English language learning is an indispensable part of Chinese students’ education. As a core subject tested in the high-stakes national college entrance examination, English plays a decisive role in Chinese upper secondary students’ schooling. According to the Canadian social psychologist, Robert Gardner, when learning another language as a formal school course, motivation is a critical determinant of successful learning outcomes. Studies on motivation to learn English in China give precedence to tertiary education; empirical studies of secondary education are underrepresented. Drawing on a comparative perspective, this study investigated Chinese upper secondary students’ motivation to learn English from the aspects of genders, age, and majors. A questionnaire survey was undertaken to assemble data from 120 participants in an upper secondary school in Chengdu city. The results indicated that, the participants at large were positively motivated to learn English, and their motivation was preponderantly instrumentally oriented (e.g., educational qualification, occupational prospect, etc.). A statistically significant difference in motivation between the female and male participants was identified, namely that the females demonstrated a stronger motivation and were willing to expend more effort and perseverance to learn English. Neither age nor major was found to make any significant difference to motivation. The pedagogical implications suggested in this study, sheds light on tackling the issues of developing a long-term strategy for promoting sustainable motivation, as well as underpinning the English language pedagogy in Chinese upper secondary education.

Yes / Research institutions, universities and organisations at large have a growing interest for gender equality and diversity to be integrated into all stages of research and innovation including strategic planning, promotion, recruitment, performance reporting and transformation. Creating and finding open spaces where these processes can be approached from different perspectives, in which multiple stakeholders can express and share their interests and experiences, and where critical conversations, discussions and knowledge sharing can take place is fundamental for advancing collaborative projects and actions aimed at profound organisational change. Learning Circles, therefore, are useful resources that facilitate organisational safe spaces where multiple stakeholders from different backgrounds, sectors, disciplines, and nationalities reflect, in a relaxed and collaborative atmosphere, about gender equality and diversity as collective projects; and their impact and relevance for/in research and innovation fields. The advantages of Learning Circles are manifold: they represent intersectional, interdisciplinary and even transnational arenas and opportunities for experience sharing, and knowledge generation/transfer. / FP7

This thesis systematically examined the link between developmental dyscalculia, a specific learning difficulty of mathematics, and mathematics anxiety, a negative emotional reaction to mathematics tasks. The link between these maths learning issues was examined by measuring their prevalence in large samples of English primary (N = 1004; N= 830) and secondary school (N = 927) students. Gender differences were also explored. Systematically varying diagnostic criteria for dyscalculia revealed that its prevalence ranged between 0.89-17.23 percent. When absolute performance thresholds were used, there was no gender difference in dyscalculia prevalence. The association of mathematics performance with other cognitive skills and mathematics anxiety was investigated longitudinally in subsamples of children with dyscalculia (n =10), typical mathematics performance (n=10) and high maths ability (n = 11). 80 percent of the children in the dyscalculia group still met the criteria for diagnosis at the final time point. Mathematics performance was positively associated with working memory performance and negatively associated with mathematics anxiety. Furthermore, children with dyscalculia had higher maths anxiety than the other two groups. The relationship between dyscalculia and high maths anxiety was estimated in a larger sample (N = 1757). Relatively few children with dyscalculia had high maths anxiety and the majority of students with high maths anxiety in fact had mathematics performance within or above the average range. Girls had higher maths anxiety than boys, and more girls had both dyscalculia and maths anxiety than boys. There was an expected negative correlation between maths anxiety and maths performance in the total sample, but this correlation was negligible in the children with dyscalculia. Collectively, these results suggest that cognitive and emotional mathematics problems are dissociable, and indicate that children with dyscalculia and maths anxiety likely require different types of intervention. Furthermore there appears to be no gender difference in maths performance or in the prevalence of dyscalculia. However, girls have higher maths anxiety than boys, and are more likely to be affected by maths anxiety alongside developmental dyscalculia. Maths anxiety may be a potential explanation for the underrepresentation of females in careers involving mathematics.

