Growth mindset interventions have been shown to give small but significant boosts to mathematics performance. These interventions are both brief and cheap, making them attractive for boosting mathematics performance. Is it possible that South African students can benefit from a growth mindset intervention? Mindset assessments and interventions have predominantly been developed in the United States. There have been applications of the assessments and interventions to other cultural contexts, often with minimal adaptions. Adaptions are not reported in detail (or thoroughly evaluated) in existing research literature. In a series of four studies, I establish that South African high school students do have mathematics mindsets akin to the fixed and growth mindsets reported elsewhere. Using an iterative design process and item analysis, I modified a mathematics mindset assessment for use with disadvantaged students in South Africa. In two correlational studies I established validity and reliability for a mindset assessment I call “Thinking About Maths”. I examined the contribution of mathematics mindsets to mathematics performance, in comparison with mathematics anxiety, study attitude and study milieu (or environment). I found that whilst mindsets do contribute to performance, the contribution is minimal compared to other variables measured. Additionally, I found that in an impoverished study environment males have high mathematics anxiety which inhibits mathematics performance whereas females have high study attitude, boosting mathematics performance. With assistance from students and teachers, I developed a mindset intervention that is culturally appropriate and relevant. 305 Grade 9 students participated in a field-based quasi-experiment, which had a passive control group. The intervention was delivered on WhatsApp over four weeks. Each week contained a growth mindset message, a YouTube clip, advice on a learning strategy, and an integration activity. The groups were facilitated by young adult mentors. It was clear that WhatsApp groups were an effective mode of delivery and there was good evidence of participation from students. Mathematics performance at the intervention school improved significantly beyond that of the control school. The strength of the intervention seems to lie in the combination of mindset messaging and the teaching of effective strategies.

The human factor/human element starts to have a key role in accidents and incidents during shipments at sea. Investigations show that poor communications increasingly are the root for many tragedies. A possible reason for communication constraints is the growing trend to employ multicultural crews. This thesis aims to document this new challenge in the maritime industry and to endeavour to show how the Maritime Education and Training (MET) can address the problem. The lack of a company crewing policy entails a variation in management standards; it causes confusion. Therefore, it is commonly advised that a common working language be used and expressed in the company policy. It is not only substandard communication that lies behind accidents but also a lack of cultural awareness and “wrong” stereotyping. This is a worrying situation. Researchers in the maritime field have tried to quantify and describe the risks and identify possible benefits with multicultural crews. Disappointingly, the results show a strong disharmony. The industry appears not to be capable of coping with diversity or hesitates to balance eventual advantages with eventual risks. The reason could be that past research studies rather confuse the industry, instead of giving useful guidance. The research strategy, that has been used to find pros and cons in multicultural crews, perhaps has not been the best suited. This thesis aims to propagate for a professionally applied inductive strategy to phenomena related to human factor constraints in the shipping industry. This thesis is also urging MET institutions to conduct courses in cultural awareness and increase the learning goal in English to something more than bare basic. With World Maritime University (WMU) students as the prime research object, it has been found that studying in a multicultural environment is not problem free but instead creates an opportunity to increase the students’ communicative competence. This research study looks at the aspects of psychology, language and pedagogy to conclude that there is a need for courses in cultural awareness. Most likely, multicultural crews in the shipping industry are an irreversible trend. The solutions presented in this thesis focus on communications and cultural awareness and the point made is that, if courses in these two subject areas are not introduced in MET, a mixed crew will continue to be a risk factor hazarding safety at sea. The implication of the results, from a WMU point of view, is that extended understanding of different cultures is a needed subject for both students and teachers. The present, high level of study contact time makes the need for such courses even more important.

This thesis describes a research project that investigates the level of contextualization needed to successfully build context-driven agents that can manage a cooperative project. Many times in industry, collaborators in a large project may be located vast distances from each other. It is for this reason that management of such projects can often be difficult. The purpose of this research is to design an agent that can take on the role of a project manager (PM) to assist the human project manager. Specifically, this thesis looks to give such project management agents full situational awareness. It is hypothesized that only with situational awareness can an agent successfully act in the role of a project manager. This thesis describes the investigation into the use of Context-Based Reasoning and Contextual Graphs to create an agent with such situational awareness. This thesis shows that with enough situational awareness, an agent will have the ability to successfully take on the role of a project manager. In particular, this thesis looks at a PM-agent that can manage a simulated project to design and construct a small sounding rocket.

