Family size,birth order,and intelligence in a large South American sample

The confluence theory, which hypothesizes a relationship between intellectual development birth order, and family size, was examined in a colombian study of more than 36,000 college applicants. The results of the study did not support the confluence theory. The confluence theory states that the intellectual development of a child is related to average mental age of the members of his family at the time of his birth. The mental age of the parents is always assigned a value of 30 and siblings are given scores equivalent to their chronological age at the birth of the subject. Therefore, the average mental age of family members for a 1st born child is 30, or 60 divided by 2. If a subject is born into a family consisting of 2 parents and a 6-year old sibling, the average mental age of family members tends, therefore, to decrease with each birth order. The hypothesis derived from the confluence theory states that there is a positive relationship between average mental age of a subject's family and the subject's performance on intelligence tests. In the Colombian study, data on family size, birth order and socioeconomic status was derived from college application forms. Intelligence test scores for each subject was obtained from college entrance exams. The mental age of each applicant's family at the time of the applicant's birth was calculated. Multiple correlation analysis and path analysis were used to assess the relationship. Results were 1) the test scores of subjects from families with 2,3,4, and 5 children were higher than test scores of the 1st born subjects; 2) the rank order of intelligence by family size was 3,4,5,2,6,1 instead of the hypothesized 1,2,3,4,5,6; and 3) only 1% of the variability in test scores was explained by the variables of birth order and family size. Further analysis indicated that socioeconomic status was a far more powerful explanatory variable than family size.     

Peace Education: Exploring Some Philosophical Foundations

Peace education has been recognized as an important aspect of social education for the past three decades. The critical literature as well as official documents, however, have given little attention to its philosophical foundations. This essay explores these foundations in the ethics of (1) virtue, (2) consequentialism, (3) aesthetics, (4) conservative politics and (5) care. Each of these alone composes a significant element of peace education, although ultimately its solid basis can only be established through an integrative approach encouraging a culture of peace. The more complete development and articulation of the philosophical rationale of peace education is yet to be accomplished and remains a task for the future.     

下一代汽车将实现无须人工干预的自主驾驶

Stanley背后的团队还在干个不停,该汽车刚刚赢得“美国国防研究项目机构”主办的2005年自主驾驶车辆穿越132英里内华达沙漠大赛的胜利.到2008年,斯坦福大学队将操纵他们的自主驾驶汽车做州际旅行.     

Sex differences in object location memory: Some further methodological considerations

Previously it has been reported that female performance on the recall of objects and their locations in a spatial array is superior to that of males. This may reflect underlying information-processing biases whereby males organize information in a self-referential manner while females adopt a more comprehensive approach. The known female advantage in verbal memory may, however, account for this sex difference. In an initial experiment we found no overall sex differences in object or object-location memory. The inclusion of a verbal distracter task revealed gender-congruent biases in performance. A final study examined some methodological issues associated with the design of item arrays. After controlling for differences in item distinctiveness, performance on object-location was found to be substantially influenced by the distance that items were displaced in the array. These findings demonstrate that certain methodological factors can significantly affect the attentional and mnemonic processes that operate when performing tasks of this nature and can negate underlying sex differences in performance.     

When group work leaves the classroom does group skills development also go out the window?

In moving towards what Lemke (1996) terms the ‘interactive learning paradigm’, higher education has adopted two key principles consistent with group learning technologies:

• ? learning is always mediated by and occurs through language ( Falk, 1997 ; Gee, 1997 ); and
• ? learning is distributed across a range of other people, sites, objects, technologies and time ( Gee, 1997 ).

A third and relatively recent principle to emerge on the higher education scene that seems to ‘contradict’ accepted views of group learning technologies is that:

• ? many universities now choose to offer ‘learning resources’ online.

This paper asks whether Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are ‘robust’ enough to support, sustain and address industry, employer and government calls for greater attention to group skills development in university graduates. Data features an examination of respondent feedback (n = 171) in an ‘ICT‐rich’ group work setting, and the subsequent ratings of group skills development over a 13‐week period. This discussion offers an account of learner outcomes by adopting Kirkpatrick's (1996) four levels of evaluation of learning as a classification scheme for determining learner satisfaction (Level One), the effectiveness of learning transfer (Level Two), its impact on practice (Level Three) and the appropriation of learning behaviours by participants (Level Four). The contrasting patterns of ICT use between female and male users in the data are discussed in relation to building social presence and producing social categories online. Differences reported here indicate that ICT group work is moving forward, but opportunities to challenge rather than reproduce existing learning relations and differences, remain largely unresolved.     

For Science and Self: Youth Interactions with Data in Community and Citizen Science

In youth-focused community and citizen (YCCS) youth in classrooms and community-based programs produce data that scientists, resource managers and community members will use. This “nested” data situates learners’ scientific activity within larger datasets, projects, and communities, with consequences for youth agency. To document opportunities for agentive learning with data in YCCS, we report on how youth interact with data across eight school and community-based project sites and how youth talk about their data and work. From analysis of 54 participant interviews, we found that youth perceived the data they produced as being used for: (1) broader scientific work, (2) their own learning, and (3) community endeavors. Nested uses of data were most meaningful when youth interacted with end users, were exposed to the larger datasets to which they contributed, or took action linked to data. Not all youth saw, believed, or valued that data would be used by others. Framing of task and purpose, nature of engagement with community users, data production protocols, and level of emphasis on youth-identified questions may contribute to youth perceptions and can foster or undermine conditions for learner agency. The results shed light on when and how conditions for expansive learning and agency get established.     

An Holistic View of Quality of Service

The growing presence of digital multimedia in everyday life, as evidenced by the continuing increase in Internet usage, is expected to augment or replace traditional modes of social and economic interaction. Face-to-face meetings, paperwork, and office-space are all expected to diminish in importance as cyberspace provides new facilities and interaction modes. In the higher education sector, distributed learning environments (DLEs) are being cited as solutions to the ambitious political goals of better education, wider access and lower costs. DLEs are still in their infancy however, and if they are to succeed in transforming conventional educational practice, they must become quality of service (QoS) aware. The notion of QoS originated in computer networking, but if it is not addressed appropriately in all a system's components then there may be little or no benefit for that system's users, regardless of the network quality. There is a real danger that policy makers in the educational sphere will simply equate the needs of the end users, namely teachers and students, with network-level QoS. Our experience with the TAGS framework for constructing DLEs has shown that QoS must be taken into account from many perspectives before traditional educational processes can be satisfactorily transformed. This paper contributes towards an holistic view of QoS in DLEs by reviewing the network perspective and augmenting it with other, equally important, concerns.     

Common sense: A form of teacher knowledge

This essay discusses an analytic construct - common sense knowledge - that might be helpful in empirical studies of teacher knowledge. I suggest that we consider whether teacher talk is common sense knowledge, in the sense that Geertz defines the term, and that if it is, that we take it seriously on its own terms and in context, rather than trying to 'fix' it.