This investigation compared achievement of boys and girls in second grade who were seven years old in June, July, and August of 1983 to the boys and girls in second grade who were eight years old in September, October, and November of 1983. The students were tested using the Iowa Test of Basic Skills using the following areas: reading, total math, and composite scores. The study also looked at the correlation of sex and age of students who had been retained in first grade. A comparison of teacher grades to standardized test scores and ability grouping was also presented. One way analysis of variance was applied to the test results. A chi square test of independence was conducted on students retained in the first grade to determine if interaction between sex and age was indicated. Older children scored higher in all three areas measured, while girls scored higher in reading. This may seem contradictory, but is not. Age was significant beyond the .05 level, while sex was significant beyond the .001 level. This difference is explained by the extremes in means for younger boys and older girls. Since first grade curriculum emphasizes reading, this gave girls a definite advantage over boys. Boys, however, scored significantly higher in math. The results indicate a need for restructuring curriculum to meet the needs of boys and girls. Younger boys in second grade scored the lowest in all areas tested, except math. These scores would have been even more significant if the boys who were not promoted to second grade could have been included in the second grade testing. These findings indicate that total developmental age is the most important factor when considering admission for school. A closer look should be taken at the requirements for school entrance. The factors that must be considered are chronological age, mental age, physical maturity, emotional and social maturity, behavior age, and sex.

The purpose of this study was to investigate scientific epistemological beliefs, perceptions of constructivist learning environment, attitude towards science, prior knowledge and gender as determinants of students&rsquo / approaches to learning. This study was carried out in 2005-2006 Spring Semester. One thousand, one hundred and fifty two eighth grade students from seven public schools in &Ccedil / ankaya, a district of Ankara participated in this study. Epistemological Beliefs Questionnaire, Constructivist Learning Environment Scale, Learning Approaches Questionnaire and Attitude towards Science Scale were administered to students in order to determine their scientific epistemological beliefs, their perceptions of constructivist learning environments, approaches to learning and attitudes towards science respectively. Descriptive statistics were used in order to explore the general characteristics of the sample. Paired samples t-test was used in order to evaluate the mean difference iv between the scales of the actual and preferred learning environments. Pearson Correlation Analyses and Multiple Regression Analyses were conducted to see the relationships among the variables and the variables that contribute to students&rsquo / meaningful and rote learning approaches. Results of the paired samples t-test showed that the actual learning environments of the students did not adapt their preferences. In fact, students preferred more constructivist learning environments where they have more opportunity to relate science with the real world, communicate in the classroom, take role in the decision making process of what will go on in the lesson to be more beneficial for them, question what is going on in the lesson freely and experience the formulation of scientific knowledge. Pearson correlation analyses, however, showed that students who had meaningful learning orientations had tentative views of scientific epistemological beliefs, positive attitudes towards science, high prior knowledge and perceived their learning environments as constructivist. On the other hand, students who had rote learning approaches had fixed views of scientific epistemological beliefs, positive attitudes towards science and low prior knowledge. In addition, the rote learners perceived their environments as constructivist in all scales except shared control scale. Multiple Regression Analyses by using actual learning environment showed that attitude towards science is the best predictor of both meaningful and rote learning approaches.

Submitted by Georgia Vaz (georgia.vaz@mackenzie.br) on 2016-07-06T19:42:24Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) JOSE AHYRTON BATISTA LOPES FILHO.pdf: 1482320 bytes, checksum: 2162e0cdfb92a9b596af601d0f4c4ed1 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-07-06T19:42:24Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) JOSE AHYRTON BATISTA LOPES FILHO.pdf: 1482320 bytes, checksum: 2162e0cdfb92a9b596af601d0f4c4ed1 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-02-17 / With the growth of social media in recent years, there has been an increase on the interest in the automatic characterization of users based on the informal content they generate. In this context, the labeling of users in demographic categories, such as age, ethnicity, origin and race,and the investigation of other attributes inherent to users, such as political preferences, personality and gender expression, has received a great deal of attention, especially based on Twitter data. The present work focuses on the task of gender classification by using 65 textual meta-attributes, commonly used in text attribution tasks, for the extraction of gender expression linguistic cues in tweets written in Portuguese.The work takes into account characters, syntax, words, structure and morphology, as well as selected psycolinguistic cues of short length, multi-genre, content free texts posted on Twitter to classify author's gender via four different machine-learning algorithms. The proposed meta-attributes in this process are also evaluated. / Com o crescimento das mídias sociais nos últimos anos tem havido um aumento de interesse na caracterização automática dos usuários com base no conteúdo informal que eles geram. Neste contexto, a rotulação dos usuários em categorias demográficas tais como idade, etnia, origem e raça, bem como a investigação de outros atributos inerentes aos usuários, como preferências políticas, personalidade e expressão de gênero, tem recebido grande atenção, especialmente com base em dados do Twitter. O presente trabalho é centrado na tarefa de classificação de gênero, propondo 65 meta-atributos textuais, comumente usados em tarefas de atribuição de texto, para a extração de características linguísticas quanto à expressão de gênero em tweets escritos em Português. São considerados caracteres, sintaxe, palavras, estrutura e morfologia, além de determinados atributos psicolinguísticos, dos textos de comprimento curto, multi-gênero e de livre conteúdo postados no Twitter para a classificação de gênero do autor por meio de quatro algoritmos de aprendizado de máquina diferentes. Também é avaliada a influência dos meta-atributos propostos para este processo.

