A randomized controlled trial of an early-intervention, computer-based literacy program to boost phonological skills in 4- to 6-year-old children

Background: Many school-based interventions are being delivered in the absence of evidence of effectiveness (Snowling & Hulme, 2011, Br. J. Educ. Psychol., 81, 1).Aim: This study sought to address this oversight by evaluating the effectiveness of the commonly used the Lexia Reading Core5 intervention, with 4- to 6-year-old pupils in Northern Ireland.Sample: A total of 126 primary school pupils in year 1 and year 2 were screened on the Phonological Assessment Battery 2nd Edition (PhAB-2). Children were recruited from the equivalent year groups to Reception and Year 1 in England and Wales, and Pre-kindergarten and Kindergarten in North America.
Methods: A total of 98 below-average pupils were randomized (T0) to either an 8-week block (inline image = 647.51 min, SD = 158.21) of daily access to Lexia Reading Core5 (n = 49) or a waiting-list control group (n = 49). Assessment of phonological skills was completed at post-intervention (T1) and at 2-month follow-up (T2) for the intervention group only.
Results: Analysis of covariance which controlled for baseline scores found that the Lexia Reading Core5 intervention group made significantly greater gains in blending, F(1, 95) = 6.50, p = .012, partial η2 = .064 (small effect size) and non-word reading, F(1, 95) = 7.20, p = .009, partial η2 = .070 (small effect size). Analysis of the 2-month follow-up of the intervention group found that all group treatment gains were maintained. However, improvements were not uniform among the intervention group with 35% failing to make progress despite access to support. Post-hoc analysis revealed that higher T0 phonological working memory scores predicted improvements made in phonological skills.
Conclusions: An early-intervention, computer-based literacy program can be effective in boosting the phonological skills of 4- to 6-year-olds, particularly if these literacy difficulties are not linked to phonological working memory deficits.

Program Annotations: Feedback for Students Learning to Program

This paper presents a novel program annotation mechanism which enables students to obtain feedback from tutors on their programs in a far simpler and more efficient way than is possible with, for example, email. A common scenario with beginning students is to email tutors with copies of their malfunctioning programs. Unfortunately the emailed program often bears little resemblance to the program the student has been trying to make work; often it is incomplete, a different version and corrupted. We propose an annotation mechanism enabling students to simply and easily annotate their programs with comments asking for help. Similarly our mechanism enables tutors to view students’ programs and to reply to their comments in a simple and structured fashion. This means students can get frequent and timely feedback on their programs; tutors can provide such feedback efficiently, and hence students’ learning is greatly improved.

Learning to program : from pear-shaped to pairs

The consistently high failure rate in Queensland University of Technology’s introductory programming subject reflects a similar dilemma facing other universities worldwide. Experiments were conducted to quantify the effectiveness of collaborative learning on introductory level programming students over a number of semesters, replicating previous studies in this area. A selection of workshops in the introductory programming subject required students to problem-solve and program in pairs, mimicking the eXtreme Programming concept of pair programming. The failure rate for the subject fell from what had been an average of 30% since 2003 (with a high of 41% in 2006), to just 5% for those students who worked consistently in pairs.

Histology challenge : an interactive program for 1st year students

Our students come from diverse backgrounds. They need flexibility in their learning, and opportunities to review aspects of curriculum they are less confident with. An online teaching and learning programme called the Histology Challenge has been developed to supplement learning experiences offered in several first year anatomy and anatomy & physiology units at QUT. The programme is designed to be integrated with the existing Blackboard sites. The Histology Challenge emphasises the foundation concept that a complex system, such as the human body, can be better understood by examining its simpler components. The tutorial allows students to examine the cells and tissues which ultimately determine structural and functional properties of body organs. The program is interactive, asking students to make decisions and choices, demonstrating an integrated understanding of systemic and cellular aspects. It provides users with the ability to progress at their own pace and to test their understanding and knowledge. For the developer the learning activity can be easily controlled and modified via the use of text files. There are several key elements of this programme, designed to promote specific aspects of student learning. Minimum text is used, instead there is a strong emphasis on instructive artwork and original, high quality histology images presented within a framework that reinforces learning and promotes problem solving skills.

