The Future Distribution of Media

The extensive developments in electronics over the past few years will have significant consequences for education in general and for all institutions serving education in some degree.     

Understanding and Teaching Problem‐Solving in Physics

Summaries

English

We describe a systematic study of skills for solving problems in basic physics, a domain of practical significance for instruction, but not of prohibitive complexity. Our studies show that an inexperienced student tends to solve a problem by assembling individual equations. By contrast, an expert solves a problem by a process of successive refinements, first describing the main problem features by seemingly vague words or pictures, and only later considering the problem in greater detail in more mathematical language. We have formulated explicit theoretical models with such features and have supported them by some detailed observations of individuals. In addition, experimental instruction incorporating such features seems to improve problem‐solving performance significantly. These investigations yield thus some basic insights into thinking processes effective for problem‐solving. Furthermore, they offer the prospect that these insights can be used to teach students improved problem‐solving skills and to modify common teaching practices which inhibit the development of such skills.     

Assessment of attention in school children: teachers' ratings related to tests of attention

The paper provides (1) a teacher-administered rating instrument for inattention without confounding the rating with hyperactivity and conduct disorder, and (2) evidence that the ratings correlate with the scores obtained from cognitive tests of attention. In Study I, the first objective was to investigate the construct validity and the inter-rater reliability of the Attention Checklist (ACL) by factor analysing the teacher ratings of 110 Grade 4 children, obtained by using the ACL. The second objective was to investigate the predictive validity of the ACL by examining the relationship between the scores obtained for the participants from teachers' ratings using the ACL and the scores obtained by participants in the lab-type attention tests. The results of factor analysis showed that a single factor labelled ‘inattention’ underlies the 12 items in the ACL. Examining the differences in performance on attention tests, the ‘low attention’ children as rated by the teachers on the ACL scored lower than the ‘high attention’ children on the objective tests of attention. These findings were replicated in Study II, which was conducted to test further the construct validity and predictive validity of the ACL. This time, only those two tests (Auditory Attention and Visual Attention) that had shown relatively poor discrimination between the high and low attention groups in Study I were, again, administered to another cohort of 97 Grade 4 children, as it was our intention to further challenge the reliability of the ACL. Overall, the results of both studies suggest that comprehensive assessment of attention skills should include both ACL and objective measures of selective attention.     

IV. THE COLLEGES AND WORLD PEACE

The Significance of Communication