Multiple-choice (MCQs) and short-answer questions (SAQs) are the most common test formats for assessing English reading proficiency. While the former provides test-takers with prescribed options, the latter requires short written responses. Test developers favor MCQs over SAQs for the following reasons: less time required for rating, high rater agreement, and wide content coverage. This mixed methods dissertation investigated the impacts of test format on reading performance, metacognitive awareness, test-completion processes, and task perceptions. Participants were eighty English as a second language (ESL) learners from a Midwestern community college. They were first divided into two groups of approximately equivalent reading proficiencies and then completed MCQ and SAQ English reading tests in different orders. After completing each format, participants filled out a survey about demographic information, strategy use, and perceptions of test formats. They also completed a 5-point Likert-scale survey to assess their degree of metacognitive awareness. At the end, sixteen participants were randomly chosen to engage in retrospective interviews focusing on their strategy use and task perceptions. This study employed a mixed methods approach in which quantitative and qualitative strands converged to draw an overall meta-inference. For the quantitative strand, descriptive statistics, paired sample t-tests, item analyses, two-way ANOVAs, and correlation analyses were conducted to investigate 1) the differences between MCQ and SAQ test performance and 2) the relationship between test performance and metacognitive awareness. For the qualitative strand, test-takers’ MCQ and SAQ test completion processes and task perceptions were explored using coded interview and survey responses related to strategy use and perceptions of test formats. Results showed that participants performed differently on MCQ and SAQ reading tests, even though both tests were highly correlated. The paired sample t-tests revealed that participants’ English reading and writing proficiencies might account for the MCQ and SAQ performance disparity. Moreover, there was no positive relationship between reading test performance and the degree of metacognitive awareness generated by the frequency of strategy use. Correlation analyses suggested whether a higher or lower English reading proficiency of the participants was more important than strategy use. Although the frequency of strategy use did not benefit test performance, strategies implemented for MCQ and SAQ tests were found to generate interactive processes allowing participants to gain deeper understanding of the source texts. Furthermore, participants’ perceptions toward MCQs, SAQs, and a combination of both revealed positive and negative influences among test format, reading comprehension, and language learning. Therefore, participants’ preferences of test format should be considered when measuring their English reading proficiency. This study has pedagogical implications on the use of various test formats in L2 reading classrooms.

abstract: INTRODUCTION: As people age, they become increasingly susceptible to falls, particularly when their attention is divided. Cognitive domains such as executive functioning and processing speed also decline over time and are associated with falls. A critical aspect to reducing falls are reactive steps, which are used to recover balance after a perturbation. Characterizing the relationship between cognition, dual tasking, and prioritization is necessary in order to decrease fall risk in older adults. Thus, the purpose of this analysis was to determine the effects of baseline cognitive status on dual task interference and prioritization of postural and cognitive tasks while reactive stepping. METHODS: 30 participants (Parkinson's disease (PD) n=16, healthy controls (HC) n=14) were divided into two groups based on their baseline cognitive status: the high-cog group (n=18) or the low-cog group (n=12). All participants experienced 7 perturbation trials where they were solely tasked with reactive stepping, 2 cognitive trials where they were solely tasked with verbally responding to an auditory Stroop test, and 7 trials that combined the two tasks. Cognitive and protective stepping performance was calculated for dual task interference and prioritization across groups. RESULTS: There were no outcome variables that showed the log-cog group performing worse than the high-cog group from single to dual task conditions. While examining the dual task interference between groups, the only significant outcome was that the low-cog group exhibited a subtle improvement in their step length performance under dual task conditions while the high-cog group did not. When comparing the prioritization scores, there was no statistically significant difference in prioritization between the high-cog and low-cog group. Albeit not significant across groups, the prioritization score for all outcomes was negative, indicating a stepping prioritization under dual task conditions for both groups. This analysis provides preliminary evidence that baseline cognitive status does not significantly affect dual task interference nor prioritization while reactive step dual tasking. While these effects should be treated with caution, these results would suggest that baseline cognitive status may not play a critical role in dual task interference or attentional allocation in both people with PD and healthy older adults. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Exercise and Wellness 2020

The components of high-performance systems continue to become more complex on the road to exascale. This complexity is exposed at the level of: multi/many-core CPUs, accelerators (GPUs), interconnects (horizontal communication), and memory hierarchies (vertical communication). A crucial task is designing an algorithm and a programming model that scale to the same order of the HPC system size at multiple levels. This trend in HPC architecture more critically affects memory-intensive appli- cations than compute-bound applications. Accomplishing this task involves adopting less synchronous forms of the mathematical algorithm, reducing synchronization in the computational implementation, introducing more SIMT-style concurrency at the finest level of system hierarchy, and increasing arithmetic intensity as the bottleneck shifts from number of floating-point operations to number of memory accesses. This dissertation addresses these challenges in scientific simulation focusing in the dominant kernels of a memory-bound application: sparse solvers in implicit model- ing, and I/O in explicit reverse time migration in seismic imaging. We introduce asynchronous task-based parallelism into iterative algebraic preconditioners. We also introduce a task-based framework that hides the latency of I/O with computation. This dissertation targets two main applications in the oil and gas industry: reservoir simulation and seismic imaging simulation. It presents results on multi- and many- core systems and GPUs on four Top500 supercomputers: Summit, TSUBAME 3.0, Shaheen II, and Makman-2. We introduce an asynchronous implementation of four major memory-bound kernels: Algebraic multigrid (MPI+OmpSs), tridiagonal solve (MPI+OpenMP), Additive Schwarz Preconditioned Inexact Newton (MPI+MPI), and Reverse Time Migration (StarPU/StarPU+MPI and CUDA).

