Writing tasks are central in the subject of Swedish, and they can be designed in various ways. The variation in design when teachers construct their own writing tasks can be due to differing views of the teaching of writing and exercises in writing. The aim of this work is to investigate how different discourses about writing and learning to write become visible in teachers’ constructions of writing tasks, and whether there are different degrees of steering in the tasks in relation to the discourse(s) to which they can be said to belong. Twelve writing tasks were examined in the study with the aid of Ivanič’s (2004) framework for analysis of discourses about writing and learning to write, and the result shows that the creativity discourse dominates among the tasks and that the sociopolitical discourse is sparsely represented among them. Several tasks have features of more than one discourse and can therefore be called hybrids. The degree of steering by the designer of the task differs between the tasks. In tasks that can be linked to the skills discourse there is usually a high degree of steering of the content, and in tasks that can be linked to the creativity discourse the designer of the task uses a different form of steering with questions which mean that the teacher gains access to personal information about the pupils.

There is substantial evidence that comprehenders predict language. In addition, dialogue partners seem to predict one another, as shown by well-timed turn-taking and by the fact that they can complete one another’s utterances. However, little is known about the mechanisms that (i) support the ability to form predictions of others’ utterances and (ii) allow such predictions to be integrated with representations of one’s own utterances. I propose (predictive) representations of others’ utterances are computed within a cognitive architecture that makes use of mechanisms routinely used in language production (i.e., for the representation of one’s own utterances). If this proposal is right, representing that another person is about to speak (and, possibly, representing what they are about to say) should affect the process of language production, as the two processes are based on overlapping mechanisms. I test this hypothesis in a series of novel joint language tasks. Psycholinguistic tasks (picture naming and picture description) that have traditionally been used to study individual language production are distributed across two participants, who either produce two utterances simultaneously or consecutively. In addition, solo versions of the same tasks (where only one participant speaks, while the other participant remains silent) are tested. Speech onset latencies and utterance duration measures are compared between the solo and the joint task. In a first set of experiments about simultaneous production, I show that participants take longer to name pictures when they believe that their partner is concurrently naming pictures than when they believe their partner is silent or is concurrently categorizing the pictures as being from the same or from different semantic categories. Second, I show that participants find it harder to stop speaking when they know that their partner is about to speak. These findings suggest that speakers are able to represent that another person is about to speak using some of the same mechanisms they use to produce language. However, in a third series of experiments, I show that participants do not routinely anticipate the content and timing of another person’s utterance in a way that affects concurrent production of utterances. In light of this evidence, I discuss the proposal that speakers use language production mechanisms to represent and anticipate their partner’s utterances and support coordination in dialogue.

Although cohesiveness has been studied for more than half a century, there is no common definition and associated measure. The current focus of research has moved from general explanations to context specific approaches. This particular thesis focuses on organisationally based, limited life, project teams. Despite the increasing use of these types of teams over the last 15 years, there is no published literature dealing directly with them, and no instrument designed specifically to measure their cohesiveness. This study has defined the construct of cohesiveness for these teams, using team members themselves, and a psychometrically sound measure of cohesiveness has been devised. It is made up of two sub-scales: task and people, and 20 component items. This tool is designed not only as an indicator of cohesiveness but also as a diagnostic tool to allow teams to increase their cohesiveness. Meta-analytical research has found that cohesiveness and performance are related, but that a number of factors moderate this relationship, e.g. type ofteam (Mullen and Copper, 1994). Using the task/people cohesiveness measure, three studies relating cohesiveness to performance and other variables were undertaken. Since project teams are of limited life and each team's output is unique, a correlational design was utilised. Altogether, data from over 500 teams was collected. Studies were carried out with 'real' teams and also a number of teams undertaking a business simulation game. Cohesiveness was found to be related to performance across a basket of performance measures in both circumstances. Task cohesiveness was more strongly related to performance than was people cohesiveness. By comparing levels of performance feedback, evidence was found to support Mullen and Coppers' (1994) suggestion that performance and cohesiveness have a reciprocal effect on one another and that the performance to cohesiveness effect is the larger of the two. The relationship of a number of variables to both cohesiveness and also the cohesivenessperformance relationship were investigated. This thesis contributes to the literature by using Social Identity Theory as an approach to defining and producing a measure of cohesiveness for a specific type of group - project teams. Its application has provided data on the cohesiveness-performance relationship that supports earlier meta-analytical findings where these are comparable.

