Personal Background Knowledge Research Articles

Predicting Age and Visual-Motor Integration Using Origami Photographs: Deep Learning Study.

Origami is a popular activity among preschool children and can be used by therapists as an evaluation tool to assess children's development in clinical settings. It is easy to implement, appealing to children, and time-efficient, requiring only simple materials-pieces of paper. Furthermore, the products of origami may reflect children's ages and their visual-motor integration (VMI) development. However, therapists typically evaluate children's origami creations based primarily on their personal background knowledge and clinical experience, leading to subjective and descriptive feedback. Consequently, the effectiveness of using origami products to determine children's age and VMI development lacks empirical support. This study had two main aims. First, we sought to apply artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to origami products to predict children's ages and VMI development, including VMI level (standardized scores) and VMI developmental status (typical, borderline, or delayed). Second, we explored the performance of the AI models using all combinations of photographs taken from different angles. A total of 515 children aged 2-6 years were recruited and divided into training and testing groups at a 4:1 ratio. Children created origami dogs, which were photographed from 8 different angles. The Beery-Buktenica Developmental Test of Visual-Motor Integration, 6th Edition, was used to assess the children's VMI levels and developmental status. Three AI models-ResNet-50, XGBoost, and a multilayer perceptron-were combined sequentially to predict age z scores and VMI z scores using the training group. The trained models were then tested using the testing group, and the accuracy of the predicted VMI developmental status was also calculated. The R2 of the age and the VMI trained models ranged from 0.50 to 0.73 and from 0.50 to 0.66, respectively. The AI models that obtained an R2>0.70 for the age model and an R2>0.60 for the VMI model were selected for model testing. Those models were further examined for the accuracy of the VMI developmental status, the correlations, and the mean absolute error (MAE) of both the age and the VMI models. The accuracy of the VMI developmental status was about 71%-76%. The correlations between the final predicted age z score and the real age z score ranged from 0.84 to 0.85, and the correlations of the final predicted VMI z scores to the real z scores ranged from 0.77 to 0.81. The MAE of the age models ranged from 0.42 to 0.46 and those of the VMI models ranged from 0.43 to 0.48. Our findings indicate that AI techniques have a significant potential for predicting children's development. The insights provided by AI may assist therapists in better interpreting children's performance in activities.

СТИЛІСТИЧНІ ЗАСОБИ В "ДОН ЖУАНІ" БАЙРОНА ТА СПОСОБИ ЇХНЬОГО ПЕРЕКЛАДУ

The article is an attempt to give a comprehensive contrastive analysis of Byron's poem "Don Juan" and its two Ukrainian translations made by S. Holovanivskyi and V. Bohuslavska. The key aspect of the article is the literary devices of the poem in the Ukrainian translations. The focus is on Byron's style and its representation in the translations. It discusses the translation strategies used by each translator. It is noted that principles guided by translator while choosing translation method meant to render the pragmatic components and author's ideas of poetic work. The creative methods of each translator were also defined. The article presents a great variety of examples of metaphors, irony, wordplay, and their perception in the Ukrainian translations. Byron's poem "Don Juan" is full of life, irony, and a deep sense of morality. The poem contains a lot of ambiguous expressions, nuances, implied meanings, puns, author's neologisms, metaphors, phraseological units that translators are going to face with. The results show that in Ukrainian translations the representation of Byron's style is rich, bright and the same as in the original many-sided. The article comes to the conclusion that the translation strategies used by S. Holovanivskyi and V. Bohuslavska may be considered very different indeed, since they were made in different times and, therefore, demands and values of the target audience. It is shown that the personal background knowledge of the translators, their occupation, environment and even their own internal world influenced the way they represented the literary devices of Byron's poem "Don Juan" in their translations. It should be underlined that each translator sets a goal to create a new, better translation in the spirit of their time and environment, different from previous interpretations. V. Bohuslavska easily reproduces Byron's unique and inimitable poetic world by means of her own native language, while S. Holovanivskyi mostly follows the text of the original poem and strives to reproduce the meaning of words as accurately as possible.

Teaching practices around natural hazards and community resilience in Colorado

Increasing extreme weather events in a warming world fuel the need for citizens to understand natural hazards and improve community resilience. We especially need to prepare students for these challenges and increase their understanding of hazard resilience. A teacher needs assessment survey was conducted to identify current teaching practices around natural hazards and community resilience, as well as the needs teachers have with respect to training and educational resources on these topics. Using an intentional sampling strategy of school districts in rural and urban communities across Colorado, we surveyed 279 teachers from all disciplines. Almost 70% of teacher survey respondents currently teach about natural hazards, while only about 30% address community resilience. The most common reasons for not teaching about natural hazards or community resilience included a lack of alignment to the subject they are teaching, the absence of these topics in the standards/curriculum, a lack of time, or a lack of personal background knowledge. Teaching practices included lectures, field trips, and class discussions which focused on the science of natural hazards, social aspects (preparedness and impacts), and using current or past events. Science teachers are the most likely to teach about natural hazards and urban teachers are more likely to teach about both hazards and community resilience. Awareness of relevant educational resources was associated with a higher rate of teachers addressing community resilience. Results imply teachers’ need for effective and place-conscious educational resources in order to build more resilience in students and thus help communities prepare for natural hazards. Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10899995.2021.1964319

How English-Speaking Teachers Can Create a Welcoming Environment that Allows Students to Maintain and Utilize their Language through Translanguaging: A Qualitative Case Study

This study analyzed how English-speaking teachers created a welcoming environment to allow students to maintain and utilize their first language through translanguaging in a high school class of English-language learners. This case study applied funds of knowledge as a theoretical framework to focus on how a ninth-grade class with two qualified English language arts teachers acquired new knowledge using five types of funds of knowledge: academic and personal background knowledge, accumulated life experiences, world views, and skills in an Urban-Multicultural Classroom. In a year-long effort, the researcher interviewed teachers and students, took field notes, collected instructional planning documents, and photographed students’ artifacts. The findings show that students grew in their construction of self-identity, developed their proficiency in two languages, and flourished in their multicultural competency while earning good grades.

