Could HPS Improve Problem-Solving?

It is generally accepted nowadays that History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) is useful in understanding scientific concepts, theories and even some experiments. Problem-solving strategies are a significant topic, since students’ careers depend on their skill to solve problems. These are the reasons for addressing the question of whether problem solving could be improved by means of HPS. Three typical problems in introductory courses of mechanics—the inclined plane, the simple pendulum and the Atwood machine—are taken as the object of the present study. The solving strategies of these problems in the eighteenth and nineteenth century constitute the historical component of the study. Its philosophical component stems from the foundations of mechanics research literature. The use of HPS leads us to see those problems in a different way. These different ways can be tested, for which experiments are proposed. The traditional solving strategies for the incline and pendulum problems are adequate for some situations but not in general. The recourse to apparent weights in the Atwood machine problem leads us to a new insight and a solving strategy for composed Atwood machines. Educational implications also concern the development of logical thinking by means of the variety of lines of thought provided by HPS.     

Planning as action research

Planning contains so much more than the written plan. Early in 2000, an invitation came from the Collaborative Action Research Network (CARN), to people experienced in action research who might want to help plan and present an action research event for elementary school science teachers in Venezuela, South America, in Autumn 2000. This article analyses the outcomes from planning and enacting the resulting workshop to show how planning can be the subject of action research. It goes on to show how planning and teaching interact in a multifaceted way towards technical, practical and emancipatory ends. Planning and teaching are best seen as conversation, a conversation that is both synchronous and asynchronous.     

Procesos cognitivos en el aprendizaje de la multiplicación

Resumen

En este trabajo se aborda el estudio de los procedimientos y estrategias desarrollados por los niños para solucionar situaciones problemáticas relacionadas con la multiplicación aritmética. El análisis de dichos procedimientos nos muestra cómo dicha noción comporta un nivel de mayor complejidad que la adición, lo que es necesario tener en cuenta en el momento de enseñarla.     

Parental background and university dropout in Italy

Using longitudinal data drawn from the European Community Household Panel, this paper examines Italian university entry and dropout rates in the context of specific parental and family characteristics. We are interested in the effects of the household’s cultural and financial conditions on shaping investment in tertiary education and its failure, at the national level. Our estimates confirm the persistence of intergenerational correlations related to education. Cultural constraints affect outcomes—enrolment in and withdrawal from tertiary education; low income negatively affects the transition from high school to college. Our results suggest that a comprehensive policy intervention is needed to ensure optimal human capital investment.     

Maternal schooling and children’s relative inequalities in developmental outcomes: evidence from the 1947 school leaving age reform in Britain

This paper investigates whether mothers’ participation in post‐compulsory education impacts on children’s relative inequalities across four developmental outcomes. The empirical analysis uses information from children born in 1958 in Britain. Mothers of the 1958 British cohort were affected by the 1947 school leaving age reform, which increased the age of compulsory schooling from 14 to 15 years. We selected the first‐born cohort members whose mothers were born in 1933 and 1934 and whose mothers completed compulsory schooling only. We found that the additional year of maternal schooling was significantly associated with relative improvements in mathematics attainment for their children, but no significant differences for reading or behavioural outcomes. The impact on mathematics was mainly for boys. These results suggest wider dispersion in mathematics attainment between sons whose mothers benefited from the additional year of schooling in 1947 and those whose mothers did not.     

The reform of curricula

The framing of school curricula and syllabi is a basic stage in the complex process of educational development. It may be said to be the clearest and most concrete ‘scholastic’ and ‘didactic’ expression of a task that begins with the taxing problem of defining objectives, continues with the establishment of the structures appropriate to aims and such objectives considered desirable and practicable, and ends with the evaluation of their present efficacity and possibilities for the future.     

Collaborative lifelong learning and professional transfer. Case study: ECO European Project

This research reviews the formative model of the sMOOCs (social MOOC) characterized by the interaction and the implication of the participants who, relying on collective intelligence, look for the co-creation of knowledge in every educational action. The fieldwork focuses on the analysis of the “Step by Step” sMOOC of ECO Project (the second and third editions), that aims at the training of e-teachers and the transfer of learning to the professional field. The research methodology is mixed, with quantitative and qualitative techniques: it uses a semi-structured questionnaire, in order to compare possible bivariate correlations between the different variables; it conducts a content analysis of the fragments of messages written by the participants in the forums of the course. One of the most significant conclusions is the high degree of satisfaction of the participants with regard to the value of the course for their professional life. This form of transfer of the learning process leads to the proposal of a new modality for MOOCs, the tMOOC as “transferMOOC”.     

Statistical relationships between corresponding authorship,international co-authorship and citation impact of national research systems

This paper presents a statistical analysis of the relationship between three science indicators applied in earlier bibliometric studies, namely research leadership based on corresponding authorship, international collaboration using international co-authorship data, and field-normalized citation impact. Indicators at the level of countries are extracted from the SIR database created by SCImago Research Group from publication records indexed for Elsevier’s Scopus. The relationship between authorship and citation-based indicators is found to be complex, as it reflects a country’s phase of scientific development and the coverage policy of the database. Moreover, one should distinguish a genuine leadership effect from a purely statistical effect due to fractional counting. Further analyses at the level of institutions and qualitative validation studies are recommended.