Published Article / The study presents the results from a project that was aimed at determining the level of awareness and understanding of sustainable development at Central University of Technology, Free State (CUT) among staff and students at the time of the commencement of the institutional Sustainable Development Project. The objectives of the study was twofold, firstly to assess the level of students' knowledge and understanding of sustainable development; and secondly to find out whether staff and students are interested in sustainable development and if they find it relevant to the university's mission. In achieving the objectives of the survey a pilot study was undertaken to test the understanding and awareness of sustainable development at CUT.

This thesis describes the development of an instrument for assessing shared understanding in teams. The purpose was to develop an instrument that would be usable, understandable, objective, flexible and self-explanatory. Teams working in naturalistic settings are expected to have a shared understanding concerning common goals and how to achieve these. The problem investigated in this thesis is that current techniques and instruments for assessing shared understanding in teams generally suffer from one or more of the following drawbacks, namely that they are expensive, difficult to use, time-consuming, requiring expertise, and are often based on subjective perceptions. Departing from existing theory in team cognition techniques and theories, the research questions posed in this thesis are: 1) How can shared understanding be measured without the disadvantages of existing methods? 2) How can shared understanding be assessed without the bias of self-ratings and/or assessments by experts/observers? 3) Can team performance be better understood by the outcomes of an instrument that measures shared understanding? These research questions are answered through six studies that are presented in this thesis. Over the six studies an instrument was iterated and subsequently developed, called the “shared priorities instrument”. When using this instrument, team members are instructed to generate items and rank these in order of importance. By comparing these rank orders from different participants, a team measure of shared understanding can be calculated. The advantages of this instrument compared to earlier measures are that it is less expensive, easier to use, less time-consuming, does not require subject matter expertise, and that the instrument is distanced from subjective perceptions. Furthermore, the final study provides results where outcomes from the shared priorities instrument correlate with performance, supporting earlier research connecting shared understanding in teams with team performance. A structural equation model, a result of the final study, shows that the instrument is both valid and reliable. / Denna avhandling beskriver utvecklingen av ett mätinstrument för att värdera delad förståelse hos team. Syftet har varit att utveckla ett mätinstrument som är användbart, förståeligt, objektivt, flexibelt och självförklarande. Team som arbetar i naturalistiska miljöer förväntas ha en delad förståelse för gemensamma mål och hur dessa ska uppnås. Befintliga tekniker och mätinstrument för värdering av delad förståelse hos team är att de ofta lider av ett eller flera av följande problem: de är dyra, svåra att använda, tidskrävande, kräver expertis, och bygger många gånger på subjektiva bedömningar. Genom att utgå från teoribildningen inom teamkognition ställs följande forskningsfrågor: 1) Hur kan delad förståelse i team mätas utan nackdelarna hos befintliga metoder? 2) Hur kan delad förståelse i team mätas utan att riskera att färgas av partiskheten hos egenbedömningar och/eller experters värderingar? 3) Kan teamprestation förstås bättre med hjälp av ett instrument som mäter delad förståelse? Dessa frågeställningar besvaras i de sex delstudier som presenteras i denna avhandling där ett instrument (som kallas shared priorities) utvecklats för att mäta delad förståelse. Tillämpningen innebär att medlemmarna i ett team individuellt får generera och rangordna faktorer som de anser vara viktiga för att teamet ska nå sitt/sina gemensamma mål och därefter rangordna varandras faktorer. Genom att beräkna överensstämmelsen i dessa rangordningar erhålls ett mått på teamets delade förståelse. Fördelen med detta instrument, i jämförelse med tidigare mått, är att det kostar mindre, är lättare att använda, tar mindre tid, inte kräver någon domänexpertis, och att mätmetoden inte bygger på rent subjektiva bedömningar. I den sista delstudien erhålls resultat där instrumentet shared priorities korrelerar med prestation, vilket stöder tidigare forskning om delad förståelse. En statistisk modell (SEM) visar på instrumentets validitet och reliabilitet.