Diese Dissertation untersucht Transfereffekte aus der Muttersprache (L1) in der Verarbeitung von grammatischem Genus in der Zweitsprache (L2) bei Spätbilingualen. „Spätbilinguale“ lernen eine Zweitsprache nach der Kindheit, im Gegensatz zu „Frühbilingualen“. Forschungsergebnisse zeigten, dass der L2-Erwerb nach der Kindheit weniger erfolgreich ist als während der Kindheit und dass einige Strukturen, wie z.B. grammatisches Genus, besonders stark von Alterseffekten beeinträchtigt sind. Eine Erklärung für L2-Verarbeitungsschwierigkeiten ist negativer L1-Transfer. Deshalb konzentriert sich diese Dissertation auf L1-Transfereffekte in der Genusverarbeitung. Transfer tritt auf, weil alle Sprachen eines Sprechers aktiviert sind und im Wettbewerb um Selektion stehen. Ein Ziel dieser Dissertation ist, zu beschreiben, welche Faktoren Genustransfer beeinflussen. Für die L2-Genusverarbeitung wurde gezeigt, dass verschiedene Faktoren die Leistung beeinflussen, z.B. die L2-Kompetenz der Probanden, Aufgabenanforderungen und die syntaktische Distanz der übereinstimmenden Elemente. Genustransfer wird durch Faktoren wie Charakteristiken des L1-Genussystems, Transparenz des L2-Genussystems und Formähnlichkeit der Nomen in L1 und L2 beeinflusst. Außerdem könnte Genustransfer von der L2-Kompetenz und der Komplexität des L2-Genussystems abhängen. Es wurden ein behaviorales und ein EKP-Experiment durchgeführt. Genustransfer wurde über verschiedene Sprachpaare mit Genussystemen von unterschiedlicher Komplexität und Transparenz hinweg untersucht. Die experimentellen Aufgaben unterschieden sich bezüglich der Aufgabenanforderungen und syntaktische Strukturen mit unterschiedlicher struktureller Distanz wurden verwendet. Der Leistungsstand der Probanden wurde manipuliert. Anhand meiner Ergebnisse konnte ich identifizieren, welche (Kombination von) Faktoren Genustransfer erhöhen oder verringern und Genustransfer als das Ergebnis eines komplexen Wechselspiels von Faktoren beschreiben. / This thesis investigates first language (L1) transfer effects in second language (L2) grammatical gender processing of late bilinguals. “Late bilinguals” learn an L2 after childhood, in contrast to “early bilinguals”. Research has shown that L2 acquisition after childhood is usually less successful than during childhood and that some aspects of a language are more affected by age than others. One of the structures especially affected is grammatical gender. A possible explanation for L2 processing difficulties in late bilinguals is negative transfer from the L1. Therefore, this thesis focuses on L1 transfer effects in L2 gender processing of late bilinguals. Transfer arises because all languages of a speaker are activated and compete for selection. One aim of this thesis is to describe which (combination of) factors influence L1 gender transfer. Regarding L2 gender processing in general, different factors have been shown to affect performance, e.g., language proficiency of the subjects, task demands, and syntactic distance of the agreeing elements. Gender transfer is affected by factors such as characteristics of the L1 gender system, transparency of the L2 gender system, and form similarities of nouns in L1 and L2 (cognates vs. noncognates). Besides this, gender transfer might be mediated by L2 proficiency and the complexity of the L2 gender system. In this thesis, a behavioral and an ERP experiment were conducted. Gender transfer was investigated across different language pairs with gender systems of varying complexity and transparency. Experimental tasks differed in task demands and syntactic structures with varying agreement distances were used. Language proficiency of subjects was also manipulated. Based on my findings, I was able to identify which factors and which combination of factors increase or decrease gender transfer and to describe gender transfer as the result of a complex interplay of a combination of various factors.