Effect of sport education on students’ perceived physical literacy,motivation, and physical activity levels in university required physical education: a cluster-randomized trial

Higher Education - Originating from the field of physical education, physical literacy is an individual disposition that accentuates the importance of lifelong physical activity. Sport education is...     

Perceptual Access Reasoning (PAR) in Developing a Representational Theory of Mind

An important part of children's social and cognitive development is their understanding that people are psychological beings with internal, mental states including desire, intention, perception, and belief. A full understanding of people as psychological beings requires a representational theory of mind (ToM), which is an understanding that mental states can faithfully represent reality, or misrepresent reality. For the last 35 years, researchers have relied on false-belief tasks as the gold standard to test children's understanding that beliefs can misrepresent reality. In false-belief tasks, children are asked to reason about the behavior of agents who have false beliefs about situations. Although a large body of evidence indicates that most children pass false-belief tasks by the end of the preschool years, the evidence we present in this monograph suggests that most children do not understand false beliefs or, surprisingly, even true beliefs until middle childhood. We argue that young children pass false-belief tasks without understanding false beliefs by using perceptual access reasoning (PAR). With PAR, children understand that seeing leads to knowing in the moment, but not that knowing also arises from thinking or persists as memory and belief after the situation changes. By the same token, PAR leads children to fail true-belief tasks. PAR theory can account for performance on other traditional tests of representational ToM and related tasks, and can account for the factors that have been found to correlate with or affect both true- and false-belief performance. The theory provides a new laboratory measure which we label the belief understanding scale (BUS). This scale can distinguish between a child who is operating with PAR versus a child who is understanding beliefs. This scale provides a method needed to allow the study of the development of representational ToM. In this monograph, we report the outcome of the tests that we have conducted of predictions generated by PAR theory. The findings demonstrated signature PAR limitations in reasoning about the mind during the ages when children are hypothesized to be using PAR. In Chapter II, secondary analyses of the published true-belief literature revealed that children failed several types of true-belief tasks. Chapters III through IX describe new empirical data collected across multiple studies between 2003 and 2014 from 580 children aged 4–7 years, as well as from a small sample of 14 adults. Participants were recruited from the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area. All participants were native English-speakers. Children were recruited from university-sponsored and community preschools and daycare centers, and from hospital maternity wards. Adults were university students who participated to partially fulfill course requirements for research participation. Sociometric data were collected only in Chapter IX, and are fully reported there. In Chapter III, minor alterations in task procedures produced wide variations in children's performance in 3-option false-belief tasks. In Chapter IV, we report findings which show that the developmental lag between children's understanding ignorance and understanding false belief is longer than the lag reported in previous studies. In Chapter V, children did not distinguish between agents who have false beliefs versus agents who have no beliefs. In Chapter VI, findings showed that children found it no easier to reason about true beliefs than to reason about false beliefs. In Chapter VII, when children were asked to justify their correct answers in false-belief tasks, they did not reference agents’ false beliefs. Similarly, in Chapter VIII, when children were asked to explain agents’ actions in false-belief tasks, they did not reference agents’ false beliefs. In Chapter IX, children who were identified as using PAR differed from children who understood beliefs along three dimensions—in levels of social development, inhibitory control, and kindergarten adjustment. Although the findings need replication and additional studies of alternative interpretations, the collection of results reported in this monograph challenges the prevailing view that representational ToM is in place by the end of the preschool years. Furthermore, the pattern of findings is consistent with the proposal that PAR is the developmental precursor of representational ToM. The current findings also raise questions about claims that infants and toddlers demonstrate ToM-related abilities, and that representational ToM is innate.     

How Do Teachers Use Comics to Promote Engagement,Equity, and Diversity in Science Classrooms?

Research in Science Education - Equitable learning opportunities are critical to the goals of science education. However, major curriculum standards are vague on how to achieve equity goals, and...     

Critical Literacy Practices Within Problem-Based Learning Projects in Science

Interchange - Digital technologies are part of many children’s everyday lives. They use them for entertainment, information seeking and connecting with friends on social media. These shifts...     

