Nyare klassrumsforskning visar att arbetet i klassrummet idag mer sällan leds av läraren i helklassundervisning, utan istället organiseras som bänkarbete, gruppsamtal och grupparbeten. Samtidigt är det preciserat i Lpf94 att elever själva ska ta ansvar för sitt lärande och resultat i förhållande till kurskriterier. Min undran utifrån detta var hur eleverna förvaltar dessa lärandesituationer och hur ansvarstagandet kan se ut i kommunikation elever emellan. Syftet med uppsatsen är att försöka förstå vilka möjligheter och begränsningar för lärande som skapas, genom att beskriva och analysera elevers kommunikation i en lärandesituation. Kommunikationen som undersökts är tre autentiska gruppsamtal mellan elever arbetande med en rapport i religionskunskap. Arbetsmomentets lärandemål handlade om att eleverna skulle utveckla vetenskapliga begrepp inom området rit och symbol. Samtalen har filmats och transkriberats. Med utgångspunkt i ett sociokulturellt perspektiv har feedback eleverna emellan undersökts i syfte att avgöra kommunikationens kvalitet för lärande. Feedbacken har kodats utifrån Hattie och Timperleys modell för att kunna avgöra dess kvalitet för lärande. För att ytterligare fördjupa analysen av elevernas kommunikation tillfördes en kategori utanför den använda modellen, samt begreppen intersubjektivitet och alteritet. Resultaten visar att kommunikationen präglas av den spontana-vardagliga begreppsnivån och inte den vetenskapliga. Alteriteten står tillbaka till förmån för intersubjektiviteten, vilket försämrar möjligheterna till användning av de vetenskapliga begreppen. Följden blir att kommunikationen innehåller feedback för lärande i begränsad utsträckning. Den feedback som sker håller låg kvalitet. Slutsatsen är att de observerade eleverna inte tar ansvar för sin lärprocess genom att använda gruppsamtalet som det tillfälle till lärande det har möjlighet att vara. Detta diskuteras utifrån ett sociokulturellt perspektiv och de förändringar som svenska skolsystemet genomgått avseende kunskapsbedömningar.

The purpose of this essay is to illuminate two teachers’ communication strategies when dealing with pupils with another first language than Swedish. One of the teachers teaches Swedish as a second language and the other teacher educates one class in most of the subjects such as mathematic, Swedish and social studies. I make an ethnographic study where I make non-participating observations and shorter interviews with the teachers. The observations lie in focus of my study and were made at eight occasions, four lessons with each teacher. My result shows that they have a lot of communication strategies in common, but not all. What makes the strategies different are the teachers different classes, there own different educations and their differences in personality. The Swedish as a second language teacher has the proper education for her teaching subject and the other teacher for her classroom. The most important thing to have in mind when teaching pupils with a second language is to have an intercultural approach which illuminates every pupils needs and that this approach stands as the basis for the education.

Books and paper prints are the most common learning medium we used to have. However, content knowledge represented in books and paper prints is static, which limits the manifestation of complex and abstract concepts. Integrating smartphone with books makes it possible to incorporate varieties of digital materials fetched from the Internet to complement the content of books and paper prints and enrich the learning activities. Collaborative learning has been recognized as an effective instructional strategy. Individual learners learn through continuous conversation with group peers for knowledge sharing and knowledge construction. However, it has also been reported that the lack of proper procedural facilitation may undermine the learning performance of collaboration. To ensure that every learner in a group can best contribute to peer collaboration, a procedural scaffold was designed and implemented. The scaffolded procedure consists of four stages in peer collaboration, including individual learning, individual problem solving, group discussion, and group decision-making, in which the stage of individual problem solving was a critical step but was often ignored. In this study, a new paper-based learning system integrated with digital materials was designed and implemented for enhancing face-to-face collaborative learning. The procedural scaffold was implemented using a smartphone. The results showed that the facilitation of the procedural scaffolding enabled groups to perform significantly better in resolving ill-structured problems, promoted higher-level discourse in group discussions, and fostered individuals¡¦ deep understanding. Relevant issues about student learning using the new system were discussed, and future research to improve this study was suggested.

In this study, the aim was to investigate the effects of the web-based internet search scaffolding tool (WISST) on the improvement of metacognitive skills of 7th grade students associated with their goal orientation. This study utilized a static-group pretest-posttest design. The first experiment group received web-based metacognitive scaffolding tool treatment / the second experiment group received teacher-based metacognitive scaffolding / and the control group had no scaffolding. The designed tool aimed to scaffold users throughout web searching by emphasizing certain metacognitive skills improvement. Three main instruments were used to gather data: metacognition inventory for Internet search (MIIS), patterns of adaptive learning scale (PALS), and achievement test. 76 7th grade elementary school students in Ankara, Turkey participated in this study. The data gathered from the participants were analyzed through quantitative and qualitative data analysis methods. The results of the study indicated that WISST tool helped students improve certain metacognitive skills including monitoring, planning, controlling, and strategy generation. Its unique effectiveness was on the improvement of controlling skills. Teacher scaffolding group was also successful in improvement of strategy generation skills. No effects of goal orientations on the improvement of metacognitive skills were found in the analyses. Within hierarchical regression models, only pre-MIIS scores significantly contributed to the model. Students having less improved metacognitive skills were found associated with less trials and less visits. Students having poor performance work grades were tended to copy-paste more, try less, and visit less. Task difficulty and task type was observed to influence the search patterns of students. Search patterns and reflections also indicated that scaffolded groups made positive difference in search patterns.

