Sites of Indeterminacy and the Spectres of Eurocentrism

The concepts of Europe and Eurocentrism, along with the political, cultural, and philosophical issues that are inseparable from them, touch upon many of today's most pressing concerns. This essay examines the ways in which problems of the aporia and of undecidability may shed light on the possibility of a new Europe to come. Through a comparative reading of Slavoj ?i?ek's pleas for a leftist Eurocentrism, Walter Benjamin's historical unweaving of Europe and Jacques Derrida's engagements with Europe as perpetually nonself-identical, Europe becomes visible as one of the names for the faint promise lodged in what will not simply remain transparent and itself.     

An axiomatic analysis of Egghe’s g-index

The g-index is a well-known index for measuring and comparing the output of scientific researchers, which has been introduced by Leo Egghe in 2006 as an improvement of the Hirsch-index. This article gives an axiomatic characterization of the g-index in terms of three natural axioms.     

Cognitive correlates of visual speech understanding in hearing-impaired individuals

This study examined the extent to which different measures of speechreading performance correlated with particular cognitive abilities in a population of hearing-impaired people. Although the three speechreading tasks (isolated word identification, sentence comprehension, and text tracking) were highly intercorrelated, they tapped different cognitive skills. In this population, younger participants were better speechreaders, and, when age was taken into account, speech tracking correlated primarily with (written) lexical decision speed. In contrast, speechreading for sentence comprehension correlated most strongly with performance on a phonological processing task (written pseudohomophone detection) but also on a span measure that may have utilized visual, nonverbal memory for letters. We discuss the implications of this pattern.     

“Shut up and calculate”: the available discursive positions in quantum physics courses

Educating new generations of physicists is often seen as a matter of attracting good students, teaching them physics and making sure that they stay at the university. Sometimes, questions are also raised about what could be done to increase diversity in recruitment. Using a discursive perspective, in this study of three introductory quantum physics courses at two Swedish universities, we instead ask what it means to become a physicist, and whether certain ways of becoming a physicist and doing physics is privileged in this process. Asking the question of what discursive positions are made accessible to students, we use observations of lectures and problem solving sessions together with interviews with students to characterize the discourse in the courses. Many students seem to have high expectations for the quantum physics course and generally express that they appreciate the course more than other courses. Nevertheless, our analysis shows that the ways of being a “good quantum physics student” are limited by the dominating focus on calculating quantum physics in the courses. We argue that this could have negative consequences both for the education of future physicists and the discipline of physics itself, in that it may reproduce an instrumental “shut up and calculate”-culture of physics, as well as an elitist physics education. Additionally, many students who take the courses are not future physicists, and the limitation of discursive positions may also affect these students significantly.     

Cognitive Teaching Methods for Special Education: Development of Approaches for Intervention and Assessment in Germany

FOLLOWING a short introduction to historical aspects of the development of cognitive teaching methods, four current areas of research are described: cognitive behaviour modification with a focus on problem solving and metacognitive abilities, comprising the methods of cognitive modelling and self‐instruction; intelligence training based on the theoretical propositions of inductive thinking; attempts at applying Piagetian concepts as a conceptual framework for education and training; dynamic testing, focussing on modifiability of performance and thus bridging the gap between diagnostic assessment and education. Basic theoretical assumptions, methods and applications are separately discussed for each of these fields. Empirical data are presented for evaluation of their level of development Summarizing the results, it seems, that promising effects of training and fruitful application of diagnostic procedures can be obtained; however, implementation of the respective methods in special education settings does not show great progress. It is, thus, concluded that research on implementation is indispensable.     

The impact of student misconceptions on student persistence in a MOOC

Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) provide opportunities to learn a vast range of subjects. Because MOOCs are open to anyone with computer access and rarely have prerequisite requirements, the range of student backgrounds can be far more varied than in conventional classroom-based courses. Prior studies have shown that misconceptions have a huge impact on students' learning performance; however, no study has empirically examined the relationship between misconceptions and learning persistence. This study of 12,913 MOOC-takers examines how students' misconceptions about the upcoming course material affect course completion. Using a survival analysis approach, we found that, controlling for the score in a pre-course test, students holding more misconceptions had a higher dropout rate at the start of the course, an effect that diminished over time. Other student variables were found to have a positive impact on survival that persisted throughout the entire course: U.S. location, higher age, an intention to complete, better English skills, prior familiarity with the subject, motivation to earn a certificate, and score and time spent on the previous problem set (homework). By contrast, student gender, education level, number of previous MOOCs completed, and motivation to participate in online discussion forums did not affect survival.