This work explores various methods teachers can use to promote high quality second language oral production. It consists of a review of empirical research and pedagogical implications related to the following factors: 1) Pre-task planning, 2) within-task planning, 3) task repetition, 4) task design, 5) formulaic sequences, 6) learner strategies, 7) form instruction, and 8) error correction. The work concludes with a consideration of issues within the literature and a brief summary of pedagogical implications. / text

As the requirements for completion of a high school diploma and the standards set locally and nationally take shifts towards more rigorous coverage of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), and applicability to the work place, public school curricula must evolve. This report focuses on an urban school district in Texas in the midst of transitioning towards using (i) assessments based on use of STEM principles in “authentic” applications and (ii) product-based evaluations dubbed performance tasks. Physics instructors within the district provided their experiences in the implementation process as well as their views on the authenticity of the tasks they are urged to use. The information from the physics teachers was used as the basis for identifying areas for professional training needed to support instructors in the use of authentic assessments, whether prescribed or instructor-developed. / text

Although the psychomotor vigilance task (PVT) is commonly used in adult sleep research, normative data for PVT performance in children have not been published and performance in children with sleep disordered breathing (SDB) has not been explored. This report describes PVT performance among children participating in the Tucson Children's Assessment of Sleep Apnea (TuCASA). A community-based sample of 360 Caucasian and Hispanic children completed a standard PVT trial. Participants were 48% female and 36% Hispanic; mean age was 8.9 years. Children with respiratory disturbance index (RDI) >1 event/hour and those with parent-reported sleep problems were excluded from the normative analysis. Among normal sleepers, performance on several measures improved with increasing age and differed between boys and girls. No ethnic differences were detected. Among children with SDB, no differences in performance were identified. Age and gender differences in PVT performance must be considered when the PVT is utilized in pediatric populations.

Children at a certain age often have difficulty in flexibly shifting attention between different representational schemes. One example of such cognitive inflexibility occurs in the Dimensional Change Card Sorting (DCCS) task in which 3-year-old children have difficulty switching between sorting dimensions. For instance, after initially sorting the cards by one dimension (e.g., colour) they are unable to sort the cards by a second dimension (e.g., shape). This finding has been primarily associated with problems in attention or inhibition. The present study investigated the role of perceptual information on children’s dimensional shift abilities by manipulating the perceptual characteristics of both task-relevant (the colour or shape of the images on the cards) and task-irrelevant (the background colour or shape of the actual cards themselves) aspects of the task materials between the pre- and post-switch experimental phases. Across three experiments better performance was observed when either task-relevant or task-irrelevant information was changed, with this improved performance occurring when these changes were salient enough to induce a stimulus novelty effect. Experiment 4 investigated yet another perceptual feature of the task; the degree of stimulus realism (abstractness) on children’s cognitive flexibility. Children successfully sorted the cards when three-dimensional stimuli were used but perseverated when using two-dimensional cards, providing evidence for the role of representational status of the stimuli in influencing children’s dimensional switching. Manipulations made to increase the salience of the task material as well as those resulting in reduction of similarity between the two phases of the tasks (or increased novelty) were used to enhance children’s cognitive flexibility. Overall, these findings highlight the critical role played by the perceptual information of the overall experimental context, and have important implications for theories of cognitive flexibility.

“Getting an overview” is a common task performed by coastal professionals in the early phases of management activities. This task involves collecting a variety of information about an area or topic to generate a first impression. This exploratory study examined this single task in detail so as to make recommendations about customizing search results to support that task through the use of an e-Card. Using a structured questionnaire, 20 coastal managers selected coastal characteristics that they would use to generate that first impression. Analysis of the data revealed fifteen core coastal characteristics that were used for the task. The work role that the professional was involved in emerged as a factor that influences characteristic selection. Fieldwork, such as scientific data collection, and management activities, such as drafting management plans, required different coastal characteristics to generate an overview. A prototype e-Card was designed as a proposed task-based search tool.

Children at a certain age often have difficulty in flexibly shifting attention between different representational schemes. One example of such cognitive inflexibility occurs in the Dimensional Change Card Sorting (DCCS) task in which 3-year-old children have difficulty switching between sorting dimensions. For instance, after initially sorting the cards by one dimension (e.g., colour) they are unable to sort the cards by a second dimension (e.g., shape). This finding has been primarily associated with problems in attention or inhibition. The present study investigated the role of perceptual information on children’s dimensional shift abilities by manipulating the perceptual characteristics of both task-relevant (the colour or shape of the images on the cards) and task-irrelevant (the background colour or shape of the actual cards themselves) aspects of the task materials between the pre- and post-switch experimental phases. Across three experiments better performance was observed when either task-relevant or task-irrelevant information was changed, with this improved performance occurring when these changes were salient enough to induce a stimulus novelty effect. Experiment 4 investigated yet another perceptual feature of the task; the degree of stimulus realism (abstractness) on children’s cognitive flexibility. Children successfully sorted the cards when three-dimensional stimuli were used but perseverated when using two-dimensional cards, providing evidence for the role of representational status of the stimuli in influencing children’s dimensional switching. Manipulations made to increase the salience of the task material as well as those resulting in reduction of similarity between the two phases of the tasks (or increased novelty) were used to enhance children’s cognitive flexibility. Overall, these findings highlight the critical role played by the perceptual information of the overall experimental context, and have important implications for theories of cognitive flexibility.

