Linguistics Commons^™

Documenting Digital Problem Solving: Qualitative Results Strategies And Approaches For Digital Problem Solving, Jill Castek, Gloria Jacobs, Cindy Gibbon, Tyler Frank, Amy Honisett, Judy Anderson

Data

This document shares qualitative analysis and findings from a 3 year research effort focused on digital problem solving. Key concepts emerging from the analysis are operationally defined. The document describes how individuals engaged in digital problem solving and describes their cognitive and affective strategies. The analysis reveals the vital role of examining digital problem solving through a diversity of contexts. Different contexts require the use of a range of approaches applied in different ways for different purposes. Data suggest that the number, frequency, and complexity of contexts in which an individual is familar plays an important role in how individuals …

Analyzing And Interpreting Data From Piaac’S Problem Solving In Technology Rich Environments (Pstre) Assessment And Library Use Survey: Quantitative Results, Jill Castek, Gloria Jacobs, Cindy Gibbon, Tyler Frank, Amy Honisett, Judy Anderson

Data

This document contains an explanation of the quantitative analysis conducted using data from a researcher-designed library use survey and PIAAC's PSTRE survey accessed through OECD's Education and Skills Online portal. Data were collected in two phases and are presented using descriptive statistics and through a latent class analysis. The latent class analysis allowed for the examination of the relationship between library activities, library website use, and PSTRE scores. Results indicated that library website use is strong predictor of higher PSTRE scores and competency in digital problem solving.

Defining Digital Problem Solving, Jill Castek, Gloria Jacobs, Cindy Gibbon, Tyler Frank, Amy Honisett, Judy Anderson

Digital Problem Solving Toolkit

This document introduces the definition of digital problem solving that emerged from a three year long research project. Digital problem solving is described as being related to, but unique from, digital literacies and basic digital skills. Specifically, digital problem solving involves the use of the skills, strategies, and approaches (including mindsets) needed to navigate online in everyday contexts, including the library, and use novel resources, tools, and interfaces in efficient and flexible ways to accomplish personal and professional goals. Authors describe how the definition of digital problem solving was developed and applications within libraries, Adult Education, and Lifelong Learning.

Observing Digital Problem Solving Checklist, Jill Castek, Gloria Jacobs, Cindy Gibbon, Tyler Frank, Amy Honisett, Judy Anderson

Digital Problem Solving Toolkit

This adaptable tool was developed from research findings from a 3 year research study exploring digital problem solving. It is intended to be used by a librarian/staff/volunteer during an in-person interview and observation context. It is designed to better understand how to shape interactions with a library user when they come into the library for assistance that requires gathering, exploring, and making sense of online resources. The tool can be used to support individual or small group interactions. It contains a series of questions that provide insight into the knowledge and experiences of the library user as well as the …

Digital Problem Solving: Score Report, Jill Castek, Gloria Jacobs, Cindy Gibbon, Tyler Frank, Amy Honisett, Judy Anderson

Digital Problem Solving Toolkit

This test tries to measure how well you use technology to solve problems. The digital tools in the test might not look familiar. As you get more practice meeting different goals using technology, these tasks will become easier to do.

Executive Summary, Jill Castek, Gloria Jacobs, Cindy Gibbon, Tyler Frank, Amy Honisett, Judy Anderson

Presentations and Publications

The Advancing Digital Equity in Public Libraries: Assessing Library Patrons’ Problem Solving in Technology Rich Environments research project was supported by a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant. It was conducted over the course of 3 years in cooperation with the Multnomah County Library in Portland, Oregon. The research was guided by a national advisory group made up of scholars and practitioners in the fields of adult education, digital literacies, online reading and research, and library services.

