Inferences and recall at ages four and seven

Inferences and recall at ages 4 and 7 were studied as a function of the cause of a target event, the presence and timing of questions prior to recall, and the type of inference demanded by the questions. 7-year-olds inferred and recalled well with stories containing any of the causal connections employed in the study. 4-year-olds performed better when physical causes, rather than either psychological causes or enabling relations, connected events. Timing of questions did not affect the 7-year-olds' inferences, but asking questions interfered with their recall. Questions about story events aided the 4-year-olds' ability to make inferences and to recall, especially when causal connections were least specified and when questions were asked following the story. 4- and 7-year-olds also differed in responding to demands for 3 specific types of inference. 4-year-olds produced significantly more unconstrained inferences than logical or constrained informational inferences. 7-year-olds were most responsive to logical inference questions, and produced significantly more logical than constrained inferences.     

Comparing loops misconceptions in block-based and text-based programming languages at the K-12 level

Novice programmers are facing many difficulties while learning to program. Most studies about misconceptions in programming are conducted at the undergraduate level, yet there is a lack of studies at the elementary school (K-12) level, reasonably because computer science neither programming are regularly still not the part of elementary school curricula’s. Are the misconceptions about loops at elementary school level equal to those at the undergraduate level? Can we “prevent” the misconceptions by using the different pedagogical approach, visual programming language and shifting the programming context toward game programming? In this paper, we tried to answer these questions. We conducted the student misconceptions research on one of the fundamental programming concepts – the loop. The research is conducted in the classroom settings among 207 elementary school students. Students were learning to program in three programming languages: Scratch, Logo and Python. In this paper, we present the results of this research.     

当前高校思想政治教育的四对矛盾和六个必须

当前,高校思想政治教育面临着社会价值观的多元化与高校思想政治教育导向一元化等“四对矛盾”。以此为基点,高校思想政治教育方式方法必须进行全方位的变革,在实际工作中做到“六个必须”。     

从素质教育的"三要义"看教师角色的"四转变"

素质教育关于全体性、全面性、主动性“三要义”的提出,迫切需要教师从传统的角色中走出来,实现“德、知、观、能”四方面的转变。新的角色定位,易形成新的教育教学行为,从而促进教师自身和教育对象的和谐发展。     

强化环境工程专业认识实习教学质量方法探索

环境工程专业认识实习实践教学质量,直接影响学生的专业和职业认可度。结合我校环境工程专业多年来认识实习实践教学开展现状,从实习基地甄选等五个方面,探讨了强化环境工程专业认识实习教学质量的多重方法,重点强调了以闭卷考试为核心的多元化考核模式在认识实习实践教学中的重要作用,杜绝了实践教学流于参观而非学习的不良现象,提升了认识实习实践教学质量,促进了我校环境工程高级应用型人才的培养。该方法对于各兄弟院校环境工程专业乃至其他工科专业的实践教学,具有一定的借鉴作用。     

提高环境工程专业认识实习质量的实践与思考

认识实习是工科专业重要的实践教学环节。本文分析了我校环境工程专业认识实习教学的现状及存在的不足,提出从实习基地、教学手段、师资队伍、考核方式四个方面进行改革,并进行了探讨,以期提高认识实习的教学质量。     

Attitudes to reading at ages nine and eleven

A survey was conducted with the aim of identifying attitudes towards reading amongst upper primary pupils, and establishing whether these attitudes had changed over the five‐year period from 1998 to 2003. A sample of 5076 pupils in Years 4 and 6 completed questionnaires. Attitudes were generally positive, but declined somewhat between the younger and older of these age groups. A sub‐sample of 2364 of these pupils were in the same schools where the same questionnaire had been completed in 1998. Enjoyment of reading had significantly fallen over the five years, whilst confidence as readers had significantly increased over the same period. The changes may be related to the introduction of the National Literacy Strategy, but other explanations are also possible.     

The double curse of misconceptions: misconceptions impair not only text comprehension but also metacomprehension in the domain of statistics

Research shows that misconceptions are usually detrimental to text comprehension. However, whether misconceptions also impair metacomprehension accuracy, that is, the accuracy with which one self-assesses one’s text comprehension, has received far less attention. We conducted a study in which we examined students’ (N = 47) comprehension and metacomprehension accuracy (prediction accuracy and postdiction accuracy) of a statistics text as a function of their statistical misconceptions. Text comprehension and metacomprehension accuracy referred to both conceptual and procedural aspects of statistics. The results showed that students who had more misconceptions achieved poorer conceptual text comprehension and, at the same time, provided more overconfident predictions of their conceptual and procedural text comprehension than students who had fewer misconceptions. In contrast, postdiction accuracy of conceptual and procedural text comprehension was not affected by misconceptions.     

Learning about forces: simulating the outcomes of pupils' misconceptions

We have developed a computer program which simulates the outcomes of pupils' perceptions regarding the forces at play in static equilibrium. A pupil is presented with a simulation of his or her own private microworld which may or may not be compatible with familiar behaviour in the real world. The program includes a tutor which helps the pupil learn the relevant scientific concepts if he or she cannot solve the problem without help.This dissonance-based strategy for achieving conceptual change was made possible by the use of a language which enables pupils to express their conceptual understanding. To date, researchers have relied primarily on natural language interfaces with all the difficulties inherent in such an approach; we chose to use a simple vector language appropriate to the study of forces. This language accurately quantifies pupils' understanding and allows the designer to create highly reactive and seemingly intelligent programs.     