The smartphone has quickly become the most used device to access the internet. Academic and public concern has been raised if overuse of smartphone technology can have detrimental effects on brain and behavior. Preliminary results suggest that excessive smartphone usage may be linked to impaired inhibitory control. The present study investigates whether such a relationship is present in a sample of healthy individuals with varying degrees of usage. To investigate the proposed relationship, the Stroop color and word task and the stop-signal task was utilized to measure inhibitory control, while screen time was utilized to measure duration of smartphone usage. A Pearson‘s correlation analysis and an independent t-test/Mann Whitney-U test analyzed the results, which did not yield statistical significance.

Title: Implementation of Challenging Tasks in Mathematics Education Author: PhDr. Lucie Růžičková Department: Department of Mathematics and Mathematics Education Supervisor: RNDr. Alena Kopáčková, Ph.D. ABSTRACT The thesis deals with practical implementation of challenging tasks in mathematics education. The methodology for examining "the fidelity of implementation of mathematical tasks" is being designed to describe whether the task is used according to the original intention of the teacher or according to the intention of its author. This methodology is employed in the analysis of four experiments to examine mathematical tasks and task environments. Then, based on the experience with the analysis, the methodology is adapted to the needs of both the teaching practice and educational research. The main result of the thesis is the creation of the methodology for examining the fidelity of implementation of mathematical tasks which is based on contrasting the descriptions of four general elements of the mathematical task at different phases of its implementation. KEY WORDS: mathematics education, mathematical task, challenging task, implementation of tasks

Task allocation, and task switching have an important effect on the efficiency of distributed, locally controlled systems such as social insect colonies. Both efficiency and workload distribution are global features of the system which are not directly accessible to workers and can only be sampled locally by an individual in a distributed system. To investigate how the cost of task switching affects global performance we use social wasp societies as a metaphor to construct a simple model system with four interconnected tasks. Our goal is not the accurate description of the behavior of a given species, but to seek general conclusions on the effect of noise and time delay on a behavior that is partitioned into subtasks. In our model a nest structure needs to be constructed by the cooperation of individuals that carry out different tasks: builders, pulp and water foragers, and individuals storing water. We report a simulation study based on a model using delay-differential equations to analyze the trade-off between task switching costs and keeping a high degree of adaptivity in a dynamic, noisy environment. Combining the methods of time-delayed equations and stochastic processes we are able to represent the influence of swarm size and task switching sensitivity. We find that the system is stable for reasonable choices of parameters but shows oscillations for extreme choices of parameters and we find that the system is resilient to perturbations. We identify a trade-off between reaching equilibria of high performance and having short transients.

Task allocation, and task switching have an important effect on the efficiency of distributed, locally controlled systems such as social insect colonies. Both efficiency and workload distribution are global features of the system which are not directly accessible to workers and can only be sampled locally by an individual in a distributed system. To investigate how the cost of task switching affects global performance we use social wasp societies as a metaphor to construct a simple model system with four interconnected tasks. Our goal is not the accurate description of the behavior of a given species, but to seek general conclusions on the effect of noise and time delay on a behavior that is partitioned into subtasks. In our model a nest structure needs to be constructed by the cooperation of individuals that carry out different tasks: builders, pulp and water foragers, and individuals storing water. We report a simulation study based on a model using delay-differential equations to analyze the trade-off between task switching costs and keeping a high degree of adaptivity in a dynamic, noisy environment. Combining the methods of time-delayed equations and stochastic processes we are able to represent the influence of swarm size and task switching sensitivity. We find that the system is stable for reasonable choices of parameters but shows oscillations for extreme choices of parameters and we find that the system is resilient to perturbations. We identify a trade-off between reaching equilibria of high performance and having short transients.

付記する学位プログラム名: 霊長類学・ワイルドライフサイエンス・リーディング大学院 / 京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(理学) / 甲第22034号 / 理博第4538号 / 新制||理||1652(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院理学研究科生物科学専攻 / (主査)教授 友永 雅己, 准教授 宮地 重弘, 教授 濱田 穣 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Science / Kyoto University / DFAM

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Teachers often need simple ways to implement effective classroom interventions that reduce off-task behaviors for students with or without ADHD (Gaastra, Groen, Tucha, & Tucha, 2016). One intervention that is easy to use and can be implemented with minimal demand on teachers is self-monitoring (Amato-Zech, Hoff, & Doepke, 2006). One prompt that can be used in the classroom for self-monitoring is the MotivAider. The MotivAider is an electronic timer that vibrates to provide a tactile prompt to self-monitor (Amato-Zech et al., 2006). The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which the MotivAider, a tactile self-monitoring device, could be used to increase on-task behavior of students identified with ADHD and/or behavior disorders. Results from this study indicated that overall the student use of the MotivAider resulted in higher amounts of time on task than teacher use.