Digital Problem Solving: The Literacies Of Navigating Life In The Digital Age, Gloria Jacobs, Jill Castek

Presentations and Publications

Digital problem solving reflects an individual’s ability to navigate and use multiple digital resources in order to accomplish goals across domains including work, personal interests, educational pursuits, social or professional networking, civic participation, and for future uses not yet conceptualized. To accomplish these goals, individuals need to enact everyday literacies (Knobel, 1999) that include: “asking questions, constructing meaning from [information and] data, generating [and sharing] creative solutions, and reflecting on how to improve these solutions for different contexts” (Manderino & Castek, 2016, p. 79). As individuals move through daily lives, they are constantly traversing disciplines as they collect information and …

Project Summary, Jill Castek, Gloria Jacobs, Cindy Gibbon, Tyler Frank, Amy Honisett, Judy Anderson

Presentations and Publications

Summary of the project, Advancing Digital Equity in Public Libraries: Assessing Library Patrons’ Problem Solving in Technology Rich Environments.

The purpose of the research was to examine and understand the digital problem solving processes of vulnerable adults.

Blueprint For Designing Digital Problem Solving Tasks, Jill Castek, Cindy Gibbon, Gloria Jacobs, Tyler Frank, Amy Honisett, Judy Anderson

Digital Problem Solving Toolkit

This document explains how the research team developed tasks and an observational protocol that allowed for the examination of individuals’ digital problem solving. These tasks, and the metacognitive scaffolding prompts and protocol associate dwith them, were developed and refined with the Multnomah County Library’s website resources in mind. Other libraries can adapt these tasks and protocol or develop a related observational protocol inspired by the design principles offered. This document suggest what libraries can do to support digital problem solving development.

Multilingualism And Multiculturalism: Opinions From Spanish-Speaking English Learners From Mexico, Central America, And South America, Cailey Catherine Moe

Dissertations and Theses

Within the population of adult English-language learners in the United States, the largest portion is comprised of Spanish speakers from Mexico and Central and South America. At the same time, Spanish is the second-most commonly spoken language in the U.S., and an increasing presence in U.S. media and culture. This puts English learners from this demographic in a unique position with respect to language and culture acquisition and the experience of working towards their goals within U.S. society at large.

The purpose of this study is to explore motivations and beliefs about language and culture held by a small number …

The Use Of Evidentials In Hearsay Contexts In Japanese And English, Tomomi Matsumura

Dissertations and Theses

Evidentials are one of the language codes that convey the speaker's beliefs in terms of the degree of reliability of information and how the speaker obtained information (Chafe, 1986; Ishida, 2006; McCready and Ogata, 2007). Evidentials play an important role in communication since they also function to show the speaker's attitude toward the interlocutors by making a sentence softer (Trent 1998). In his theory of territory of information, Kamio (1990, 1997, 2002) proposed that pragmatic rules of evidentials are different in Japanese than in English. Ishida (2006) studied these differences and argued that learners of Japanese (JF learners) face difficulties …

Advancing Digital Skills For Problem Solving In Technology-Rich Environments, Jill Castek, Gloria Jacobs

Presentations and Publications

Digital and disciplinary literacies are not simply tools or cognitive behaviors. They have the potential to provide opportunities for students to better understand themselves, their communities, and their world. The presentation examines ways of conceptualizing and understanding digital literacies and disciplinary learning and consider implications for teacher education and community outreach efforts.

Maps For Sherbro Area, George Tucker Childs

The Sherbro Language and Culture of Sierra Leone

Maps pertaining to Sherbro language and culture.

Escalating Language At Traffic Stops: Two Case Studies, Jamalieh Haley

Dissertations and Theses

In recent years, the public has seen a rise in recorded footage of violent encounters between police and Black American citizens, partially due to technology such as cell phones, dash-cameras, and body-cameras. This linguistic study examines how these encounters get escalated to the point of violence by asking 1) what kind of directives were used, 2) how were they responded to, 3) how the directives contributed to escalation, and 4) how might power and authority have played a role. I use two case studies to analyze directives and their responses. Findings reveal that repetition of directives on the part of …

Loanwords In Context: Lexical Borrowing From English To Japanese And Its Effects On Second-Language Vocabulary Acquisition, Andrew Michael Sowers

