a subject like physics in that it can make physics more real for the students. More importantly, there is great scope for developing laboratory learning which will enhance understanding as well as give the students an experience of how experimental evidence is used to develop the insights in physics. The question here is: does laboratory courses in higher education actually achieve these goals in a developing country such as Libya where the laboratories are not highly equipped while the staff and the teachers are not trained adequately? Studies have shown that, in laboratory learning, students follow instruction sheets like recipes with little understanding what they are doing, tending to generate negative attitudes. Some key studies have shown clearly that cognitive overload is the source of the problem: the learner’s has to cope with too many ideas at the same time. This study explored this idea and considered how the cognitive load can be reduced, enabling cognitive capacity to be available for greater understanding.The entire work was carried out on three stages with the students in the Faculty of Science at Sebha University, a typical university in Libya. The first experimental study (N = 150) aimed to gain an overall picture of the problems in Libya, look at how learners saw their school and their university experiences in laboratory work in physics. Questionnaires were designed to establish a picture of what was going on and where the problems lay. The survey showed the learners’ need for the security of instruction sheets but they were following these like recipes and not understanding what they were doing. In the light of these findings, pre-laboratory exercises were designed and post-laboratory exercises were constructed, for each experiment. The pre-laboratory exercise involved a set of simple tasks for the students to complete allowing them to revise underpinning ideas, grasp the key point of the experiment and how it was to be done. The overall aim was to reduce the pressure on limited working memory capacity as they undertook the experiment. The post-laboratory exercises were also short and were designed to allow the students to apply the ideas they had learned. The post-laboratory exercises were marked and the scores were used as a measure of understanding. When used with a sample of students (N = 95), the changes brought about by the use of pre-laboratory exercises were explored by considering their performance in the post-laboratory exercises while student perceptions of the experience were considered using a questionnaire. It was found that the pre-laboratory exercises improved understanding quite markedly with the students at Sebha University and their attitudes towards the whole pre-laboratory experience was very positive. In the third and final stage, pre-laboratory and post-laboratory were also employed with a sample of students (N = 106)but the post-lab exercises were extended considerably. The laboratory instructions sheets were re-written completely to make the whole learning experience a more cohesive whole. The outcomes were considered using performance in the post-laboratory exercises while student opinions were surveyed again. In both stages two and three, performance in the post-lab exercises offered insight into how well the students understood what they had done. In addition, at the end of stage three, semi-structured interviews were carried out with university teachers to explore the views of university teachers relating to physics laboratories in Libya. The findings of the third stage and second stage were compared to see what is new in students’ perceptions (N = 106). The question being explored here was whether the key to the greater success lay in the pre-laboratory exercises on their own or whether the re-written instruction sheets made further major improvements. It was found that there were only very small further improvements, thus confirming that the pre-learning from the pre-laboratory exercises was the key. The overall conclusions, this study has demonstrated the power and effectiveness of simple pre-laboratory exercises in a typical Libyan university physics course in enhancing understanding in physics. In almost all the survey items, the responses of the students who worked with pre-lab (with pre-laboratory group) were significantly more positive than the responses from the students who worked without pre-lab (without pre-laboratory group). Comparing the second stage and the third stage revealed little change, suggesting that the key to the performance improvement as well as the changes in student perceptions was largely due to the pre-laboratory exercises. Implications of the findings are discussed, especially in the context of education in Libya.

<p>The objectives of the present study were 1) to examine the effects of noise exposure on recall and recognition of orally presented text and 2) to examine the relation between working memory capacity and the performance of recall and recognition of orally presented text in noisy conditions. A total of 32 subjects, age 20-33, with no known hearing impairment, were paid to participate in the experiment. The hearing ability of all subjects was tested using recorded sentences with and without background noise. Their working memory capacity was tested using listening span, reading span and operation span tests measuring a) correctly recalled words of all three tests, b) the response latency in the reading span test and c) the processing time of the arithmetical operations in the operation span test. Finally all subjects took recall and recognition tests on texts presented orally with and without broadband background noise (white noise). The test results showed that 1) noise had no significant main effect on recall or recognition of the spoken texts, 2) ) the capacity of the central executive component of working memory, measured as the processing time of the arithmetical operations of the operation span test, correlated significantly with recall and recognition of the orally presented text in the noise condition, but not in the control condition, 3) noise exposure had a negative effect on the recognition performance of subjects with lower capacity of the central executive component of working memory.</p>