Research has been undertaken to obtain a thorough understanding of the existence and degree of gender disparity in students' participation and performance in introductory university physics courses at the University of Edinburgh. The research on this topic has focused on three main subject areas: the proportion of male and female students enrolled in undergraduate physics courses and their reasons for choosing to study this subject, gender differences in student performance and, Finally, how students' attitudes and beliefs towards studying physics change after a period of instruction. Gaining an insight into students' attitudes towards studying and learning physics, as well as their conceptual understanding of the topics being assessed, can draw attention to potential areas of weakness which can be targeted in future teaching. This thesis comprises a comprehensive review of the current situation surrounding male and female participation in the undergraduate physics degree programme at the University of Edinburgh in comparison to other STEM subjects, as well as a description of factors potentially influencing the gender performance in physics. With respect to student performance, conceptual understanding tests have been used as evaluation tools to measure the effectiveness of introducing interactive engagement, such as Peer Instruction, into teaching environments in order to improve student performance, as well as a means by which male and female learning gains could be compared. Results indicate that female students show a lower level of conceptual understanding of Newtonian Mechanics than male students when entering the degree programme, and that this gender difference remains after a period of instruction. Qualitative interviews highlight the preconceptions of first year undergraduate physics students with regards to Newtonian concepts of force and motion and demonstrate the range of misconceptions held by both male and female students. The research presented here compares male and female performance on different forms of assessment; coursework, laboratory assessments, examinations and peer instruction in-lecture questions. Results indicate that while examination scores show no distinct gender trends, female students show consistently higher coursework scores compared to males across physics, chemistry and biology first year courses. Analysis of Peer Instruction questions implemented in the introductory physics lectures suggest that such teaching methodologies have had an overall positive effect on class performance, although there is evidence that differences exist between male and female performance on individual questions. Students' attitudes towards learning physics have been measured at under- graduate level in order to evaluate the level of 'expert-like' thinking of first year undergraduate students. One notable finding of this study has been the lack of decline in the `expert-like' thinking after a semester of teaching in recent years, where previously a decline had been witnessed in this expert-like thinking. This result coincides with a change in the format of lectures to a 'flipped- classroom' approach and may have implications for the introduction of new teaching methods. As well as focusing on the progression of undergraduate students' attitudes, this study has evaluated UK academics' attitudes towards physics. This has enabled a UK level of `expert-like' thinking to be established, with gender differences between male and female academics identified. Students' opinions of the transferable skills gained and their experiences during their degree programme are discussed. Each of the gender topics discussed in this thesis has provided a deeper insight into gender differences in student attainment at undergraduate level which could have implications for the further improvement of future courses.

This thesis explores whether a social game shows indications of being more effective to raise awareness of cultural differences than an open discussion exercise. Within the field of Serious Games there are studies exploring the area. Among them some studies aim to train the cultural understanding of military personnel or are business relationship oriented, while others try to motivate immigrant to interact with local population or convey situation which may lead to culture shock.To conduct the experiment critical incidents were developed using a model where individualistic and collectivistic cultures are compared in social and work related situations. Participants, students from Swedish for immigrants, were divided into two groups. One group was playing the game and the other was having an open discussion exercise. Results show after the session and three weeks later indications of the game being more effective raising awareness of cultural differences.

Syftet med den här uppsatsen är att utföra de la Fuente et al:s (2014) experiment med priming av temporalt fokus hos arbisktalande individer med svenska som andraspråk. De frågor som undersöks är i vilken utsträckning de la Fuente et al:s temporalfokushypotes är generaliserbar till fler språkgrupper än spansktalande, vilka primingeffekterna blir hos individerna, samt vilka faktorer som inverkar på det temporala fokuset utöver primingen. Metoden är att återupprepa det experiment de la Fuente et al. gjort med spansktalande, genom att återutföra det på en grupp arabisktalande individer med svenska som andraspråk. Resultatet av föreliggande studies upprepning av de la Fuentes experiment på arabisktalande, visar att primingeffekterna uteblir, men att faktorer som vistelsetid och ålder inverkar påvisbart på tidsrepresentationen. Utbildningsbakgrund visar tendenser till att inverka på tidsrepresentationen. Ett temporalt fokus påverkbart av yttre stimuli går inte att påvisa i den här studien, varför delar av temporalfokushypotesen inte är generaliserbar till alla språkgrupper.

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This thesis investigates the mechanisms underlying the formation, maintenance, and sharing of reference in tasks in which language and vision interact. Previous research in psycholinguistics and visual cognition has provided insights into the formation of reference in cross-modal tasks. The conclusions reached are largely independent, with the focus on mechanisms pertaining to either linguistic or visual processing. In this thesis, we present a series of eye-tracking experiments that aim to unify these distinct strands of research by identifying and quantifying factors that underlie the cross-modal interaction between scene understanding and sentence processing. Our results show that both low-level (imagebased) and high-level (object-based) visual information interacts actively with linguistic information during situated language processing tasks. In particular, during language understanding (Chapter 3), image-based information, i.e., saliency, is used to predict the upcoming arguments of the sentence, when the linguistic material alone is not sufficient to make such predictions. During language production (Chapter 4), visual attention has the active role of sourcing referential information for sentence encoding. We show that two important factors influencing this process are the visual density of the scene, i.e., clutter, and the animacy of the objects described. Both factors influence the type of linguistic encoding observed and the associated visual responses. We uncover a close relationship between linguistic descriptions and visual responses, triggered by the cross-modal interaction of scene and object properties, which implies a general mechanism of cross-modal referential coordination. Further investigation (Chapter 5) shows that visual attention and sentence processing are closely coordinated during sentence production: similar sentences are associated with similar scan patterns. This finding holds across different scenes, which suggests that coordination goes beyond the well-known scene-based effects guiding visual attention, again supporting the existence of a general mechanism for the cross-modal coordination of referential information. The extent to which cross-modal mechanisms are activated depends on the nature of the task performed. We compare the three tasks of visual search, object naming, and scene description (Chapter 6) and explore how the modulation of cross-modal reference is reflected in the visual responses of participants. Our results show that the cross-modal coordination required in naming and description triggers longer visual processing and higher scan pattern similarity than in search. This difference is due to the coordination required to integrate and organize visual and linguistic referential processing. Overall, this thesis unifies explanations of distinct cognitive processes (visual and linguistic) based on the principle of cross-modal referentiality, and provides a new framework for unraveling the mechanisms that allow scene understanding and sentence processing to share and integrate information during cross-modal processing.

