Computer-Based Classification of Preservice Physics Teachers’ Written Reflections

Journal of Science Education and Technology - Reflecting in written form on one’s teaching enactments has been considered a facilitator for teachers’ professional growth in...     

Policy entrepreneurship in the co-evolution of institutions, preferences, and technology: Comparing the diffusion of totally chlorine free pulp bleaching technologies in the US and Sweden

This paper uses the concept of policy entrepreneurship to explain the social processes underlying sustainable technical change in the pulp and paper industry in the 1990s. It presents a detailed case study on the differences in the transition to and diffusion of totally chlorine free (TCF) pulp bleaching methods in Sweden and the USA. This change was sustained in the former, while it was almost absent in the latter. The paper studies the causes for this difference. It looks at the complex coevolution of technology, institutions, and consumer preferences that has taken place in both countries and draws conclusions on how transitions to sustainable paths in production and consumption may be supported by economic and social policy.     

Increasing the career choice readiness of young adolescents: an evaluation study

A career workshop that applies models of the Cognitive Information Processing Approach (Sampson, Reardon, Peterson, &; Lenz, 2004) and incorporates critical ingredients (Brown and Ryan Krane, 2000) to promote the career choice readiness of young adolescents was developed and evaluated with 334 Swiss students in seventh grade applying a Solomon four group design with a three-month follow-up. Participants significantly increased their performance in terms of career decidedness, career planning, career exploration, and vocational identity. Implications for evaluation research and counselling practice are presented.     

Father Absence in Pregnancy or During Childhood and Pubertal Development in Girls and Boys: A Population-Based Cohort Study

This cohort study, including 15,810 children born 2000–2003 in Denmark, aimed to investigate the association between father absence in pregnancy or during childhood and pubertal development in girls and boys. The children were followed from 11 years of age and throughout pubertal development. Mean age differences according to exposure groups were estimated for each pubertal marker separately and for a combined pubertal marker. The results suggested that father absence in pregnancy and during childhood was associated with earlier pubertal development in girls, and father absence from late childhood was associated with earlier pubertal development in boys. The paternal investment theory, the psychosocial acceleration theory and the energetics theory were explored, and did not seem to explain the observed associations.     

Parsing written language with non-standard grammar

Reading and Writing - Morphologically marked case is in Arabic a feature exclusive to the variety of Standard Arabic, with no parallel in the spoken varieties, and it is orthographically marked...     

Teacher-led design of an adaptive learning environment

This paper discusses a requirements engineering process that exemplifies teacher-led design in the case of an envisioned system for adaptive learning. Such a design poses various challenges and still remains an open research issue in the field of adaptive learning. Starting from a scenario-based elicitation method, the whole process was highly participatory, with requirements validation in iterative cycles. The contribution of the paper is twofold: (a) it exposes the design of an environment which addresses the related challenges mentioned by the participants and the literature and (b) it suggests a methodology of framing key requirements into a set of critical success factors for meeting the end-users’ expectations. The latter could be crucial in cases where the available resources are limited, but the quality of the product must not be sacrificed.     

Can collaborative concept mapping create mathematically productive discourses?

Four groups (three engineering students in each group)were videotaped while constructing concept maps in Linear Algebra. There are two aims of this study. The first is to characterize the discourse in the groups by addressing the following research questions: Do the students communicate in an effective way?Do the students' communications contain the elements typical for amathematically productive discourse? The analysis indicates that the communication among the students is effective and contains the elements that are characteristic for a mathematically productive interaction. The two types of methods used to analyze the data were focal and preoccupational analysis. The mathematical content and the coherence of the conversations were examined through focal analysis. The participants' engagement in the discourse was examined by preoccupational analysis, carried out by means of interactive flow chart. The second aim of this study is to evaluate the newly developed methodological framework used to characterize the discourses. The study shows that several aspects of the methodological framework need to be developed.