Studying the amateur artist: A perspective on disguising data collected in human subjects research on the Internet

In the mid-1990s, the Internet rapidly changedfrom a venue used by a small number ofscientists to a popular phenomena affecting allaspects of life in industrialized nations. Scholars from diverse disciplines have taken aninterest in trying to understand the Internetand Internet users. However, as a variety ofresearchers have noted, guidelines for ethicalresearch on human subjects written before theInternet's growth can be difficult to extend toresearch on Internet users.In this paper, I focus on one ethicalissue: whether and to what extent to disguisematerial collected online in publishedaccounts. While some people argue thatvulnerable human subjects must always be madeanonymous in publications for their ownprotection, others argue that Internet usersdeserve credit for their creative andintellectual work. Still others argue thatmuch material available online should betreated as ``published.' To attempt to resolvethese issues, I first review my own experiencesof disguising material in research accountsfrom 1992 to 2002. Some of the thorniestissues emerge at the boundaries betweenresearch disciplines. Furthermore, manyhumanities disciplines have not historicallyviewed what they do as human subjects research. Next, I explore what it means to do humansubjects research in the humanities. Inspiredby issues raised by colleagues in thehumanities, I argue that the traditional notionof a ``human subject' does not adequatelycharacterize Internet users. A useful alternatemental model is proposed: Internet users areamateur artists. The Internet can be seen as aplayground for amateur artists creatingsemi-published work. I argue that thisapproach helps make some ethical dilemmaseasier to reason about, because it highlightskey novel aspects of the situation,particularly with regard to disguisingmaterial. Finally, I conclude by proposing aset of practical guidelines regardingdisguising material gathered on the Internet inpublished accounts, on a continuum from nodisguise, light disguise, moderate disguise, toheavy disguise.     

基于元搜索的聚类挖掘引擎

针对目前搜索引擎返回结果的海量性和无结构性，构建一个基于元搜索的聚类挖掘引擎，旨在利用元搜索引擎返回的结果，提高搜索结果聚类效率，快速有效地为用户提供一个搜索结果结构视图，从而进行进一步的知识发现。介绍了搜索引擎和挖掘引擎的主要功能及差别，应用向量空间模型对元搜索结果进行处理。介绍当前主要的聚类算法-K—means划分法和层次凝聚聚类法，并在此基础上提出基于元搜索结果将两种聚类算法相结合的聚类方法。     

Using feedback to promote student participation in online learning programs: evidence from a quasi-experimental study

Educational technology research and development - How should learner analytics and different media be used to optimize feedback to increase students’ motivation and sense of learning...     

Pedagogy of the Spirit: Comparing Evangelical and Latter-day Saint Youth Self-Reported In-Class Spiritual Experiences

This study statistically analyzes data from 756 evangelical and Latter-day Saint youth regarding their perceived in-class spiritual experiences of twenty items related to Christian theology. The data indicates similar spiritual outcomes between the two groups, with no statistically significant differences between eleven of the twenty spiritual experience items. However, evangelical participants most highly reported affective spiritual outcomes and least commonly reported action-oriented spiritual outcomes, while Latter-day Saint youth most highly reported action-oriented spiritual outcomes and least commonly reported cognitive spiritual outcomes. Action-oriented spiritual outcomes constitute the greatest difference between the two groups. We explore how the differences between evangelical and Latter-day Saint pedagogy and theology might account for these differences.     

Software to Promote Young Children’s Growth in Literacy: A Comparison of Online and Offline Formats

The primary goal of this research was to extend our understanding of the strengths and weaknesses inherent in online and offline early literacy software programs designed for young learners. A taxonomy of reading skills was used to contrast online software with offline closed system (compact disc) based programs with respect to number of skills taught, quality of instruction and scaffolding during instruction. Overall, online programs were more comprehensive and provided instruction for more skills than offline software at either the Kindergarten or Grade 1 level. However, offline programs demonstrated some developmentally appropriate selectivity in skills trained. Quality of instruction was variable within and across all programs. Scaffolding of instruction was also variable and surprisingly few programs, either online or offline, provided automatic movement across levels of difficulty. These outcomes have important implications for the selection of instructional materials by parents and educators involved in early literacy instruction and also for future software design.     

美国各级政府与学前儿童的保育和教育

本文论述了美国联邦政府、州政府和地方政府在学前儿童的保育和教育方面扮演的角色和担负的职责.