Dissertations and Theses

Research has shown that cognates between Japanese and English have the potential to be a valuable learning tool (Daulton, 2008). Yet little is known on how Japanese learners of English produce cognates in context. Recently, studies have argued that cognates can cause a surprisingly high number of syntactic errors in sentence writing activities with Japanese learners (Rogers, Webb, & Nakata, 2014; Masson, 2013). In the present study, I investigated how Japanese learners of English understood and used true cognates (words that have equivalent meanings in both languages) and non-true cognates (words where the Japanese meaning differs in various ways from …

Examining Adult Learners’ Digital Problem Solving In Libraries Using A Learning Typology, Jill Castek, Amy Honisett

Presentations and Publications

In this presentation, we shared our emerging findings around what constitutes digital problem solving and the approaches and strategies digital problem solvers use.

Mobile Augmented Reality: Hyper Contextualization And Situated Language Usage Events, Steven L. Thorne, John Hellermann

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

Language use, second-language development, and technology mediated human activity are complex processes situated in, and in some cases demonstrably interwoven with, specific material and social contexts. Our presentation describes a project that focuses on the contextually embedded nature of communicative action. Building upon recent research on ethnomethodological analyses of talk-in-interaction while walking (Haddington et al., 2013), analyses of how communicative activity mediates our understanding of objects and environments (Nevile et al., 2014; Latour, 2005), principles of extended and embodied cognition (Atkinson, 2010), and existing research on the use of mobile place-based augmented reality (AR) techniques for language learning (Holden & …

From Digital Literacies To Digital Problem Solving: Expanding Technology-Rich Learning Opportunities For Adults, Tyler Frank, Jill Castek

Presentations and Publications

A window into an adult basic education (ABE) class shows several learners typing essays on laptops. Suddenly one student throws her hands up in the air loudly exclaiming, “I didn’t do anything! The computer just erased everything! It wasn’t me, it was the computer!” This scenario is all too familiar with new-to-computer users. Over time, this learner has developed more confidence and digital literacies, and has since passed the Language Arts GED test. However the technology skills needed in the workplace and in daily life go beyond those needed for test taking. Yet computers in adult education classrooms are most …

Adults' Engagement In Reading, Writing And Numeracy Practices, Stephen Reder

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Analyzing information from the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), this paper explores the frequency with which adults engage in reading, writing and numeracy practices and the relationship between these practices and a range of social and economic outcomes. Results are examined for the general adult populations as well as adult populations with low literacy or numeracy proficiencies. For most social and economic outcomes, levels of engagement in literacy practices appear to be as strong predictors as proficiency measures are, indicating the importance of encouraging more intense engagement in literacy and numeracy practices both in and outside of work.

Survive Or Thrive: A Mixed Method Study Of Visiting Chinese Language Teachers' Identity Formation In The U.S. Classrooms, Li Xiang

Dissertations and Theses

In recent years in the United States, an increasing number of people are learning Mandarin, the dominant Chinese language in China. Because of the shortage of Mandarin teachers, many visiting teachers from China with Chinese educational background are teaching Mandarin in the U.S. schools. In the U.S. classrooms, these teachers are challenged to adapt to a new setting. This experience can lead them to changing their teaching identity, that is, their basic beliefs, attitudes and practices about teaching. Understanding how Chinese teachers may form a new teaching identity in the U.S. context serves to inform future professional development activities designed …

Comparing The Effects Of Phonomotor Treatment And Semantic Feature Analysis On Discourse Production For Individuals With Aphasia, Kasey Graue

Student Research Symposium

Phonomotor treatment is a program designed to address anomic deficits in people with aphasia (PWA) by training speech sounds in isolation before progressing to sound combinations and single words (Kendall et al., 2013). Kendall et al. (2015) investigated phonomotor treatment in a sample of 26 PWA, reporting improved naming of untrained nouns and ultimate generalization of phonologic processing abilities. Despite emerging literature on the effects of the phonomotor treatment on single word production, research is limited at the discourse level. This study’s objective is to examine the extent that phonomotor treatment used for PWA increases the amount of correct information …

