We report findings that help us better understand the difficulty of tasks which involve information seeking, retrieving, gathering, and use. We examined the data gathered from two interactive information retrieval user studies on how users’ perception of task difficulty changes before and after searching for information to solve tasks, and how the difficulty of tasks relates with users’ backgro...

This study was an attempt to investigate what metacognitive strategies are specifically employed by English learners when it comes to different speaking task types.60 students at advanced level (female) were randomly selected and given an OPT as a test of homogeneity. They were assigned to experimental and control groups. The MS questionnaire (Oxford, 1990) was also administered to see what MS ...

This study was conducted to investigate the effect of meaning-focused versus form-focused input-oriented and output-oriented task-based instruction on elementary level Iranian EFL Learners’ vocabulary comprehension and recall. For this purpose, a sample of 120 male students from a private school in Tehran was selected through convenience sampling and based on availability. The participants were...

the necessity and importance of teaching pragmatics has come to light by many researchers (e.g. rose & kasper, 2001). due to the consensus over the need to teach pragmatic competence, the main issue now centers on the question of how we should teach this competence in the most effective way. consistent with this line of research, the present study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of d...

The current study investigated creativity-directed problem-solving processing that explicitly requires solving pattern generalization problems in multiple ways. To examine mathematical creativity, we employed a solution tasks approach, asking participants to solve were engaged with generalization-multiple which patterns presented numerically, diagrammatically, or contextually. aimed whether suc...

Interest is a critical fuel for and outcome of learning. Building on refocusing the Four-Phase Model interest development, this study provides window into ecology learning experience it generates. This research uses novel mobile assessment platform to test experiences in three university courses (Organic chemistry, biochemistry, introduction physics non-majors) pilots micro-analytic approach ca...

  One of the most problematic areas in foreign language learning is collocation. It is often seen as arbitrary and an overwhelming obstacle to the achievement of nativelike fluency. Current second language (L2) instruction research has encouraged the use of collaborative output tasks in L2 classrooms. This study examined the effects of two types of output tasks (editing and cloze) on the learni...

We incorporated behavioral and computational modeling techniques to examine age-based differences in strategy use in two four-choice decision-making tasks. Healthy older (aged 60-82 years) and younger adults (aged 18-23 years) performed one of two decision-making tasks that differed in the degree to which rewards for each option depended on the choices made on previous trials. In the choice-ind...

In this paper, the training needs of wind farm employees have been specified, assessed and prioritized. For this purpose, first of all, the main tasks of wind farm employees have been identified. Afterwards, four criteria—including task complexity, task importance, task time duration and task frequency—have been considered to assess and prioritize tasks. In this respect, the Analytic Hierar...

Policy gradient methods have enjoyed great success in deep reinforcement learning but suffer from high variance of gradient estimates. The high variance problem is particularly exasperated in problems with long horizons or high-dimensional action spaces. To mitigate this issue, we derive a bias-free action-dependent baseline for variance reduction which fully exploits the structural form of the...