The objectives of the present study were 1) to examine the effects of noise exposure on recall and recognition of orally presented text and 2) to examine the relation between working memory capacity and the performance of recall and recognition of orally presented text in noisy conditions. A total of 32 subjects, age 20-33, with no known hearing impairment, were paid to participate in the experiment. The hearing ability of all subjects was tested using recorded sentences with and without background noise. Their working memory capacity was tested using listening span, reading span and operation span tests measuring a) correctly recalled words of all three tests, b) the response latency in the reading span test and c) the processing time of the arithmetical operations in the operation span test. Finally all subjects took recall and recognition tests on texts presented orally with and without broadband background noise (white noise). The test results showed that 1) noise had no significant main effect on recall or recognition of the spoken texts, 2) ) the capacity of the central executive component of working memory, measured as the processing time of the arithmetical operations of the operation span test, correlated significantly with recall and recognition of the orally presented text in the noise condition, but not in the control condition, 3) noise exposure had a negative effect on the recognition performance of subjects with lower capacity of the central executive component of working memory.

Digital computers have changed human society in a profound way over the last 50 years. Key properties that contribute to the success of the computer are flexible programmability and fast access to large amounts of data and instructions. Effective access to algorithms and data is a fundamental property that limits the capabilities of computer systems. For PC computers, the main memory consists of dynamic random access memory (DRAM). Communication between memory and processor has traditionally been performed over a multi-drop bus. Signal frequencies on these buses have gradually increased in order to keep up with the progress in integrated circuit data processing capabilities. Increased signal frequencies have exposed the inherent signal degradation effects of a multidrop bus structure. As of today, the main approach to tackle these effects has been to reduce the number of endpoints of the bus structure. Though improvements in DRAM memory technology have increased the available memory size at each endpoint, the increase has not been able to fully fulfill the demand for larger system memory capacity. Different bus structural changes have been used to overcome this problem. All are different compromises between access latency, data transmission capacity, memory capacity, and implementation costs. In this thesis we focus on using the signal processing capabilities of a modern integrated circuit technology as an alternative to bus structural changes. This has the potential to give low latency, high memory capacity, and relatively high data transmission capacity at an additional cost limited to integrated circuit blocks. We first use information theory to estimate the unexplored potential of existing multi-drop bus structures. Hereby showing that reduction of the number of endpoints for multi-drop buses, is by no means based on the fundamental limit of the data transmission capacity of the bus structure. Two test-chips have been designed and fabricated to experimentally demonstrate the feasibility of several Gb/s data-rates over multidrop buses, with limited cost overhead and no latency penalty. The test-chips implement decision feedback equalization, adopted for high speed multi-drop use. The equalizers feature digital filter implementations which, in combination with high speed DACs, enable the use of long digital filters for high speed decision feedback equalization. Blind adaptation has also been implemented to demonstrate extraction of channel characteristics during data transmission. The use of single sided equalization has been proposed in order to limit the need for equalization implementation to the host side of a DRAM memory bus. Furthermore, we propose to utilize the reciprocal properties of the communication channel to ensure that single sided equalization can be performed without any channel characterization hardware on the memory chips. Finally, issues related to evaluation of high-speed channels are addressed and the on-chip structures used for channel evaluation in this project are presented.

This study investigated cognitive factors that might influence Chinese EFL learners’ argumentative essay writing in English. The factors that were explored included English (L2) language proficiency, Chinese (L1) writing ability, genre knowledge, use of writing strategies, and working memory capacity in L1 and L2. Data were collected from 136 university students who received a battery of tests in two sessions. The tests consisted of timed essay writing tasks in L1 and L2, post-writing questionnaires for genre knowledge and use of strategies in the writing process, a timed grammaticality judgment task for L2 grammar knowledge, a receptive vocabulary test and a controlled-production vocabulary test for L2 vocabulary knowledge, and working memory span tasks in L1 and L2. Quantitative analyses using correlations, paired-samples t-test, analysis of variance and multiple regression revealed that L2 language proficiency is the most important predictor of L2 writing, followed by genre knowledge and L2 writing strategies. L1 writing ability and working memory capacity have slight impact as explanatory variables for L2 writing performance in the timed essay writing task.