Animateur : participatory studio-based learning in computer graphics animation

The impact of digital technology within the creative industries has brought with it a range of new opportunities for collaborative, cross-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary practice. Along with these opportunities has come the need to re-evaluate how we as educators approach teaching within this new digital culture. Within the field of animation, there has been a radical shift in the expectations of students, industry and educators as animation has become central to a range of new moving image practices. This paper interrogates the effectiveness of adopting a studio-based collaborative production project as a method for educating students within this new moving-image culture. The project was undertaken, as part of the Creative Industries Transitions to New Professional Environments program at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane Australia. A number of students studying across the Creative Industries Faculty and the Faculty of Science and Technology were invited to participate in the development of a 3D animated short film. The project offered students the opportunity to become actively involved in all stages of the creative process, allowing them to experience informal learning through collaborative professional practice. It is proposed that theoretical principles often associated with andragogy and constructivism can be used to design and deliver programs that address the emerging issues surrounding the teaching of this new moving image culture.

The development of a new signal processing program at the Queensland University of Technology

The School of Electrical and Electronic Systems Engineering at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia (QUT), offers three bachelor degree courses in electrical and computer engineering. In all its courses there is a strong emphasis on signal processing. A newly established Signal Processing Research Centre (SPRC) has played an important role in the development of the signal processing units in these courses. This paper describes the unique design of the undergraduate program in signal processing at QUT, the laboratories developed to support it, and the criteria that influenced the design.

Food(ing): between human-computer and human-food-experience

This workshop is a continuation and extension to the successful past workshops exploring the intersection of food, technology, place, and people, namely 2009 OZCHI workshop, Hungry 24/7? HCI Design for Sustainable Food Culture and Sustainable Interaction with Food, Technology, and the City [1] and 2010 CHI panel Making Food, Producing Sustainability [3]. The workshop aims to bring together experts from diverse backgrounds including academia, government, industry, and non-for-profit organisations. It specifically aims to create a space for discussion and design of innovative approaches to understanding and cultivating sustainable food practices via human-computer-interaction (HCI) as well as addressing the wider opportunities for the HCI community to engage with food as a key issue for sustainability The workshop addresses environmental, health, and social domains of sustainability in particular, by looking at various conceptual and design approaches in orchestrating sustainable interaction of people and food in and through dynamic techno-social networks.

Pedagogy of introductory computer programming : a people-first approach

Students struggle with learning to program. In recent years, not only has there been a dramatic drop in the number of students enrolling in IT and Computer Science courses, but attrition from these courses continues to be significant. Introductory programming subjects traditionally have high failure rates and as they tend to be core to IT and Computer Science courses can be a road block for many students to their university studies. Is programming really that difficult — or are there other barriers to learning that have a serious and detrimental effect on student progression? In-class experiments were conducted in introductory programming units to confirm our hypothesis that that pair-programming would benefit students' learning to program. We investigated the social and cultural barriers to learning programming by questioning students' perceptions of confidence, difficulty and enjoyment of programming. The results of paired and non-paired students were compared to determine the effect of pair-programming on learning outcomes. Both the empirical and anecdotal results of our experiments strongly supported our hypothesis.

Data flow analysis of embedded program expressions

Data flow analysis techniques can be used to help assess threats to data confidentiality and integrity in security critical program code. However, a fundamental weakness of static analysis techniques is that they overestimate the ways in which data may propagate at run time. Discounting large numbers of these false-positive data flow paths wastes an information security evaluator's time and effort. Here we show how to automatically eliminate some false-positive data flow paths by precisely modelling how classified data is blocked by certain expressions in embedded C code. We present a library of detailed data flow models of individual expression elements and an algorithm for introducing these components into conventional data flow graphs. The resulting models can be used to accurately trace byte-level or even bit-level data flow through expressions that are normally treated as atomic. This allows us to identify expressions that safely downgrade their classified inputs and thereby eliminate false-positive data flow paths from the security evaluation process. To validate the approach we have implemented and tested it in an existing data flow analysis toolkit.

