Exploring marine biodiversity through inquiry with primary school students: a successful journey?

In this work, we present a marine ecology inquiry-based activity, implemented with 164 primary school students. The main goal was to evaluate the activity's impact on students’ understanding about biodiversity and scientific procedures. We also aimed to analyse the potential use of personal meaning maps (PMMs) to assess the impact of the activity on students’ ideas about the topics explored. The results revealed that fieldwork and the exploration of real data were the aspects most emphasised by all intervenient. Finally, the PMMs proved to be a good tool to evaluate the impact of activities developed outside classroom, with primary school levels.     

Soccer,nationalism and the media in contemporary Spanish society: La Roja,Real Madrid & FC Barcelona

This essay examines the relationship between nationalism and soccer in contemporary Spain. Firstly, it pays close attention to the roles of the national team and the rivalry between Real Madrid and FC Barcelona in articulating conflictual social agendas. Secondly, it compares how Spanish and Catalan media utilize the Spanish soccer team success to articulate clashing forms of nationalism. It scrutinizes a wide range of journalistic interventions as well as the TV coverage of the national soccer team in the Spanish and Catalan media to determine how they constantly re-articulate the role of soccer in defining the distinguishing characteristics of the nation. Lastly, it studies a series of soccer-related cultural and social practices such as street rallies, gatherings and celebrations in order to determine their role within contemporary nationalism in Spain.     

V + H: Hybrid architecture for DSS and OLTP

Previous research has been done to identify the best pragmatic approach that DBMSs must follow to manage different workloads. Some approaches have followed the “One size fits all” approach, trying to incorporate all features in a row-oriented DBMS (also called horizontal) to manage both OLTP and DSS workloads. Additionally, there have been specialized DBMS, following a columnar approach (also called vertical), that focuses on the growing demand to efficiently manage DSS workloads. This paper proposes a combination of both vertical and horizontal DBMS to best manage OLTP and DSS workloads. We have used mature, commercially available products from a single vendor and developed a custom middleware Decision Query Module that identifies the best option for most efficient execution of a query. This V + H architecture also offers the functionality of a mirrored DB without paying twice for storage.     

The Effectiveness of Concept Maps in Teaching Physics Concepts Applied to Engineering Education: Experimental Comparison of the Amount of Learning Achieved With and Without Concept Maps

A study was conducted to quantify the effectiveness of concept maps in learning physics in engineering degrees. The following research question was posed: What was the difference in learning results from the use of concept maps to study a particular topic in an engineering course? The study design was quasi-experimental and used a post-test as a measuring instrument. The sample included 114 university students from the School of Industrial Engineering who were divided into two equivalent homogeneous groups of 57 students each. The amount of learning attained by the students in each group was compared, with the independent variable being the teaching method; the experimental group (E.G.) used concept maps, while the control group (C.G.) did not. We performed a crossover study with the two groups of students, with one group acting as the E.G. for the topic of optical fibers and as the C.G. for the topic of the fundamental particles of matter and vice versa for the other group. For each of the two topics studied, the evaluation instrument was a test of 100 dichotomous items. The resulting data were subjected to a comparative statistical analysis, which revealed a significant difference in the amount of learning attained by the E.G. students as compared with the C.G. students. The results allow us to state that for the use of concept maps, the average increment in the E.G. students’ learning was greater than 19 percentage points.     

Una introducción a los espacios vectoriales y al lenguaje logo a través del ordenador

Resumen

Este artículo presenta la posibilidad de programar conjuntamente unos contenidos informáticos con los d e otras materias del currículo escolar. Después de ilustrar esta posibilidad mediante la programación de unos contenidos sobre espacios vectoriales y lenguaje LOGO de programación de ordenadores, se indican algunos aspectos positivos que favorecen los procesos de aprendizaje de los alumnos.     

The h-bubble

Hypes occur in every domain of human behavior, including scientific research. We show in this contribution that journals and authors who studied the h-index benefited in terms of short-term citations. As, moreover, the introduction of the h-index is more a ‘clever find’ than a first rate intellectual achievement, its rise can be compared to a stock market bubble.     

The Role of Context for Characterising Students’ Strategies when Estimating Large Numbers of Elements on a Surface

International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education - This paper presents a qualitative study developed with a group of 16-year-old students who were asked to estimate large numbers of...