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The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of task difficulty and magnitude of reinforcement upon the performance of mentally retarded institutionalized individuals in a level of aspiration situation.

The purpose of this research program was to explore the effectiveness of the Predict- Observe-Explain (POE) teachingllearning technique to diagnose students' understanding of science and identify students' level of achievement with reference to the Science Student Outcome Statements for Australian schools. This research employed an interpretive action research approach with a sample of students from three Australian metropolitan high schools in grades 9, 10, 11, and 12, whose ages ranged between 14 and 17 years. Three data collection methods were used to generate data for interpretation, namely, written POE responses of students, in-class journals and student interviews. Data collected were interpreted using three theoretical perspectives, namely, Chi et al.'s theory of ontological categories, Hewson and Hennessey's conceptual change theory to determine the epistemological status of students' understanding of science, and Chinn and Brewer's model to classify types of students' responses to contradictory observations. This purpose of using this methodology was to obtain an in-depth, plausible and credible account of students' understanding and their level of achievement. POE tasks were concerned with heat and the expansion of water, solubility of salt, and power and resistance of light globes. The data revealed common ideas amongst students that are contrary to scientists' science; furthermore, students showed that they were able to articulate their own ideas based on the POE tasks. The findings in this research reveal that these POEs were effective in capturing a range of possible student observations and prediction outcomes when worded in an open-ended format. / Quality information on students' understanding and on the way they responded to contradictory data was obtained when POEs were administered by teacher demonstrations and were designed to produce phenomena that were clear, immediate and had only one aspect to observe. Furthermore, the data suggest that POEs are effective in identifying students' achievement across levels within a substrand of the Australian Student Outcome Statements and enable the teacher to observe and document a spread of achievement over a range of levels rather that a single outcome. The results of this research suggest that POEs are effective in diagnosing students' understanding of science and their level of achievement. The POE tasks can be used by teachers to insightfully design learning activities and strategies that start from the students' viewpoint rather than that of the teacher or the scientist. Findings in this research have implications for curriculum development and learning strategies, teacher development, and the promotion and assessment of students' understanding and level of achievement.

Programming by demonstration is an end-user programming technique that allows people to create programs by showing the computer examples of what they want to do. Users do not need specialised programming skills. Instead, they instruct the computer by demonstrating examples, much as they might show another person how to do the task. Programming by demonstration empowers users to create programs that perform tedious and time-consuming computer chores. However, it is not in widespread use, and is instead confined to research applications that end users never see. This makes it difficult to evaluate programming by demonstration tools and techniques. This thesis claims that domain-independent programming by demonstration can be made available in existing applications and used to automate iterative tasks by end users. It is supported by Familiar, a domain-independent, AppleScript-based programming-by-demonstration tool embodying standard machine learning algorithms. Familiar is designed for end users, so works in the existing applications that they regularly use. The assertion that programming by demonstration can be made available in existing applications is validated by identifying the relevant platform requirements and a range of platforms that meet them. A detailed scrutiny of AppleScript highlights problems with the architecture and with many implementations, and yields a set of guidelines for designing applications that support programming-by-demonstration. An evaluation shows that end users are capable of using programming by demonstration to automate iterative tasks. However, the subjects tended to prefer other tools, choosing Familiar only when the alternatives were unsuitable or unavailable. Familiar's inferencing is evaluated on an extensive set of examples, highlighting the tasks it can perform and the functionality it requires.