<p>This thesis aims to evaluate four artificial neural network architectures, each of which implements the sensory-motor mapping in an embodied, situated, and autonomous agent set up to reach a goal area in one out of six systematically varied T-maze environments. In order to reach the goal the agent has to turn either to the left or to the right in each junction in the environment, depending on the placement of previously encountered light sources. The evaluation is broken down into (i) measuring the reliability of the agents' capacity to repeatedly reach the goal area, (ii) analyzing how the agents work, and (iii) comparing the results to related work on the problem.</p><p>Each T-maze constitutes an instance of a broad class of problems known as delayed response tasks, which are characterized by a significant (and typically varying) delay between a stimulus and the corresponding appropriate response. This thesis expands this notion to include, besides simple tasks, repeated and multiple delayed response tasks. In repeated tasks, the agent faces several stimulus-delay-response sequences after each other. In multiple tasks, the agent faces several stimuli before the delay and the corresponding appropriate responses. Even if simple at an abstract level, these tasks raise some of the fundamental issues within cognitive science and artificial intelligence such as whether or not an internal objective world model is necessary and/or suitable to achieve the appropriate behavior. For such reasons, these problems also constitute an interesting base for evaluating alternative ideas within these fields.</p><p>The work leads to several interesting insights. Firstly, purely reactive controllers (as represented by a feed-forward network) may be sufficient, in interaction with the environment, to solve both simple and repeated delayed response tasks. Secondly, an extended sequential cascaded network that selectively replaces its own sensory-motor mapping achieves significantly better performance than the other networks. This indicates that selective replacement of the sensory-motor mapping may be more powerful than both modulation (as represented by a simple recurrent network) and replacement in each step (as represented by a standard sequential cascaded network). Thirdly, this thesis demonstrates that even reactive controllers may contribute to behavior, which, from an observer's point of view, may seem to require an internal rational capacity, i.e. the ability to represent and explore alternatives internally.</p>

Teachers work in complex and demanding times with an increasing number of students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds (CLD) in classrooms. These students are over represented in statistics of under achievement. All teachers are teachers of academic language, and while no child is born with school language as a first language, for some students the match between home and school is more closely aligned than for other students. Teachers are expected to be culturally responsive, ensuring the languages and culture of students is visible in the classroom environment and the classroom curriculum. Despite the increasing knowledge about the specific strategies and approaches that will most effectively support CLD students in classrooms, the teaching of CLD students within mainstream contexts remains far from ideal. Teachers need support to access the principles of effective teaching of CLD learners that are available, and importantly to transfer the knowledge into classroom practice. Professional development and learning is linked to improved teacher practice and student learning outcomes. When teachers have opportunities to be engaged in successful elements of in-depth professional learning such as in-class modelling, observation and feedback, and co-construction of teaching and planning they are able to demonstrate improved pedagogical content knowledge. Their beliefs may also need to be challenged. The study was conducted in two schools in a large city in New Zealand where I am employed as an ESOL and literacy adviser. Using an action research method I was able to examine how a professional development and learning process shaped my own knowledge and practice as well as teacher knowledge and practice. The study fills a research space to gain insights into the effective professional learning processes that impact on teacher strategies and approaches with their CLD learners A central tenet of this research is that teachers can improve their practice of teaching CLD students and they can specifically learn strategies and approaches that are considered effective for them.

Learning and assessment are inextricably intertwined, since assessment not only measures learning, but future learning is also dependent on assessment. The purpose of this two phase sequential mixed-methods study was to examine the interplay between informal and formal assessment in Grade 9 EFAL classrooms in order to gain a better understanding of teachers’ assessment practises. Argued from a constructivist point of view, the study endorses continuous assessment (CASS), which balances informal and formal assessment. In order to direct the study towards the stated purpose, the researcher embarked on a literature study to contextualise English as First Additional Language against the background of educational developments in South Africa since 1994 and to examine assessment of English First Additional Language in an OBE framework. The literature study was followed by an empirical study. By applying a sequential mixed-methods research design, 66 conveniently sampled EFAL teachers in the Johannesburg-North District of the Gauteng Department of Education participated in the quantitative phase of the empirical study. By means of a survey as strategy of inquiry, these teachers completed a questionnaire. Six randomly selected teachers from the initial sample participated in the qualitative phase of the empirical study which followed a case study strategy of inquiry and consisted of individual interviews and observations. The empirical research findings revealed that the sampled teachers experienced the official Departmental documents as regulatory, overwhelming and ambiguous and that they gave more attention to formal assessment than informal assessment. Due to this emphasis on formal assessment, the teachers felt uncertain about the purposes of informal assessment which, as a consequence, was considered as less important than formal assessment. A preference of conventional assessment methods was also disclosed which implied that the sampled teachers were not willing to experiment with alternative assessment methods. In conclusion, the researcher discovered that although CASS was implemented in the sampled teachers’ classrooms, learner-centred teaching founded on constructivism with the aim of encouraging scaffolding, was not high on the teachers’ teaching agendas. / MEd (Learning and Teaching), North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2013