History and Intentions in the Experience of Artworks

The role of personal background knowledge—in particular knowledge about the context of production of an artwork—has been only marginally taken into account in cognitive approaches to art. Addressing this issue is crucial to enhancing these approaches’ explanatory power and framing their collaboration with the humanities (Bullot and Reber 2012). This paper sketches a model of the experience of artworks based on the mechanisms of intention attribution, and shows how this model makes it possible to address the issue of personal background knowledge empirically. I claim that the role of intention attribution in art experience has been incorrectly accounted in the literature because of an overly narrow definition of “intention.” I suggest that the observer can recover not only the artist’s abstract projects, but any kind of mental states that have played a causal role during the production of the work. In addition, I suggest that this recovery occurs in large part unconsciously and/or implicitly. I provide support for these claims by distinguishing three families of psychological mechanisms of intention attribution that are activated by artworks: one involved in the cognition of artifacts, one devoted to communication, and one involved in action perception.

Personal Background Knowledge Influences Cross-Cultural Understanding

Purpose of the StudyThe purpose of the study was to investigate how two types of videos, personal background knowledge (PBK) and general background knowledge (GBK), affect people's interpretation of a classroom problem case that involved a disconnection between a foreign college professor and her students. The PBK video described the professor's personal experiences and upbringing within her culture that impacted her views about the importance of learning. The GBK video included only general information about important political and social events in, and the language and customs of, the professor's culture. Both prior to and after seeing the PBK or GBK video, we measured participants’ reactions to the problem case. PBK had a much stronger impact on changes in reactions than GBK.Background/ContextPrior research suggests that background information may unfreeze stereotypes and result in more empathy between people. It is unclear whether these effects are due to access to general kinds of knowledge about an individual (GBK) or whether they depend on specific kinds of relevant personal knowledge (PBK). We investigated the role of different kinds of knowledge in changing people's negative views about the teacher in the case.ParticipantsThe participants were 43 undergraduate students (25 females and 18 males) enrolled in a general psychology course at a top-5 school of education (according to US News rankings) located near the middle of the United States. Ninety percent of the participants were Caucasian and enrolled in different majors in the school of education.Research DesignWe used a within- and between-subjects design. The participants first saw and responded to the case of the problematic professor (baseline condition). Participants were then assigned randomly to either the PBK or GBK video conditions. After watching, they answered questions about the case once again.ResultsThe PBK video story had strong emotional and cognitive effects on changes in students’ understanding of Professor X's case and in their strategies for resolving the problem. The GBK tended to make negative stereotypes and opinions worse. This latter outcome was unexpected given the frequent reliance on general cultural knowledge to make people more empathetic and understanding. We suggest that increased attention to personal background knowledge in instruction may have important implications for additional ways to help students learn.

The myth of the double-blind review?

Prior studies have questioned the degree of anonymity of the double-blind review process for scholarly research articles. For example, one study based on a survey of reviewers concluded that authors often could be identified by reviewers using a combination of the author's reference list and the referee's personal background knowledge. For the KDD Cup 2003 competition's "Open Task," we examined how well various automatic matching techniques could identify authors within the competition's very large archive of research papers. This paper describes the issues surrounding author identification, how these issues motivated our study, and the results we obtained. The best method, based on discriminative self-citations, identified authors correctly 40--45% of the time. One main motivation for double-blind review is to eliminate bias in favor of well-known authors. However, identification accuracy for authors with substantial publication history is even better (60% accuracy for the top-10% most prolific authors, 85% for authors with 100 or more prior papers).

Neighborhood, Family, and Work: Influences on the Premarital Behaviors of Adolescent Males

The authors report their findings from a study of the effects of neighborhood family and individual characteristics upon teenage males premarital sexual and contraceptive behaviors and upon their experiences with pregnancy or fatherhood. The investigation also systematically compares the effects of related personal and neighborhood traits in multilevel analysis including employment income education welfare receipt family composition and race/ethnicity. Micro-level data on respondents personal and family characteristics come from the 1988 National Survey of Adolescent Males a nationally-representative survey of 1880 never-married noninstitutionalized males aged 15-19 years. Blacks and Hispanics were oversampled. Each participant was interviewed for one hour on sexual and contraceptive behaviors family and personal background knowledge and attitudes about pregnancy AIDS and other risks. Neighborhood data derive from the 1980 census. Analysis found young men who worked more hours to be more sexually active and more likely to have caused a pregnancy. Higher neighborhood unemployment rates were also independently associated with a greater risk of impregnation. Greater financial resources at the personal level may therefore enable teen males to attract more partners thereby increasing their risk of impregnating a female sex partner. Comparatively limited economic opportunities at the community level also seem to increase the risks of paternity.