Spanish preservice primary school teachers’ pedagogical knowledge of numbers: results from TEDS-M / Conocimiento didáctico de los estudiantes españoles de magisterio sobre números: resultados en TEDS-M

Abstract

This paper describes and characterises Spanish preservice primary school teachers’ pedagogical knowledge on school mathematics, particularly in the number subdomain. The study conducts a conceptual analysis of the TEDS-M survey items on this type of knowledge and interprets the responses. We found that preservice teachers were able to recognise variables that affect the difficulty of arithmetic and proportionality problems, but showed difficulties in diagnosing errors committed by students and in graphically representing mathematical concepts and procedures and applying them to the teaching process. These results will be useful for the design of syllabi in the new Primary School Teaching degree.     

Morphological Processing Before and During Children’s Spelling

ABSTRACT

Our understanding of spelling development has largely been gleaned from analysis of children’s accuracy at spelling words under varying conditions and the nature of their errors. Here, we consider whether handwriting durations can inform us about the time course with which children use morphological information to produce accurate spellings of root morphemes. Six- to 7-year-old (n = 23) and 8- to 11-year-old (n = 25) children produced 28 target spellings in a spelling-to-dictation task. Target words were matched quadruplets of base, control, inflected, and derived words beginning with the same letters (e.g., rock, rocket, rocking, rocky). Both groups of children showed evidence of morphological processing as they prepared their spelling; writing onset latencies were shorter for two-morpheme words than control words. The findings are consistent with statistical learning theories of spelling development and theories of lexical quality that include a role of morphology.     

El aprendizaje del ritmo musical

¿En qué actividades y soportes instrumentales se debe apoyar la educación del ritmo musical en cada edad? ¿Qué errores son «buenos» y cuáles son «malos» en la organización rítmica del niño? ¿Hasta qué punto se separa la educación rítmica de una evolución espontánea? En este trabajo se verifican las respuestas a éstas y otras preguntas, lo que permite ir algo más lejos de la pedagogía del ritmo de los llamados «métodos activos»     

Response–food delay gradients for lever pressing and schedule-induced licking in rats

Eight food-deprived Wistar rats developed stable patterns of lever pressing and licking when exposed to a fixed-time 30-s schedule of food pellet presentation. The rats were trained to lever press by presenting the lever 10 s before the programmed food delivery, with the food pellet being delivered immediately upon a lever press. The operant contingency was then removed and the lever was inserted through the entire interfood interval, being withdrawn with food delivery and reinserted 2 s later. On successive phases of the study, a protective contingency postponed food delivery if responses (lever presses or licks) occurred within the last 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, or 25 s of the interfood interval. Lever pressing was reduced at much shorter response–food delays than those that reduced licking. These results demonstrate that reinforcement contributes to the maintenance of different response patterns on periodic schedules, and that different responses are differentially sensitive to delays.     

What do plastics emit? HS-SPME-GC/MS analyses of new standard plastics and plastic objects in museum collections

In recent years, plastics are designated as a source of indoor pollution and particular attention has thus been devoted to the identification of emitting low molecular weight compounds. Headspace-solid phase microextraction-gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (HS-SPME-GC/MS) has been already successfully applied for screening emissions from synthetic materials. This analytical tool being also non-invasive, it has been already successfully applied in the field of cultural heritage science for the identification of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted from various museum objects made of natural materials. In this research, we aimed at assessing the use of HS-SPME-GC/MS as an in situ non-invasive analytical tool for a better knowledge of the volatile organic compounds emitted by plastics in collections. The possibility of characterizing plastics based on their emission signatures was also evaluated. Twelve new standard plastic samples, belonging to seven main polymer families widely present in museum collections as well as three naturally aged museum objects, were investigated. In this paper, we provide a survey of the VOCs emitted, and the use of HS-SPME-GC/MS for identifying volatile marker compounds, degradation products, additives, and monomer residues of the plastic synthesis is evaluated. More than 200 different VOCs were identified from the new standard samples. Two categories of VOCs were distinguished: “non-specific” and “specific” ones. We showed that based on the “specific” VOCs, it was possible to identify the nature of the polymeric matrix itself or at least to unambiguously distinguish a plastic by family. Emissions from the museum objects were then characterised, and main volatile degradation compounds considered as degradation markers of the natural deterioration of polymeric matrices, were identified. This identification procedure could be further exploited for the characterization of VOCs emitted by objects made of multiple synthetic polymers. Complementary to other techniques, this analytical tool is an interesting way to assess the risk for the objects stored in the vicinity of emitting plastics.     

Football: A History of Semantic and Cultural Borrowing [1]

Sport is a practice, yet it is also a language conveying the representations of those who structure it and those who employ it. The contribution of numerous English lexical units to the lexicon of other languages in touch with United Kingdom participates in the diffusion of sport and its level of penetration in geographical spaces. France does not escape this phenomenon and its language borrows from its Anglo-Saxon neighbour. Anglicisms have been described in opprobrious terms for a long time by critics who consider them the sign of France's dependence on the British Empire. Through the analysis of five types of anglicisms (intact, truncated, gallicized, signified and signifier anglicism) and about 60 lexical units, we will identify the privileged forms of borrowings, their origins and the meaning to be attributed to them and thus show the role of sport in general and football in particular in linguistic and cultural diffusion.     

A profound mutation: The advent of professional rugby in France

Amateur before 1995, professional thereafter, French rugby has changed considerably. However, to focus the entire analysis on the most manifest transformations can lead to certain pitfalls of which the main effect consists in only understanding rugby through the notion of change, built for the circumstances into a veritable rhetoric capable of explaining by itself all that goes on and is played out. It is not a case of stating that nothing has changed but rather to show that the rhetoric of change in effect says little about French professional rugby, from a sociological point of view. In the case in point, this rhetoric masks on the one hand what has not or has hardly changed, notably the relationships between players and directors; on the other hand what has effectively changed but which is hardly talked about, in particular the players' working conditions and the possible regulation regarding employers and club directors.     

Report of Committee on Criteria for Evaluation of Articles Submitted for Publication in the Research Quarterly April 1950

The aim of this study was to determine what visual information expert soccer players encode when they are asked to make a decision. We used a repetition-priming paradigm to test the hypothesis that experts encode a soccer pattern's structure independently of the players' physical characteristics (i.e., posture and morphology). The participants were given either realistic (digital photos) or abstract (three-dimensional schematic representations) soccer game patterns. The results showed that the experts benefited from priming effects regardless of how abstract the stimuli were. This suggests that an abstract representation of a realistic pattern (i.e., one that does not include visual information related to the players' physical characteristics) is sufficient to activate experts' specific knowledge during decision making. These results seem to show that expert soccer players encode and store abstract representations of visual patterns in memory.     

Analysis of Gymnastics Judges' Visual Search

Abstract

This study was designed to investigate the visual search patterns of gymnastics judges. The subjects were four national judges (experienced) and three local judges (novice). Three dependent variables were measured: the number and the location of ocular fixations during the evaluation of a gymnast's performance, and the number of errors made by the judges. Ocular fixations were studied by the corneal reflection technique with a NAC Eye-Movement Recorder. There was no statistical difference in the number of fixations for both groups of judges. However, the expert judges had 27% less fixations than the novice judges. A statistical difference was found between expert judges and novice judges for the location of fixations; experts had more fixations on the upper part of the gymnast's body, while novices concentrated their attention on the legs. The type of routine significantly affected the number of fixations; more fixations were found for optional routines. There was no statistical difference in the number of judgment errors made by the two groups of judges. However, novice judges detected only half the gymnast's errors detected by the expert judges.