Individual And Group Differences In Sound Category Learning, Ben Carlstrom

Student Research Symposium

Abstract: We examined the role of procedural-, declarative-, and working-memory systems in adults learning novel sound categories. Adults have fully developed declarative-memory skills that sometimes inhibit their ability to learn implicitly/procedurally (Filoteo, Lauritzen, & Maddox, 2010). Models of impaired language like the Procedural Deficit Hypothesis suggest that procedural-memory deficits are predictive of language-learning outcomes (Lum, Conti-Ramsden, Page, & Ullman, 2011). This study tested the hypothesis that language structure is best learned implicitly/procedurally, which has implications for L2 learning and language impairment. The novel sound categories presented to participants varied along a phonologically non-native dimension, pitch, and a native dimension, vowel …

Revealing Subtle Cognitive-Linguistic Differences In Adults With Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Through Discourse Analysis, Amanda L. Weichselbaum, Sarah E. Key-Delyria

Student Research Symposium

Discourse abilities of individuals with traumatic brain injury presented at the Portland State University Student Research Symposium.

The findings of this study support the idea that discourse analysis may be a useful tool for determining subtle, cognitive-communication deficits in the TBI population that common neuropsychological tests may not detect. Such information may be important clinically for validating persisting cognitive symptoms and guiding effective therapy goals. Linguistic disruptions may reveal cognitive impairments due to diffuse damage of the brain.

Digital Equity In Libraries: Understanding The Problem Solving Skills Of Adults, Jill Castek, Gloria Jacobs, Cindy Gibbon

Presentations and Publications

Webinar introduces the purpose of the project as it relates to the collaboration between the library and researchers. The webinar also shares where the project is at with data collection and what it means.

Research Into Action: Skills Assessment And Training To Support A Digital Equity Action Plan, Cindy Gibbon, Jill Castek

Presentations and Publications

This presentation focuses on digital problem solving skills in libraries.

Teaching For Digital Equity: Examining Digital Problem Solving In A Public Library, Jill Castek, Gloria Jacobs

Presentations and Publications

Presentation focuses on emerging findings around what constitutes digital problem solving and the approaches and strategies digital problem solvers use.

Understanding Our Patrons’ Needs In Order To Thrive Together In A Digital Environment, Amy Honisett, Cindy Gibbon

Presentations and Publications

Data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) shows that adults in the US are less skilled in digital problem solving than in many other countries. As more of our communication, creation and learning moves online, how do we help our patrons thrive in a new environment, and how do we transform our training and resources so the library thrives, too?

We used a digital problem solving assessment tool from PIAAC to find out if our patrons’ skills matched up with national data, and we mapped the digital skills we assessed to common library tasks. Results …

Examining Digital Problem Solving Skills In Libraries To Promote Digital Equity, Gloria Jacobs, Jill Castek

Presentations and Publications

This presentation was part of the digital skills and inequality session and focuses digital problem solving and the approaches and strategies digital problem solvers use.

Contextualization: An Experimental Model For Efl Writing Instruction In China, Guimin Tang

Dissertations and Theses

Chinese students learning English as a foreign language seem to get good marks in tests, but are poor or limited in their ability to write in English. This dilemma of China's EFL writing instruction seems to be related to the decontextualized EFL writing practices. This study aims to examine how Chinese EFL college students respond to changes in their writing instruction that pays attention to the context of EFL teaching and learning. In this study, context refers to three levels: linguistic context, situational context and cultural context.

Using the mixed methods approach, I conducted the study by engaging 60 second-year …

An Analytical System For Determining Disciplinary Vocabulary For Data-Driven Learning: An Example From Civil Engineering, Philippa Jean Otto

Dissertations and Theses

Data-driven learning (DDL), an inductive teaching approach in which students learn through corpus interaction, has gained recent traction as way to teach specialized vocabulary in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classes. There is little research, however, that addresses how to choose specialized vocabulary for teaching with DDL.

This study addressed this gap in research by exploring the potential of a three-part analytical, corpus-based system for determining vocabulary to teach with DDL for a specific context of language use. This system included (1) identifying words that were significantly more frequent in a specialized expert corpus than in a corpus of general …