Connecting high school physics experiences,outcome expectations,physics identity,and physics career choice: A gender study

This study explores how students' physics identities are shaped by their experiences in high school physics classes and by their career outcome expectations. The theoretical framework focuses on physics identity and includes the dimensions of student performance, competence, recognition by others, and interest. Drawing data from the Persistence Research in Science and Engineering (PRiSE) project, which surveyed college English students nationally about their backgrounds, high school science experiences, and science attitudes, the study uses multiple regression to examine the responses of 3,829 students from 34 randomly selected US colleges/universities. Confirming the salience of the identity dimension for young persons' occupational plans, the measure for students' physics identity used in this study was found to strongly predict their intended choice of a physics career. Physics identity, in turn, was found to correlate positively with a desire for an intrinsically fulfilling career and negatively with a desire for personal/family time and opportunities to work with others. Physics identity was also positively predicted by several high school physics characteristics/experiences such as a focus on conceptual understanding, real‐world/contextual connections, students answering questions or making comments, students teaching classmates, and having an encouraging teacher. Even though equally beneficial for both genders, females reported experiencing a conceptual focus and real‐world/contextual connections less frequently. The explicit discussion of under‐representation of women in science was positively related to physics identity for female students but had no impact for male students. Surprisingly, several experiences that were hypothesized to be important for females' physics identity were found to be non‐significant including having female scientist guest speakers, discussion of women scientists' work, and the frequency of group work. This study exemplifies a useful theoretical framework based on identity, which can be employed to further examine persistence in science, and illustrates possible avenues for change in high school physics teaching. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47: 978–1003, 2010     

Students' understanding of the greenhouse effect,the societal consequences of reducing CO2 emissions and the problem of ozone layer depletion

This study is an attempt to contribute to the growing body of knowledge about students' conceptions and views concerning environmental and natural resource issues. Answers have been sought to the following questions: “How do Swedish students in grade 9 (15–16 years old) and grade 12 (18–19 years old) explain the greenhouse effect?”, “How do they think reduction of CO₂ emission would affect society?” and “How do they explain that the depletion of the ozone layer is a problem?” The method chosen to answer these questions was to give students written tasks of the open‐ended type. Five models of the greenhouse effect appear among the answers, all more or less incomplete, but nevertheless with potential for development. The students' responses also indicate that they do not fully understand what fundamental societal changes would occur as a result of a drastic reduction in CO₂ emission. On the other hand, they are rather well informed about how injurious depletion of the ozone layer is to humans. The findings are discussed, including implications for teaching. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 37: 1096–1111, 2000     

Semantic Similarity Search on Semistructured Data with the XXL Search Engine

Query languages for XML such as XPath or XQuery support Boolean retrieval: a query result is a (possibly restructured) subset of XML elements or entire documents that satisfy the search conditions of the query. This search paradigm works for highly schematic XML data collections such as electronic catalogs. However, for searching information in open environments such as the Web or intranets of large corporations, ranked retrieval is more appropriate: a query result is a ranked list of XML elements in descending order of (estimated) relevance. Web search engines, which are based on the ranked retrieval paradigm, do, however, not consider the additional information and rich annotations provided by the structure of XML documents and their element names.This article presents the XXL search engine that supports relevance ranking on XML data. XXL is particularly geared for path queries with wildcards that can span multiple XML collections and contain both exact-match as well as semantic-similarity search conditions. In addition, ontological information and suitable index structures are used to improve the search efficiency and effectiveness. XXL is fully implemented as a suite of Java classes and servlets. Experiments in the context of the INEX benchmark demonstrate the efficiency of the XXL search engine and underline its effectiveness for ranked retrieval.     

The optimum age for beginning the study of modern languages

International Review of Education -     

Teachers’ views on risk factors for problematic school absenteeism in Swedish primary school students

In the present online survey, 158 teachers in regular and special education teaching in grades six to nine were asked to rate the importance of probable reasons for problematic school absenteeism. On average, the teachers estimated that among their students, 19 students had presented with problematic school absenteeism over the last five years. Teachers viewed school absenteeism as a multifactorial problem. Family factors were considered to contribute most and low mood or depression were rated as one of the five most contributing factors. Teachers in special education viewed school factors as more influential than teachers in mainstream education did (t₁₅₆ = ?3.94, p < 0.05). The current findings stress the importance of collaboration between the school, parents and the student to be able to address all factors that may lead to problematic school absenteeism.