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Executive function, the cognitive processes that allow the voluntary control of goal-directed behaviour, can be studied through the examination of inhibition of action. The countermanding paradigm has been shown to be a powerful tool to examine a subject’s ability to withhold responses to a go stimulus when a stop signal is presented occasionally. Logan and Cowan (1984) developed a race model to account for countermanding performance in humans, proposing that independent go and stop process initiated by the go and stop signals respectively, race toward a finish line whereby the first process to cross its finish line determines the behavioural outcome. The model allows estimation of the stop signal response time, a variable that is not directly observable. The race model has yet to be validated for countermanding performance in rats. Using a new rodent countermanding task inspired directly from human studies, male Wistar rats were trained to respond to a visual stimulus (go signal) by pressing a lever below an illuminated light for food reward, but to countermand lever the press (25% of trials) subsequent to an auditory tone (stop signal) presented after a variable delay. The ability to cancel a response decreased as stop signal delay increased. The stop signal response time for rats was estimated to be 157 ms, a value within the range of human estimates. Predictions of countermanding performance made by the race model were generally respected. Response times of movements that escape inhibition: 1) were shorter than those of movements made in the absence of a stop signal; 2) gradually lengthened with increasing stop signal delay; and most importantly, 3) were predicted by the race model. These findings demonstrate that the countermanding performance of rodents can be accounted for by a simple race model, which has been applied successfully in human studies and nonhuman primate models. This new animal model will permit complementary invasive investigations of brain mechanisms underlying inhibitory control and refine the existing rodent models of neurological disease and impulsivity. / Thesis (Master, Neuroscience Studies) -- Queen's University, 2008-09-30 11:35:44.713

The present study validates the Treadmill Rehabilitation Platform (TRP) protocol that assessed standing balance performance; spatial and temporal gait variability; stability measures and visual spatial cognitive task performances. Healthy individuals (mean age = 61.4± 4.4 years; n = 30) performed tasks from the TRP protocol while standing and while walking on treadmill. Moderate to High test retest reliability was observed for the TRP tool measures with a few exceptions. Standing balance decreased significantly as visual task load increased. Spatial and temporal gait variability increased whereas walking stability decreased significantly as visual task load increased. Visual task performance decreased significantly as physical load increased. In conclusion, the TRP protocol allows us to assess the ability to prioritize the division of attention when visual spatial cognitive tasks are performed while standing and during walking. Also, it allows reliable assessment of the effects of compromised attention during the tasks performances.

It is generally agreed that language interpreting is cognitively demanding; how- ever, to date there is little evidence to indicate how working memory is involved in the task, perhaps due to methodological limitations. Based on a full considera- tion of key components of interpreting, two series of experiments were conducted to explore how working memory might play a role in discourse and sentence inter- preting. If working memory is implicated both in grammatical encoding into the target language, and in temporary storage of the discourse content, then higher demand in one function might compromise the other. Thus discourses that di er in word orders between languages could increase the processing load and leave less resource for memory maintenance, a ecting recall performance. In Experiment 1, Chinese-English bilingual participants' memory performance was compared when they translated passages from Chinese to English and from English to Chinese, where the expected word order was either congruent or incongruent between source and target. Recall was not sensitive to word order or direction of translation. Per- haps surprisingly, memory for incongruent discourses was numerically better than that for congruent sentences. Experiment 2 showed that interpreting trainees per- formed just like the participants in Experiment 1 did, suggesting that memory performance was not modulated by translation direction in pro cient translators. Experiment 3 explored the relationship between surface form transformation and recall. As discourse paraphrasing did not result in better recall than verbatim recall, it was concluded that the better memory performance for incongruent discourse in- terpreting suggested by Experiment 1 was not the result of active manipulation of word form or word order in interpreting. Finally, a free recall task among native English speakers showed that the incongruent discourses tested in earlier experi- ments were intrinsically more memorable than congruent discourses (Experiment 4). Despite this confound, this series of experiments highlighted the importance of comprehension in interpreting, but it did not rule out the role of working memory in the task. The role of working memory in interpreting was further explored using on-line measures in Experiments 5-8. Experiment 5 replicated a self-paced reading study by Ruiz, Paredes, Macizo, and Bajo (2008), comparing participants’ times to read sentences for translation to those to read them normally. The data showed that participants accessed lexical and syntactic properties of a target language in the reading-for-translation condition when resources were available to them. In order to explore the role of working memory in sentence interpreting, a dual-task paradigm was used in Experiment 6. When participants' working memory was occupied by a secondary task (digit preload), reading times were only different numerically between congruent and incongruent sentences. Crucially, reading times decreased as digit preload increased. Since there were no differences in the interpretations produced or in digit recall, it appears that participants were flexible in their resource allocation, suggesting that processing can be tuned up to optimise performance for concurrent tasks. Experiment 7 refined the procedure in the order of responses for the dual tasks but replicated the results of Experiment 6. A closer examination of participants’ interpretation responses showed that devices that could reduce processing load in target language production may have been strategically employed. Finally, another set of sentences were used in Experiment 8 in an attempt to replicate Experiment 5. A failure to replicate the earlier findings suggested that working memory demand might differ for different syntactic structures in sentence interpreting. All in all, this thesis shows that research in language interpreting benefits by taking a full account of the key components of interpreting. The use of on-line measures allowed us to take a ne-grained approach to the investigation of interpretation processes. It is proposed in this thesis that interpreting research may gain more insight from the data by incorporating some of the theories and methods typically used in research into language production.