Creation of reusable open textbooks: Insights from the Connexions repository

Open textbook initiatives have appeared as an alternative to traditional publishing. These initiatives for the production of alternatively copyrighted educational resources provide a way of sharing materials through the Web. While the open model of peer‐produced materials enables the global reuse of textbooks, the combination of fragments to produce new textbooks tailored to particular needs is not easy. The heterogeneity of topics and target audiences, as well as the cultural and institutional differences of educational systems across the globe, raises the need for new compositional features, fostering—at the same time—the reuse of the newly produced combinations. This paper reviews the current models of reuse and sharing, and presents a quantitative analysis of the Connexions repository which provides evidence about the culture of reuse in open textbook initiatives.     

Analysis of the cognitive unity or rupture between conjecture and proof when learning to prove on a grade 10 trigonometry course

We present results from a classroom-based intervention designed to help a class of grade 10 students (14–15 years old) learn proof while studying trigonometry in a dynamic geometry software environment. We analysed some students’ solutions to conjecture-and-proof problems that let them gain experience in stating conjectures and developing proofs. Grounded on a conception of proof that includes both empirical and deductive mathematical argumentations, we show the trajectories of some students progressing from developing basic empirical proofs towards developing deductive proofs and understanding the role of conjectures and proofs in mathematics. Our analysis of students’ solutions is based on networking Boero et al.’s construct of cognitive unity of theorems, Pedemonte’s structural and referential analysis of conjectures and proofs, and Balacheff and Margolinas’ cK¢ model, while using Toulmin schemes to represent students’ productions. This combination has allowed us to identify several emerging types of cognitive unity/rupture, corresponding to different ways of solving conjecture-and-proof problems. We also show that some types of cognitive unity/rupture seem to induce students to produce deductive proofs, whereas other types seem to induce them to produce empirical proofs.     

Special issue on computational models of classical conditioning guest editors’ introduction

In the present special issue, the performance of current computational models of classical conditioning was evaluated under three requirements: (1) Models were to be tested against a list of previously agreed-upon phenomena; (2) the parameters were fixed across simulations; and (3) the simulations used to test the models had to be made available. These requirements resulted in three major products: (a) a list of fundamental classical-conditioning results for which there is a consensus about their reliability; (b) the necessary information to evaluate each of the models on the basis of its ordinal successes in accounting for the experimental data; and (c) a repository of computational models ready to generate simulations. We believe that the contents of this issue represent the 2012 state of the art in computational modeling of classical conditioning and provide a way to find promising avenues for future model development.     

Guidance and education,an analysis of young peoples’ discontinuous school pathways: the guidance-oriented approach of educational institutions

International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance - This article presents results of an investigation that explored the school pathways of young Argentine unskilled workers without a...     

Persecution and behavior: a report of refugee children from Chile

A Swedish study of 50 newly resettled refugee children from Chile describes the children's experiences of persecution in their home country and coping patterns in the receiving country. Thirty-six children had experiences directly related to persecution, and seven of these had been victims of physical assault for political reasons. Sleep disturbances and dependency were behaviors significantly associated with experiences of persecution. Resettled refugee families need to be approached by concerned professionals as symptoms of trauma in refugee children are often recognized only in the family sphere.     

Women mentoring in the academe: a faculty cross-racial and cross-cultural experience

Two women faculty members, one White from the southeastern United States and one Black African from Zimbabwe, purposefully explored their informal mentoring relationship with the goal of illuminating the complexities associated with their cross-racial, cross-cultural experience. Concentrating on their four-year mentor-mentee academic relationship at a predominantly White institution (PWI), these women employed a dialogic duoethnographic methodology to uncover emerging, nuanced characteristics contributing to the positive nature of their mentoring experience. Calling upon a seminal nine-function mentoring framework focused on advancing mentee personal growth and professional advancement, the authors, engaged in critical interplay of dialogic considerations of their mentoring experiences, relationship, and literature. The authors revealed a distinct cross-cultural and cross-racial journey where each, as participant researcher, uncovered a deeper appreciation for the importance of engaged dialog. Emerging is a complex interplay of understandings about trust, care, and power dynamics as factors in defining mentoring relationships that work for good.     

Intermittent hypoxia exposure in a hypobaric chamber and erythropoietin abuse interpretation

Abstract

The aim of this study was to assess the effect of intermittent hypoxia exposure on direct and indirect methods used to evaluate recombinant human erythropoietin (rhEPO) misuse. Sixteen male triathletes were randomly assigned to either the intermittent hypoxia exposure group (experimental group) or the control normoxic group (control group). The members of the experimental group were exposed to simulated altitude (from 4000 to 5500 m) in a hypobaric chamber for 3 h per day, 5 days a week, for 4 weeks. Blood and urine samples were collected before and after the first and the final exposures, and again 2 weeks after the final exposure. While serum EPO significantly increased after the first [from a mean 8.3 IU · l^?1 (s = 3.2) to 16.6 IU · l^?1 (s = 4.7)] and final exposures [from 4.6 IU · l^?1 (s = 1.4) to 24.8 IU · l^?1 (s = 9.3)], haemoglobin, percentage of reticulocytes, and soluble transferrin receptor were not elevated. Second-generation ON/OFF models (indirect rhEPO misuse detection) were insensitive to intermittent hypoxia exposure. The distribution of the urinary EPO isoelectric profiles (direct rhEPO misuse detection) was altered after intermittent hypoxia exposure with a slight shift towards more basic isoforms. However, those shifts never resulted in misinterpretation of results. The intermittent hypoxia exposure protocol studied did not produce any false-positive result for indirect or direct detection of rhEPO misuse in spite of the changes in EPO serum concentrations and urinary EPO isoelectric profiles, respectively.     

Reflexiones sobre el lenguaje autista. I.—Análisis descrpitivos y diferencias con la disfasia receptiva

Resumen

En este articulo, se revisan las descripciones clínicas y los estudios sistemáticos que tratan de establecer los rasgos que definen al lenguaje de los autistas cuando se les compara con el dé los sujetos normales o con otras clases de alteraciones. En la última parte de él, se analizan especialmente las semejanzas y diferencias entre el lenguaje autista y el de los niños con disfasia receptiva del desarrollo y anlizaremos la llamada «tesis de continuidad», que concibe el autismo como una especie de disfasia receptiva grave. En un trabajo posterior, se analizarán más específicamente algunas de las alteraciones más características del lenguaje de los autistas (p.e. ecolalia, inversión pronominal, problemas de comprensión) y se discutirán sus anomalías y retrasos en relación con los distintos componentes (fonológico, morfosintáctico, léxico, etc.) en que puede analizarse el lenguaje.