An interdisciplinary collaboration between computer engineering and mathematics/bilingual education to develop a curriculum for underrepresented middle school students

There is a strong need in the United States to increase the number of students from underrepresented groups who pursue careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Drawing from sociocultural theory, we present approaches to establishing collaborations between computer engineering and mathematics/bilingual education faculty to address this need. We describe our work through the Advancing Out-of-School Learning in Mathematics and Engineering project by illustrating how an integrated curriculum that is based on mathematics with applications in image and video processing can be designed and how it can be implemented with middle school students from underrepresented groups.     

La autorregulación verbal en tareas de reproducción de series

Resumen

Investigaciones recientes han señalado la inadecuación de la metodología utilizada por Luria en el estudio del origen y desarrollo de la autorregulación verbal. Aquí se describen las características de las tareas y situaciones de estudio óptimas para analizar el habla autorreguladora en interacción con la acción. En un experimento diseñado con tareas de reproducción de series (gráficas y manipulativas) realizadas por niños preescolares, hemos analizado la influencia de la edad, el modelado verbal, la estimulación activadora, la naturaleza de la tarea, el modelo visual y el nivel de dificultad de las series, sobre la ejecución de la tarea (calidad y tiempo) y sobre la emisión de habla privada autorreguladora. Los resultados indican las condiciones situacionales en las cuales es más probable la acción autorregulada verbalmente y refuerzan la idea de que la emisión de habla autorreguladora no depende tanto del momento evolutivo como de las condiciones en las que ocurre la acción.     

Kiva Microloans in a Learning Community: An Assignment for Interdisciplinary Synthesis

Learning communities can strengthen early undergraduates’ learning, but planning them can be daunting for instructors. Learning communities usually rely on integrative assignments that encourage interdisciplinary analysis. This article reports on our experiences using microloans as an interdisciplinary assignment in a learning community that united algebra with world literature. Students used the microfinance website www.kiva.org to make small loans of real money to entrepreneurs in low-income countries. Four themes emerged from student reaction to the assignment: awareness of Africa, community impact, mathematical consciousness, and productive collaboration among students. Our reflections suggest that microfinance assignments may support integrative learning across many other disciplines.     

On the management of open innovation

In an open innovation relationship, the party that owns a key asset enjoys bargaining power that discourages the investments of the other party in the collaboration. We show that these incentives can be restored by conferring on the weak party the power to take decisions during the research process – e.g., a pharmaceutical firm with manufacturing and commercialization assets offers the direction of a joint research project to a biotech partner. However, on many occasions, the strong party still captures more value from the collaboration by retaining the power to take decisions during research even if it produces less innovation value and fewer aggregate profits. We conclude that the potential of open innovation is underexploited. In particular, owners may not release enough power to take decisions on the use of their assets.     

Operation of the phoneme-to-grapheme conversion mechanism in a brain injured patient

We report the performance of a dysgraphic patient who exhibited impaired ability to spell some words in the face of spared ability to spell nonwords. Word errors generally were phonologically plausible responses. Extensive testing supported the conclusion that the patient used non-lexical processes to spell many words. An examination of the phonologically plausible errors showed that there was a significant correlation between the relative frequency of the patient's choice of phoneme-grapheme mapping options and the relative frequency of use of the same options in the written language. Furthermore, the selection of a specific grapheme option for a given phoneme was determined by the within-syllable position of the phoneme. This result indicates that syllable structure is involved in the process of converting phonology to orthography in non-lexical spelling.The research reported here was supported by NIH grant NS22201 and by a grant from the Seaver Institute. This support is gratefully acknowledged.     

Contributing Factors to Earning Tenure Among Black Male Counselor Educators

The authors used a phenomenological research design and a critical race theory lens to examine interviews with 8 Black male counselor educators and learn what contributed to their earning tenure. Participants described requisite personal dispositions and institutional support as contributing factors. Recommendations include facilitating programmatic sociocultural awareness, assessing faculty experiences, and coordinating mentoring opportunities.     

Science Centres： A Resource for School and Community

We present a science centre established in Genoa on an agreement between Municipality of Genoa and Department of Physics of University of Genoa. The aim is to offer children, young people and community an opportunity to approach science in a playful way. The centre staffs guide the visitors through the exhibits, attracting their interests towards the most amusing aspects of the phenomena. According to the principles of constructivism, kids and children are encouraged to handle objects, play with geometrical shapes, observe materials collected from natural and human environment and make ＂discoveries＂, and students can take advantage of the visit and from the exhibits to study in depth a specific topic afterwards in their class, thus preventing the aridity of a purely formal presentation of the discipline, while a general public can realize how much science affects people＇s lives, enjoy its fun aspects and meet scientists during special events.