Program your city : designing an urban integrated open data API

Cities accumulate and distribute vast sets of digital information. Many decision-making and planning processes in councils, local governments and organisations are based on both real-time and historical data. Until recently, only a small, carefully selected subset of this information has been released to the public – usually for specific purposes (e.g. train timetables, release of planning application through websites to name just a few). This situation is however changing rapidly. Regulatory frameworks, such as the Freedom of Information Legislation in the US, the UK, the European Union and many other countries guarantee public access to data held by the state. One of the results of this legislation and changing attitudes towards open data has been the widespread release of public information as part of recent Government 2.0 initiatives. This includes the creation of public data catalogues such as data.gov.au (U.S.), data.gov.uk (U.K.), data.gov.au (Australia) at federal government levels, and datasf.org (San Francisco) and data.london.gov.uk (London) at municipal levels. The release of this data has opened up the possibility of a wide range of future applications and services which are now the subject of intensified research efforts. Previous research endeavours have explored the creation of specialised tools to aid decision-making by urban citizens, councils and other stakeholders (Calabrese, Kloeckl & Ratti, 2008; Paulos, Honicky & Hooker, 2009). While these initiatives represent an important step towards open data, they too often result in mere collections of data repositories. Proprietary database formats and the lack of an open application programming interface (API) limit the full potential achievable by allowing these data sets to be cross-queried. Our research, presented in this paper, looks beyond the pure release of data. It is concerned with three essential questions: First, how can data from different sources be integrated into a consistent framework and made accessible? Second, how can ordinary citizens be supported in easily composing data from different sources in order to address their specific problems? Third, what are interfaces that make it easy for citizens to interact with data in an urban environment? How can data be accessed and collected?

Quality metrics for assessing security-critical computer programs

Existing secure software development principles tend to focus on coding vulnerabilities, such as buffer or integer overflows, that apply to individual program statements, or issues associated with the run-time environment, such as component isolation. Here we instead consider software security from the perspective of potential information flow through a program’s object-oriented module structure. In particular, we define a set of quantifiable "security metrics" which allow programmers to quickly and easily assess the overall security of a given source code program or object-oriented design. Although measuring quality attributes of object-oriented programs for properties such as maintainability and performance has been well-covered in the literature, metrics which measure the quality of information security have received little attention. Moreover, existing securityrelevant metrics assess a system either at a very high level, i.e., the whole system, or at a fine level of granularity, i.e., with respect to individual statements. These approaches make it hard and expensive to recognise a secure system from an early stage of development. Instead, our security metrics are based on well-established compositional properties of object-oriented programs (i.e., data encapsulation, cohesion, coupling, composition, extensibility, inheritance and design size), combined with data flow analysis principles that trace potential information flow between high- and low-security system variables. We first define a set of metrics to assess the security quality of a given object-oriented system based on its design artifacts, allowing defects to be detected at an early stage of development. We then extend these metrics to produce a second set applicable to object-oriented program source code. The resulting metrics make it easy to compare the relative security of functionallyequivalent system designs or source code programs so that, for instance, the security of two different revisions of the same system can be compared directly. This capability is further used to study the impact of specific refactoring rules on system security more generally, at both the design and code levels. By measuring the relative security of various programs refactored using different rules, we thus provide guidelines for the safe application of refactoring steps to security-critical programs. Finally, to make it easy and efficient to measure a system design or program’s security, we have also developed a stand-alone software tool which automatically analyses and measures the security of UML designs and Java program code. The tool’s capabilities are demonstrated by applying it to a number of security-critical system designs and Java programs. Notably, the validity of the metrics is demonstrated empirically through measurements that confirm our expectation that program security typically improves as bugs are fixed, but worsens as new functionality is added.