We present a method to help faculty assess and visualize conceptual knowledge by applying topic modeling to unstructured student writing from online class discussion forums. To validate the technique against conventional assessment metrics, we evaluated its accuracy in predicting final grades in introductory undergraduate biology and graduate…

The pattern, which is a key concept in understanding the mathematical information and concepts, is the basis in comprehending mathematical relations and in understanding mathematical order and logic. The fact that students discover the relationships contained within the patterns and generalize them helps them develop their skills to better…

The current study examined phonetic convergence when talkers alternated roles during conversational interaction. The talkers completed a map navigation task in which they alternated instruction Giver and Receiver roles across multiple map pairs. Previous studies found robust effects of the role of a talker on phonetic convergence, and it was…

Color charts, or grids of evenly spaced multicolored dots or squares, appear in the work of modern artists and designers. Often the artist/designer distributes the many colors in a way that could be described as "random," that is, without an obvious pattern. We conduct a statistical analysis of 125 "random-looking" art and design color charts and…

We use a concept of framing to explain 3 cases in which participants initially lacked mutual understanding but then achieved significant mutual understanding. The cases were all consistent with a pattern of "positional framing" that includes a human participant who is inquiring, which we call a "listener", and a "source", which may be another…

Gonzalez and Dutt (2011) recently reported that trends during sampling, prior to a consequential risky decision, reveal a gradual movement from exploration to exploitation. That is, even when search imposes no immediate costs, people adopt the same pattern manifest in costly search: early exploration followed by later exploitation. From this…

In this empirical study, we investigate an early childhood education activity in mathematics on the concept of "pattern". The children participating in the study attend an intermediate form of schooling in Sweden called "the preschool class for six-year-olds", intended to facilitate their transition from preschool to school.…

Multi-voxel pattern recognition techniques combined with Hidden Markov models can be used to discover the mental states that people go through in performing a task. The combined method identifies both the mental states and how their durations vary with experimental conditions. We apply this method to a task where participants solve novel…

Learning Style (LS) is an important parameter in the learning process. Therefore, learning styles should be considered in the design, development, and implementation of e-learning environments. Consequently, an important capability of an e-learning system could be the automatic determination of a student's learning style. In this paper, a set of…

In Maori medium schools, research that investigates children's mathematical computation with number and connections they might make to mathematical ideas in other strands is limited. This paper seeks to share ideas elicited in a task-based observation and interview with one child about the number ideas she utilises to solve a problem requiring…

Infection by pathogenic microbes initiates a set of complex interactions between the pathogen and the host mediated by pattern recognition receptors. Innate immune responses play direct roles in host defense during the early stages of infection, and they also exert a profound influence on the generation of the adaptive immune responses that ensue.…

Binary cueing systems assist in many tasks, often alerting people about potential hazards (such as alarms and alerts). We investigate whether cues, besides possibly improving decision accuracy, also affect the effort users invest in tasks and whether the required effort in tasks affects the responses to cues. We developed a novel experimental tool…

Humans perceive a wide range of temporal patterns, including those rhythms that occur in music, speech, and movement; however, there are constraints on the rhythmic patterns that we can represent. Past research has shown that sequences in which sounds occur regularly at non-metrical locations in a repeating beat period (non-integer ratio…

The broad application domain of the work presented in this thesis is pattern classification with a focus on gesture recognition and 3D hand pose estimation. One of the main contributions of the proposed thesis is a novel method for 3D hand pose estimation using RGB-D. Hand pose estimation is formulated as a database retrieval problem. The proposed…

Observers often remember a scene as containing information that was not presented but that would have likely been located just beyond the observed boundaries of the scene. This effect is called "boundary extension" (BE; e.g., Intraub & Richardson, 1989). Previous studies have observed BE in memory for visual and haptic stimuli, and…