Developing training scenarios that induce a trainee to utilize specific skills is one of the facets of simulation-based training that requires significant effort. Simulation-based training systems have become more complex in recent years. Because of this added complexity, the amount of effort required to generate and maintain training scenarios has increased. This thesis describes an investigation into automating the scenario generation process. The Automated Scenario Generation System (ASGS) generates expected action flow as contexts in chronological order from several events and tasks with estimated time for the entire training mission. When the training objectives and conditions are defined, the ASGS will automatically generate a scenario, with some randomization to ensure no two equivalent scenarios are identical. This makes it possible to train different groups of trainees sequentially who may have the same level or training objectives without using a single scenario repeatedly. The thesis describes the prototype ASGS and the evaluation results are described and discussed. SVSTM Desktop is used as the development infrastructure for ASGS as prototype training system.

This thesis explores the use of head gesture recognition as an intuitive interface for computer interaction. This research presents a novel vision-based head gesture recognition system which utilizes contextual clues to reduce false positives. The system is used as a computer interface for answering dialog boxes. This work seeks to validate similar research, but focuses on using more efficient techniques using everyday hardware. A survey of image processing techniques for recognizing and tracking facial features is presented along with a comparison of several methods for tracking and identifying gestures over time. The design explains an efficient reusable head gesture recognition system using efficient lightweight algorithms to minimize resource utilization. The research conducted consists of a comparison between the base gesture recognition system and an optimized system that uses contextual clues to reduce false positives. The results confirm that simple contextual clues can lead to a significant reduction of false positives. The head gesture recognition system achieves an overall accuracy of 96% using contextual clues and significantly reduces false positives. In addition, the results from a usability study are presented showing that head gesture recognition is considered an intuitive interface and desirable above conventional input for answering dialog boxes. By providing the detailed design and architecture of a head gesture recognition system using efficient techniques and simple hardware, this thesis demonstrates the feasibility of implementing head gesture recognition as an intuitive form of interaction using preexisting infrastructure, and also provides evidence that such a system is desirable.

This study was designed to assess the effect of Situational context on the playful behaviors of young preschool children ages 18 to 24 months. Playfulness was defined as a psychological construct involving the disposition of play (Rogers, Meeks, Impara, & Frary, 1987). Playful behaviors were observed and coded from videotapes of toddlers interacting with a teacher/experimenter in both assisted play and direct instruction conditions. The research question addressed was as follows: What is the effect of situational context (teacher interaction style) on the playful behaviors of toddlers as measured by the Playful Behaviors Observation Inventory (PBOI)? Data were analyzed using a 2 x 2 x 2 (Condition x Order x Gender) analysis of variance with repeated measures. In the direct instruction condition, children accomplished goals in more varied ways, invented more uses of objects, and attended longer than in the assisted play condition. Those who received the direct instruction condition first also persisted longer at goals than those who received the assisted play condition first. Although pretend play rarely occurred, the number of times children engaged in pretend play was also higher in the direct instruction condition than in the assisted play condition. Results of PBOI scales correlated with age showed an interesting pattern which was not significant but indicated a relationship between age and playfulness. Findings suggest that toddlers are more playful in direct instruction than in assisted play. However, it is difficult to determine from this study if direct instruction is developmentally appropriate for very young preschool children since the children in the late sensorimotor period are in a transitional period of development. It is possible that direct instruction was beneficial because of the age of the children in this study. Toddlers learn through repetition and imitation and need more direction. Results indicate that context has an important role and that imitation, not play, is characteristic of toddlers during the late sensorimotor period. / Ph. D.

