Chinese Tertiary Students＇ Perceptions of a Good EFL Teacher

This article mainly deals with a group of Chinese tertiary students＇ ideas about what makes a good EFL teacher at the tertiary level. The participants＇ learning experience, reflections and expectations have cast light upon what a modern EFL teacher is supposed to perform in the Chinese EFL context.

Pilot study:Nursing students'perceptions of the environment in two different clinical models

Purpose:This pilot study aimed to assess the reliability and validity of a modified Dundee Ready Educational Environment Measure(m-DREEM)tool used to evaluate the effects of different pedagogical approaches in a clinical learning environment on nursing students'learning perceptions.Methods:A sample consisting of 130 nursing students in two different models of clinical education was surveyed.Results:This pilot study demonstrated that m-DREEM yields a high internal consistency.This tool can be used to evaluate nursing students'perceptions of their clinical learning environment on the basis of five sub-scales:students'learning perceptions,facilitators,academic self-perception,atmosphere,social self-perception,and mentorship.Conclusion:A definitive and inferential relationship between sub-scales and clinical models,namely,block and non-block dispersed models,could not be determined because of the small sample size of the block clinical model.Hence,further research should be performed.

The Use of MARIE CPU Simulator in the Computer Architecture （CA） Course： An Exploratory Analysis to Assess the Students＇ Perception of Leaming

It seems that the combination of teaching practices creates interesting results in several areas of knowledge. The teacher has to always bear in mind that he/she has to present educational contents regarding his discipline always trying to present it an attractive way through new teaching dynamics. The challenge is to not to distance from the curricular content by using a broader educational proposal, intensifying the interaction with the students with the problems related to the professional area with artifacts and tools. Under such circumstances, the computer simulation can be a valuable teaching tool for the necessary contents in the formation of students. The preliminary studies based on students＇ opinions indicate it as a promising practice.

Movement Primitives as a Robotic Tool to Interpret Trajectories Through Learning-by-doing

Articulated movements are fundamental in many human and robotic tasks.While humans can learn and generalise arbitrarily long sequences of movements,and particularly can optimise them to ft the constraints and features of their body,robots are often programmed to execute point-to-point precise but fxed patterns.This study proposes a new approach to interpreting and reproducing articulated and complex trajectories as a set of known robot-based primitives.Instead of achieving accurate reproductions,the proposed approach aims at interpreting data in an agent-centred fashion,according to an agent s primitive movements.The method improves the accuracy of a reproduction with an incremental process that seeks frst a rough approximation by capturing the most essential features of a demonstrated trajectory.Observing the discrepancy between the demonstrated and reproduced trajectories,the process then proceeds with incremental decompositions and new searches in sub-optimal parts of the trajectory.The aim is to achieve an agent-centred interpretation and progressive learning that fts in the frst place the robots capability,as opposed to a data-centred decomposition analysis.Tests on both geometric and human generated trajectories reveal that the use of own primitives results in remarkable robustness and generalisation properties of the method.In particular,because trajectories are understood and abstracted by means of agent-optimised primitives,the method has two main features： 1） Reproduced trajectories are general and represent an abstraction of the data.2） The algorithm is capable of reconstructing highly noisy or corrupted data without pre-processing thanks to an implicit and emergent noise suppression and feature detection.This study suggests a novel bio-inspired approach to interpreting,learning and reproducing articulated movements and trajectories.Possible applications include drawing,writing,movement generation,object manipulation,and other tasks where the performance requires human-like interpretation and generalisation capabilities.