与时俱进 同步发展——关于当前高校档案工作的几点认识

随着高等教育形势的发展，学校档案工作在改革和发展中不可避免的会出现一些新问题和阻力．面对新形势，高校档案工作只能加强不能削弱，应夯实档案业务基础，把档案业务工作延伸到系级单位。     

简体汉字背景下的繁体汉字认知机制探究

以隐喻理论为基础探讨了大陆人在简体汉字的知识背景下认知繁体汉字的认知过程.我们对于繁体汉字的认知由三个步骤组成,由形达义,由音达义和由义达义.在这个过程中,我们运用已存在于大脑中的心理字典,根据繁体字的形、音、义,寻找与之具有相似性的简体字.最终通过简体字空间与繁体字空间的互动与投射完成对繁体字的认知.为此,提出了一个...     

依托『四个基地』通过『六条途径』建设『双师型』师资队伍

职业学校的专业师资队伍建设是一个长期工程，我校依托四个培养基地，通过六条主要途径开展形式多样的专业师资队伍建设工作，取得了显著的效果。     

高等职业教育课程资源开发的认识与实践

一、对高等职业教育课程资源的认识 高等职业教育主要为生产、服务、技术和管理第一线培养技术性应用型人才,课程设置必须以职业为导向、以能力为本位、以职业实践为主线,课程实施需要有切实可行的教学方案(包括课程大纲、技能标准、工作计划和教案等)、必需的教学资料(包括教材、教学参考资料、多媒体课件、图书资料等)、相应的教学条件(包括教师、学生、教室、教学设备、教学基地等)和稳定的运行系统等要素.这里的教学方案、教学资料、教学条件和运行系统等都是课程资源.其中既包括物质的,也包括非物质的;既包括校内的,也包括校外的;既包括传统的教科书、图书资料,也包括现代的网络、科技成果等.     

Social routines,pragmatic schemas,and schemes in how children distribute objects between the ages of three and six

Past research on social marking and pragmatic reasoning schemas suggest that cognitive processing modes are first elaborated by children when are carying out regulating social routines in the course of which they learn to produce the responses that satisfy the demand of their environment. The data of five experimental studies with 3–6 year old children, for object distribution tasks, are reported here. The data of the three first experiments show that the social routines evoked by the objects to be processed have a dual effect, influencing both the representation of the partition to be made, as well as the procedures used to make them. The data of the two last experiments seems to attest that, in training situations, the utilization of routine-evoking tasks promotes the construction of more general schemas, by the attribution of an operative meaning to the linguistic expressions used to characterize the states to be attained, and the transformations to be applied in order to attain them.     

An in-depth study of misconceptions in stoichiometry and chemical equilibrium at a South African university

An investigation into the attempts of Chemistry I students at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, to answer questions in an examination involving stoichiometry and chemical equilibrium revealed that the majority of the students do not fully understand either concept. These results are in line with studies carried out in other countries and it seems that the main difficulty with these topics is that they are highly abstract and first taught to students before they have reached the stage of formal operational thought. Concrete examples (not open to misinterpretation) need to be used when these topics are first introduced to students, and cooperative learning in small groups should be encouraged to give students an opportunity to identify and remediate their misconceptions in a nonthreatening environment. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

大学英语四六级考试影响下的大学英语教学策略研究

我国大学英语教学一直以来都在不断的改革当中,大多数院校都是通过让学生参加四六级考试来检验大学英语教学的有效性,但经过这几年的考核发现,该测试手段给大学英语教学带来了不同程度的影响。既有正面影响,也有负面影响。本文通过分析大学英语四六级考试现状及大学英语教学现状,试图探讨有效的大学英语教学策略,以努力推进大学英语教学改革。     

Common origins of diverse misconceptions: cognitive principles and the development of biology thinking

Many ideas in the biological sciences seem especially difficult to understand, learn, and teach successfully. Our goal in this feature is to explore how these difficulties may stem not from the complexity or opacity of the concepts themselves, but from the fact that they may clash with informal, intuitive, and deeply held ways of understanding the world that have been studied for decades by psychologists. We give a brief overview of the field of developmental cognitive psychology. Then, in each of the following sections, we present a number of common challenges faced by students in the biological sciences. These may be in the form of misconceptions, biases, or simply concepts that are difficult to learn and teach, and they occur at all levels of biological analysis (molecular, cellular, organismal, population, and ecosystem). We then introduce the notion of a cognitive construal and discuss specific examples of how these cognitive principles may explain what makes some misconceptions so alluring and some biological concepts so challenging for undergraduates. We will argue that seemingly unrelated misconceptions may have common origins in a single underlying cognitive construal. These ideas emerge from our own ongoing cross-disciplinary conversation, and we think that expanding this conversation to include other biological scientists and educators, as well as other cognitive scientists, could have significant utility in improving biology teaching and learning.