Thesis advisor: Rebekah Levine Coley / Research on adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) has demonstrated the high prevalence rates of such experiences, with about 60% of individuals in national U.S. samples reporting one or more types of ACEs as children (Chapman et al., 2013; Finkelhor et al., 2015). Further, research has established robust links between ACEs and a range of negative behavioral and health outcomes in adulthood (Felitti et al., 1998; Hughes et al., 2017; Kalmakis & Chandler, 2015; Wang et al., 2020; Wang & Maguire-Jack, 2018; Wolff et al., 2018). Less is known about when potential negative consequences of ACEs exposure emerge. The few studies that have examined the relationship between ACEs and early outcomes have employed inconsistent modeling strategies which has left the functional form of the relationship unclear, which could lead to either under-or over-estimating the risk associated with various levels of ACEs exposure (Crouch et al., 2019; Hughes et al., 2017; Lanier et al., 2018; Wang et al., 2019). Further, these studies have not comprehensively examined the potential moderating role of socio-ecological factors like neighborhood context. Theoretical frameworks suggest neighborhood resources might buffer children from negative consequences associated with ACEs while exposure to neighborhood-level adversities might exacerbate negative consequences. In order to address these gaps, the currently study examined the functional form of the relationship between ACEs experienced in the first four years of life and kindergarten behavioral outcomes and tested the moderating role of neighborhood resources and neighborhood adversities in a large, nationally representative sample of young children drawn from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study - Birth Cohort (ECLS-B; N ≈ 10,700) linked with neighborhood administrative data. Using inverse probability weighting to strengthen internal validity, numerous modeling strategies supported a linear relationship between early childhood ACEs and kindergarten behavioral outcomes. Greater ACEs exposure was associated with significantly lower prosocial skills and significantly higher externalizing behavior problems, with small effect sizes of 0.075 to 0.143 standard deviation shifts in behaviors for each additional ACEs exposure. Interaction models found that ACEs were significantly associated with behavioral consequences regardless of neighborhood context. Overall, the robust modeling strategies employed provide the strongest evidence to date of the significant, linear relationship between ACEs and early behavioral consequences. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Counseling, Developmental and Educational Psychology.

京都大学 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(人間・環境学) / 甲第24685号 / 人博第1058号 / 新制||人||248(附属図書館) / 2022||人博||1058(吉田南総合図書館) / 京都大学大学院人間・環境学研究科共生人間学専攻 / (主査)教授 藤田 耕司, 教授 谷口 一美, 准教授 守田 貴弘, 教授 田中 伸一 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Human and Environmental Studies / Kyoto University / DFAM

With the proliferation of sensor-enabled smartphones, significant attention has been attracted to develop sensing-driven mobile systems. Current research on sensing-driven mobile systems can be classified into two categories, based on the purpose of sensing. In the first category, smartphones are used to sense personal context information, such as locations, activities, and daily habits to enable applications such as location-aware systems and virtual reality systems. In the second category, smartphones are exploited to collect sensing data of the physical world and enable applications including traffic monitoring, environmental monitoring, and others. As smartphones become blossomed in popularity and ubiquity, new problems have emerged in both categories of mobile sensing systems. In this thesis, we investigate three core challenges by answering the following fundamental questions: first, how can we utilize user context to improve the operating system performance? Second, how can we process sensing data, especially images, with high accuracy? Third, how can we enable distributed sensing while satisfy resource constraints of smartphones? The first part of this thesis studies how to exploit user context to improve the responsiveness of mobile operating systems. We propose a context-aware application-preloading engine named FALCON. The core of FALCON is a decision engine that learns application usage patterns of mobile users and preloads applications ahead of time to improve the responsiveness of mobile OS. Compared with other approaches such as caching schemes like Least Recently Used (LRU), Falcon improves the application responsiveness by two times. The second part of this thesis focuses on image search for mobile phones. We first explore how to improve image search accuracy on centralized servers, and propose an image search engine named CrowdSearch. The core idea of CrowdSearch is to incorporate crowdsourced human validation into the system for removing erroneous results from automated image search engines, while still provide realtime response for mobile users. Compared with existing automated image search engines, CrowdSearch achieves over 95% accuracy consistently across multiple categories of images with response time in a minute. We then extend image search to distributed mobile phones, and emphasis resource constraint problems, especially on energy and bandwidth. We propose a distributed image search system named SenSearch, which turns smartphones into micro image search engines. Images are collected, indexed, and transmitted using compact features that are two magnitudes smaller than their raw format. SenSearch improves the energy and bandwidth cost by five times compared with centralized image search engines.

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