title: Chocolates for me or chocolates for you? The impact of a learning experience outside the classroom on the technological practice of two five-year-old students

authors: Milne, Louise

subjects: technology education

abstract: Knowledge of expert practice is a key element of Technology Education (Ministry of Education, 2007), and this paper which is part of a larger study, is a brief comparative study which investigates the impact a learning experience outside the classroom has on two students’ technological practice. These students, Dana and Manahi, who are in their first year at school, visit a chocolate factory with their class to find out how to make a chocolate gift for Mothers’ Day.
This study uses a qualitative case study methodology (Stake, 2006). Data was collected and analysed from three interviews, before, after and six months after the students’ visit to the factory. The students’ drawings and stories recorded after the visit were also analysed using themes emerging from the literature of Education Outside the Classroom (Anderson, 2003; Falk, 2004), Technology Education (Compton, 2009; de Vries, 2012; Jones, Buntting, & de Vries, 2013) and the characteristics of young students learning (Cohen, 2013; Siegler & Alibali, 2005).
The findings from this study identify a significant increase in both Dana and Manahi’s context specific oral language, their understanding of the individual phases of technological development, and their ability to transfer these understandings to other contexts. Whilst these developments showed an encouraging improvement in their technological understandings, there existed a lack of continuity and connectedness (Moreland & Cowie, 2011) through the development of Manahi’s chocolate gift. Compared with progress achieved by Dana, the gaps in Manahi’s understandings impacted negatively on his perceptions of the purpose of the visit and the final goal of his practice.

text: Chocolates for me or chocolates for you? The impact of a learning experience outside the classroom on the technological practice of two five-year-old students Knowledge of expert practice is a key element of Technology Education (Ministry of Education, 2007), and this paper which is part of a larger study, is a brief comparative study which investigates the impact a learning experience outside the classroom has on two students’ technological practice. These students, Dana and Manahi, who are in their first year at school, visit a chocolate factory with their class to find out how to make a chocolate gift for Mothers’ Day.
This study uses a qualitative case study methodology (Stake, 2006). Data was collected and analysed from three interviews, before, after and six months after the students’ visit to the factory. The students’ drawings and stories recorded after the visit were also analysed using themes emerging from the literature of Education Outside the Classroom (Anderson, 2003; Falk, 2004), Technology Education (Compton, 2009; de Vries, 2012; Jones, Buntting, & de Vries, 2013) and the characteristics of young students learning (Cohen, 2013; Siegler & Alibali, 2005).
The findings from this study identify a significant increase in both Dana and Manahi’s context specific oral language, their understanding of the individual phases of technological development, and their ability to transfer these understandings to other contexts. Whilst these developments showed an encouraging improvement in their technological understandings, there existed a lack of continuity and connectedness (Moreland & Cowie, 2011) through the development of Manahi’s chocolate gift. Compared with progress achieved by Dana, the gaps in Manahi’s understandings impacted negatively on his perceptions of the purpose of the visit and the final goal of his practice.

year: 2015

title: A simple approach to ordinal classification

authors: Frank, Eibe

abstract: Machine learning methods for classification problems commonly assume that the class values are unordered. However, in many practical applications, the class values do exhibit a natural order—for example, when learning how to grade. The standard approach to ordinal classification converts the class value into a numeric quantity and applies a regression learner to the transformed data, translating the output back into a discrete class value in a post-processing step. A disadvantage of this method is that it can only be applied in conjunction with a regression scheme.

In this paper, we present a simple method that enables standard classification algorithms to make use of ordering information in class attributes. By applying it in conjunction with a decision tree learner, we show that it outperforms the naive approach, which treats the class values as an unordered set. Compared to special-purpose algorithms for ordinal classification, our method has the advantage that it can be applied without any modification to the underlying learning scheme.

text: A simple approach to ordinal classification Machine learning methods for classification problems commonly assume that the class values are unordered. However, in many practical applications, the class values do exhibit a natural order—for example, when learning how to grade. The standard approach to ordinal classification converts the class value into a numeric quantity and applies a regression learner to the transformed data, translating the output back into a discrete class value in a post-processing step. A disadvantage of this method is that it can only be applied in conjunction with a regression scheme.

In this paper, we present a simple method that enables standard classification algorithms to make use of ordering information in class attributes. By applying it in conjunction with a decision tree learner, we show that it outperforms the naive approach, which treats the class values as an unordered set. Compared to special-purpose algorithms for ordinal classification, our method has the advantage that it can be applied without any modification to the underlying learning scheme.

year: 2001

title: Poster Abstracts

authors: Lapsley, Hilary

subjects: Maori

abstract: These are the poster abstracts from the Proceedings of the National Māori Graduates of Psychology Symposium 2002.

text: Poster Abstracts These are the poster abstracts from the Proceedings of the National Māori Graduates of Psychology Symposium 2002.

year: 2003