Adaptation of the Students' Motivation Towards Science Learning (SMTSL) questionnaire in the Greek language

The present study aimed at adapting in the Greek language the Students' Motivation Towards Science Learning (SMTSL) questionnaire developed by Tuan, Chin, and Shieh (INT J SCI EDUC 27(6): 639-654, 2005a) into a different cultural context, a different age group, that is, in university students and with a focus on physics learning. Three hundred and fifty Greek student teachers participated in the study. The original instrument consisted of 35 items allocated in six scales: self-efficacy, use of active learning strategies, science learning value, performance goals, achievement goals, and learning environment stimulation. The instrument's internal consistency was acceptable and comparable to previous studies' reports. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was applied on the data in order to test an a priori hypothesis regarding the SMTSL's factorial structure based on previous studies' findings. The results of the study showed that the six-factor conceptual model of students' motivation proposed by the SMTSL applies in this different cultural setting and in this group of university students with reference to physics learning. Along with the six distinct motivational constructs confirmed, students' motivational beliefs were also explained by a general motivational construct assumed to be at their basis. Suggestions for further improvement of the Greek version of the SMTSL are also discussed.     

Predictors of students’ intrinsic motivation in school physical education

The aim of the present study was to examine the relations of students’ intrinsic motivation in physical education lessons with factors such as perceived locus of causality, perceived competence and outcome expectancies. Five hundred sixteen students of grades 7–12 participated in the study. The students were randomly selected from three schools located in a medium sized town in Greece. Perceived locus of causality was examined using Ryan and Connell’s (1989) motivational orientation scales, while intrinsic motivation was assessed by means of the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (Ryan, 1982). Outcome expectancies for ten possible outcomes of school physical education were assessed by means of two different scales, namely outcome evaluation and outcome likelihood. Causal modelling analysis showed that intrinsic motivation was mainly influenced by perceived usefulness which in turned was influenced by outcome expectations. Moreover, outcome expectations also influenced perceived locus of causality. These results show that students’ outcome expectancies for their participation in school physical education is an important factor influencing their intrinsic motivation.     

The angiogenetic effect of intramuscular administration of b-FGF and a-FGF on cardiac muscle: the influence of exercise on muscle angiogenesis

Although angiogenetic therapy using recombinant growth factors holds much hope for the treatment of ischaemic diseases, there are still many unanswered questions, including the method of administration, the correct dose of these factors, and the duration of the therapeutic approach. Exercise has also been suggested to induce neovascularizaiton in muscles. We evaluated the angiogenetic effects of the intramuscular administration of basic-fibroblast growth factor (b-FGF) and acidic-fibroblast growth factor (a-FGF) in rat heart, compared with rats who exercised daily. In conclusion, both the intramuscular administration of b-FGF and exercise increased significantly angiogenesis in the heart in contrast to the intramuscular administration of a-FGF, which was ineffective.     

Operational and Financial Aspects for Delivering a Consortium Shared LMS - The MITOS Project

The Shared Library Management System (LMS) model is not a new concept. Lately, many libraries consortia have migrated to a shared LMS to reduce their services' total costs. The Hellenic Academic Libraries consortium has implemented a shared LMS service, hosted in a private owned cloud infrastructure for its members during the past years (known as the MITOS project). Recognizing the complexity and significance that joining a shared LMS represents, it is important for librarians and other decision makers to have access to the MITOS experience for operational, technical and financial aspects, during and after the transition.     

Evaluating multimodal relevance feedback techniques for medical image retrieval

Medical image retrieval can assist physicians in finding information supporting their diagnosis and fulfilling information needs. Systems that allow searching for medical images need to provide tools for quick and easy navigation and query refinement as the time available for information search is often short. Relevance feedback is a powerful tool in information retrieval. This study evaluates relevance feedback techniques with regard to the content they use. A novel relevance feedback technique that uses both text and visual information of the results is proposed. The two information modalities from the image examples are fused either at the feature level using the Rocchio algorithm or at the query list fusion step using a common late fusion rule. Results using the ImageCLEF 2012 benchmark database for medical image retrieval show the potential of relevance feedback techniques in medical image retrieval. The mean average precision (mAP) is used as the evaluation metric and the proposed method outperforms commonly-used methods. The baseline without feedback reached 16 % whereas the relevance feedback with 20 images reached up to 26.35 % with three steps and when using 100 images up to 34.87 % in four steps. Most improvements occur in the first two steps of relevance feedback and then results start to become relatively flat. This might also be due to only using positive feedback as negative feeback often also improves results after more steps. The effect of relevance feedback in automatically spelling corrected and translated queries is investigated as well. Results without mistakes were better than spell-corrected results but the spelling correction more than double results over non-corrected retrieval. Multimodal relevance feedback has shown to be able to help visual medical information retrieval. Next steps include integrating semantics into relevance feedback techniques to benefit from the structured knowledge of ontologies and experimenting on the fusion of text and visual information.     

Views of prospective early childhood education teachers,towards mathematics and its instruction

The questions this paper attempts to answer are related to the attitudes of student teachers of the Department of Early Childhood Education at the University of Patras (Greece) towards mathematics, as well as their views on the instruction of mathematics in Early Childhood Education. The research sample included 52 students in the fourth semester of studies, who were invited to answer a questionnaire with respect to mathematics and its instruction. The findings reveal the negative attitude our research subjects adopt towards mathematics. Their epistemological views on mathematics and its instruction do not constitute a single and solid conceptual system. These findings underline the need to improve the mathematical education offered to student teachers of Early Childhood Education.