The aim of the thesis is to explore, from a linguistic perspective, the construction and maintenance of interaction in documents in which directives are conveyed in business communication correspondence, in order to input directly into the pedagogic practice in written business communication. The focus is research into ways of scaffolding relationships in documents for correspondence, an area that represents an important aspect of language use in business communication practice. The data for the study includes letters, memoranda and saving rams in which directives are conveyed written by writers of English as a second language and following various channels of communication. Two methods are used to extract the relevant data in which evaluative meanings are conveyed. These are Wordsmith to extract evaluative and patterns and a manual analysis to identify the evaluative structures of the texts. The linguistic construal of interpersonal scaffolding is investigated drawing on the model of APPRAISAL (Martin, 2000), which is located within the Hallidayan grammar as the theoretical point of departure. The choice of language used in the texts is interrogated and interpreted with reference to the theory. analysis focuses on the linguistic systems that appropriately serve or construe the interactive function of language and addresses issues such as kinds of semantic values that are conveyed, the patterns in which they are expressed and their texture. The objective is not to make generalizations about how writers of documents manage interaction and persuade their recipients to carry out the actions they desire. Rather the aim is to develop a theoretical framework to explain the evaluative strategies that are encoded in the texts and the implications of choosing amongst different strategies. ii The thesis therefore contributes a theoretically motivated and dynamic explanation of the ways in which interaction is managed in the context of texts in which directives are communicated especially amongst Batswana writing in the English language. From a pedagogic perspective the explanations of managing interaction developed in the study provide insights and resources for teachers of business communication writing to assist them in modelling evaluative strategies in business correspondence writing and helping their students to develop effective written communication strategies. / Thesis (Ph.D. (English)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2010.

The aim of the thesis is to explore, from a linguistic perspective, the construction and maintenance of interaction in documents in which directives are conveyed in business communication correspondence, in order to input directly into the pedagogic practice in written business communication. The focus is research into ways of scaffolding relationships in documents for correspondence, an area that represents an important aspect of language use in business communication practice. The data for the study includes letters, memoranda and saving rams in which directives are conveyed written by writers of English as a second language and following various channels of communication. Two methods are used to extract the relevant data in which evaluative meanings are conveyed. These are Wordsmith to extract evaluative and patterns and a manual analysis to identify the evaluative structures of the texts. The linguistic construal of interpersonal scaffolding is investigated drawing on the model of APPRAISAL (Martin, 2000), which is located within the Hallidayan grammar as the theoretical point of departure. The choice of language used in the texts is interrogated and interpreted with reference to the theory. analysis focuses on the linguistic systems that appropriately serve or construe the interactive function of language and addresses issues such as kinds of semantic values that are conveyed, the patterns in which they are expressed and their texture. The objective is not to make generalizations about how writers of documents manage interaction and persuade their recipients to carry out the actions they desire. Rather the aim is to develop a theoretical framework to explain the evaluative strategies that are encoded in the texts and the implications of choosing amongst different strategies. ii The thesis therefore contributes a theoretically motivated and dynamic explanation of the ways in which interaction is managed in the context of texts in which directives are communicated especially amongst Batswana writing in the English language. From a pedagogic perspective the explanations of managing interaction developed in the study provide insights and resources for teachers of business communication writing to assist them in modelling evaluative strategies in business correspondence writing and helping their students to develop effective written communication strategies. / Thesis (Ph.D. (English)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2010.

The purpose of this degree project has been to examine the implications of the provision of certain methodological support mechanisms, what has often been referred to as "instructional scaffolding" in literary didactics, to assist students in the ESL/EFL classroom in their interaction with the various literary texts into which they come into contact during their English language education at the upper secondary level in Sweden. My primary interest has been to gauge the response of the students involved in this study to the particular types of literary didactic methods utilized, for example, regarding their effectiveness in aiding the learning process as well as their impact on the literary, or aesthetic, experience itself. An analysis of student responses to a literature instruction module based on a reading of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness will demonstrate that certain forms of literary didactic methods in general, and significantly, particular forms of what can be conceptualized as instructional scaffolding, play a crucial role for both the learning process and the student's aesthetic experience of literature.