My main aim is to contribute to the exploration of the nature of the epistemic state of understanding. It seems that the most productive way in which this might be done is by (i) investigating what sort of conditions must be fulfilled in order for one to understand, and (ii) comparing understanding’s place in certain contemporary debates to the place that knowledge has in those debates. Regarding conditions for understanding, I will argue that there are two types of understanding that are most relevant to epistemology—objectual understanding and atomistic understanding. I will contend that atomistic understanding is entirely factive while objectual understanding is moderately factive, that objectual understanding admits of degrees, that both types involve some sort of grasp of explanatory relations, that both possess a measure of luck immunity, and that both are cognitive achievements with instrumental, teleological, contributory and (crucially) final value. It must be stressed that the general accounts of both types of understanding that I attempt to provide are not supposed to be exhaustive sets of necessary and sufficient conditions—I remain particularly open to the possibility that there are further necessary conditions that are as yet undiscovered, especially for objectual understanding. Regarding understanding’s place in contemporary debates, it is perplexing that existing work does not capitalise on the thought that treating understanding in conjunction with many of the most prominent issues in recent epistemology is a worthwhile project that could yield interesting and important results. I will summarise understanding's potential significance for a number of these topics, looking at all of the following (in varying degrees of detail): factivity, coherentism, norms of assertion, the transmission of epistemic properties, epistemic luck, the nature of cognitive achievement, and epistemic value. This last topic is one that I think is particularly important to an investigation into understanding, because it is quite plausible that there is a particularly strong revisionist theory of epistemic value focused on understanding. Such a view would be one on which knowledge is not finally valuable, but one by way of which we could nonetheless explain why we might pre-theoretically think that knowledge is finally valuable. Since revisionist views often involve a claim that we should think of a different, closely related epistemic state as distinctively valuable, it is natural to consider understanding as a prime candidate for the focus of such a theory.

The meanings of natural language sentences may be represented as compositional logical-forms. Each word or lexicalised multiword-element has an associated logicalform representing its meaning. Full sentential logical-forms are then composed from these word logical-forms via a syntactic parse of the sentence. This thesis develops two computational systems that learn both the word-meanings and parsing model required to map sentences onto logical-forms from an example corpus of (sentence, logical-form) pairs. One of these systems is designed to provide a general purpose method of inducing semantic parsers for multiple languages and logical meaning representations. Semantic parsers map sentences onto logical representations of their meanings and may form an important part of any computational task that needs to interpret the meanings of sentences. The other system is designed to model the way in which a child learns the semantics and syntax of their first language. Here, logical-forms are used to represent the potentially ambiguous context in which childdirected utterances are spoken and a psycholinguistically plausible training algorithm learns a probabilistic grammar that describes the target language. This computational modelling task is important as it can provide evidence for or against competing theories of how children learn their first language. Both of the systems presented here are based upon two working hypotheses. First, that the correct parse of any sentence in any language is contained in a set of possible parses defined in terms of the sentence itself, the sentence’s logical-form and a small set of combinatory rule schemata. The second working hypothesis is that, given a corpus of (sentence, logical-form) pairs that each support a large number of possible parses according to the schemata mentioned above, it is possible to learn a probabilistic parsing model that accurately describes the target language. The algorithm for semantic parser induction learns Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) lexicons and discriminative probabilistic parsing models from corpora of (sentence, logical-form) pairs. This system is shown to achieve at or near state of the art performance across multiple languages, logical meaning representations and domains. As the approach is not tied to any single natural or logical language, this system represents an important step towards widely applicable black-box methods for semantic parser induction. This thesis also develops an efficient representation of the CCG lexicon that separately stores language specific syntactic regularities and domain specific semantic knowledge. This factorised lexical representation improves the performance of CCG based semantic parsers in sparse domains and also provides a potential basis for lexical expansion and domain adaptation for semantic parsers. The algorithm for modelling child language acquisition learns a generative probabilistic model of CCG parses from sentences paired with a context set of potential logical-forms containing one correct entry and a number of distractors. The online learning algorithm used is intended to be psycholinguistically plausible and to assume as little information specific to the task of language learning as is possible. It is shown that this algorithm learns an accurate parsing model despite making very few initial assumptions. It is also shown that the manner in which both word-meanings and syntactic rules are learnt is in accordance with observations of both of these learning tasks in children, supporting a theory of language acquisition that builds upon the two working hypotheses stated above.