Les questions posées par la présente recherche concernent les attitudes envers les mathématiques ainsi que les conceptions sur l'enseignement de mathématiques des étudiants—futurs enseignants du Département de l'Education Pré‐scolaire de l'université de Patras. Cinquante‐deux étudiants de la quatrième année de leurs études ont participé à cette recherche en remplissant un questionnaire sur les mathématiques et leur enseignement. L'analyse des réponses a montré que les étudiants ont des attitudes négatives envers les mathématiques et que leurs conceptions épistémologiques sur les mathématiques et leur enseignement ne constituent pas un cadre conceptuel unitaire et cohérent. Ces constatations soulignent la nécessite de reformulation du contenu de l'éducation mathématique adressé aux étudiants—futurs enseignants à l'école maternelle.

La pesquisa actual está intentando responder a cuestiones relacionadas con las actitudes de los estudiantes—futuros institutores—de la Facultad de Pedagogía Preescolar de la Universidad de Patras (Grecia), en relación a la matemática y con sus puntos de vista en relación a la enseñanza de los conceptos matemáticos en la Educación Preescolar. La muestra representativa de la investigación se compone de 52 estudiantes del cuarto semestre de la carrera a quienes se solicitó responder a un cuestionario relacionado con la matemática y su didáctica. El escrutinio del cuestionario indica que los sujetos de la muestra mantienen una actitud negativa ante la matemática y su didáctica. Además, sus convicciones y conjeturas de ellos no componen un sistema de comprensión unificado y conciso acerca de la matemática y su didáctica. Dicho escrutinio subraya que hace falta mejorar la educación de la matemática que se presta en nuestra Facultad de Pedagogía.

Die vorliegende Studie untersucht die Einstellung von Studenten—zukünftigen Lehrern—des Fachs Pädagogik am Institut für Frühe Kindheit, Universität Patras, Griechenland, gegenüber der Mathematik. Insbesondere befasst sie sich mit deren Wahrnehmung der Vermittlung von mathematischen Begriffen im Kindergarten. Im Rahmen der Studie wurden 52 Studenten des vierten Semesters aufgefordert, einen Fragebogen zur Mathematikausbildung auszufüllen. Aus den Ergebnissen resultiert eine negative Haltung der Befragten gegenüber der Mathematik und deren Unterricht. Des weiteren bilden ihre Wahrnehmungsweise der Mathematik und des Mathematikunterrichts kein einheitliches und konsistentes konzeptuelles System. Diese Ergebnisse heben die Notwendigkeit einer Verbesserung der angebotenen Mathematikausbildung in unserem Fachbereich Pädagogik hervor.     

3DSSE – A 3D Scene Search Engine: Exploring 3D scenes using keywords

The evolution of real time 3D graphics technologies in combination with high bandwidth Internet connections and modern Web browsers enable users to explore complex 3D scenes. As a rule, a virtual visitor has to manually explore the geometrically complex 3D model in order to discover points of interest. This manual exploration is a time consuming process that, in some cases, can be assisted by sets of predefined points of interest. In this paper, we propose the annotation of 3D scenes in order to equip the user with a text based 3D scene search engine. The search engine provides a query mechanism that unburdens the user from the time consuming process of manually exploring vast 3D scenes. It responds to queries by exploiting the metadata of each 3D model and returns textual and visual information along with a group of links that correspond to relative points of interest within the 3D scene. The search engine allows the virtual visitor to automatically be transferred to a specific point of interest. We have built a Web accessible prototype system that is able to handle queries related to historical data, topological relationships and architectural properties of buildings. A number of 3D reconstructions covering urban areas of cultural importance located in Northern Greece have been annotated and used in the search engine as case studies. The prototype system is based on open source technologies and on a hybrid metadata schema that is derived from the MIDAS Heritage and MACE schemas.     

Differences in fatigability between the sexes during a sustained submaximal contraction protocol in prepubertal children

The aim of this study was to determine whether there are differences in the fatigability of plantar flexor muscles during sustained submaximal contractions in prepubertal boys and girls. Fifteen boys (age 10.0 +/- 1.0 years) and 15 girls (age 9.8 +/- 0.9 years) participated in the study. The fatigue protocol consisted of a 10 min isometric plantar flexion at 20% of the maximal voluntary contraction. Immediately after this, five maximal isometric contractions were performed with a 3 min interval between contractions. During the experiment, electromyograms of the agonist muscles soleus and medial gastrocnemius and antagonist tibialis anterior were recorded. We observed no differences between the sexes (P < 0.05) in the decrease in torque or in the recovery rate after the fatigue protocol. Nor were there any differences between the sexes (P < 0.05) in agonist or antagonist muscle activation during the fatigue protocol and recovery period. The results indicate that there are no differences in fatigability between prepubertal boys and girls during submaximal sustained contractions, probably because the agonist and antagonist muscles were activated similarly in both sexes.     

Predicting different types of parental involvement in children’s homework: the role of parent motivational beliefs and parent affect

European Journal of Psychology of Education - This study investigated motivational and affective processes behind qualitatively different parental involvement practices in children’s...     

Greek primary school children’s representations of the urban environment as seen through their drawings

In the present study, we explore aspects of Greek primary school children’s representations about the urban environment through the use of drawings and their relation to sustainability. For that purpose, 104 children, aged 9–12 (4th and 6th grades), were asked to make two drawings of their town: one as it is now and another as they would like it to be. Drawings were analysed using pre-defined categories of urban sustainability and were statistically analysed using SPSS. Results revealed a serious gap in knowledge regarding energy and aspects of local development tied to sustainability in the current and future state of the children’s towns. Although the most popular characteristics in the children’s drawings were associated with the environment, the majority of children illustrated issues related to society. Evidence indicated an age-related progression of representations related to sustainability in the urban environment, at least concerning the topics of natural environment, infrastructure and the realization of problems caused by air pollution and municipal waste generation.