This text critically examines traditional methodologies for teaching grammar in the context of Portuguese as a Foreign Language (PFL). It proposes an alternative, eclectic approach, which can be used in any foreign language. Drawing on evidence from research and pedagogical practices, it highlights areas for improvement in current approaches, such…

Deep learning techniques are being unified for decision support in various applications. However, it remains challenging to train robust deep learning models, due to the inherent insufficient labeled data that is usually time-consuming and labor-intensive. Self-supervised learning is a feature representation learning paradigm to learn robust…

Within the commognitive perspective, ritual and explorative routines are used in a very particular way to distinguish students' routines according to whether they are driven by social reward or by generating a substantiated narrative. Explorative routines in this theorisation may refer not to inquiry-based activity but to the result of a student's…

In the human-to-human Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) test, students' problem-solving process reflects the interdependency among partners. The high interdependency in CPS makes it very sensitive to group composition. For example, the group outcome might be driven by a highly competent group member, so it does not reflect all the individual…

The benefits of incorporating process information in a large-scale assessment with the complex micro-level evidence from the examinees (i.e., process log data) are well documented in the research across large-scale assessments and learning analytics. This study introduces a deep-learning-based approach to predictive modeling of the examinee's…

Who should evaluate the originality and task-appropriateness of a given idea has been a perennial debate among psychologists of creativity. Here, we argue that the most relevant evaluator of a given idea depends crucially on the level of expertise of the person who generated it. To build this argument, we draw on two complimentary theoretical…

Practice in real-world settings exhibits many idiosyncrasies of scheduling and duration that can only be roughly approximated by laboratory research. Here we investigate 39,157 individuals' performance on two cognitive games on the Lumosity platform over a span of 5 years. The large-scale nature of the data allows us to observe highly varied…

One of the main generic competencies in Higher Education is "Learning to Learn". The key component of this competence is the capacity for self-regulated learning (SRL). For this competence to be developed, peer feedback seems useful because it fosters evaluative judgement. Following the principles of peer feedback processes, an online…

Social Learning Analytics (SLA) seeks to obtain hidden information in large amounts of data, usually of an educational nature. SLA focuses mainly on the analysis of social networks (Social Network Analysis, SNA) and the Web, to discover patterns of interaction and behavior of educational social actors. This paper incorporates the SLA in a smart…

Existing approaches in the literature on cognitive control in conflict tasks almost exclusively target the outcome of control (by comparing mean congruency effects) and not the processes that shape control. These approaches are limited in addressing a current theoretical issue--what contribution does learning make to adjustments in cognitive…

An extended (and probably unnecessary) parallel is drawn between engagement in mathematics and engagement in musical performance. Key facets of engagement are described and a model of how mathematics engagement plays out in task-level activities is discussed in light of new findings related to its social and emotional facets. Implications for…

Training design for automatic skills has a vast domain of application, such as education, physical and cognitive rehabilitation, as well as sports, arts and professional training. Gamification concept used in technology-assisted training has the potential to increase motivation, engagement and adherence to the training programme. Currently, the…

Dialogue act (DA) classification plays an important role in understanding, interpreting and modeling dialogue. Dialogue acts (DAs) represent the intended meaning of an utterance, which is associated with the illocutionary force (or the speaker's intention), such as greetings, questions, requests, statements, and agreements. In natural language…

This dissertation is about a particular style of research. The philosophy of this style is that in order to scientifically understand deep learning, it is fruitful to investigate what happens when neural networks are trained on simple, mathematically well-defined tasks. Even though the training data is simple, the training algorithm can end up…

Personalized learning has become an important and powerful paradigm catering for various needs, styles, preferences, and modes of learning. Several methods including task recommendations and path planning have recently emerged to effectively implement personalized learning using e-learning systems. The literature shows that the use of task…