Development of a scale of Sense of Community in university online courses

Creating a sense of community in online classes contributes to student retention and to their overall satisfaction with the course itself. This study aimed to develop a scale of sense of community of students attending online university courses. A series of ordinal exploratory factor analyses were conducted on data obtained from 839 students enrolled in Italian universities. Using an item analysis method, we were able to select the 36 most valid items from an original set of 60 items we had previously defined. These items are distributed across three related factors measuring membership, influence, and fulfillment of needs. This factorial structure replicates the McMillan and Chavis’s model of sense of community, upon the basis of which this scale was developed. The three factors presented good ordinal alpha and adequate convergent/divergent validity coefficients. The scale represents an efficient tool for the design, monitoring, and evaluation of online courses.     

Socio-cognitive dynamics of knowledge building in the work of 9- and 10-year-olds

This study examines four months of online discourse of 22 Grade 4 students engaged in efforts to advance their understanding of optics. Their work is part of a school-wide knowledge building initiative, the essence of which is giving students collective responsibility for idea improvement. This goal is supported by software—Knowledge Forum—designed to provide a public and collaborative space for continual improvement of ideas. A new analytic tool—inquiry threads—was developed to analyze the discourse used by these students as they worked in this environment. Data analyses focus on four knowledge building principles: idea improvement; real ideas, authentic problems (involving concrete/empirical and abstract/conceptual artifacts); community knowledge (knowledge constructed for the benefit of the community as a whole); and constructive use of authoritative sources. Results indicate that these young students generated theories and explanation-seeking questions, designed experiments to produce real-world empirical data to support their theories, located and introduced expert resources, revised ideas, and responded to problems and ideas that emerged as community knowledge evolved. Advances were reflected in progress in refining ideas and evidence of growth of knowledge for the community as a whole. Design strategies and challenges for collective idea improvement are discussed.

Young Children's Self‐Concepts Include Representations of Abstract Traits and the Global Self

There is debate about the abstractness of young children's self‐concepts—specifically, whether they include representations of (a) general traits and abilities and (b) the global self. Four studies (N = 176 children aged 4–7) suggested these representations are indeed part of early self‐concepts. Studies 1 and 2 reexamined prior evidence that young children cannot represent traits and abilities. The results suggested that children's seemingly immature judgments in previous studies were due to peculiarities of the task context not the inadequacy of children's self‐concepts. Similarly, Studies 3 and 4 revealed that, contrary to claims of immaturity in reasoning about the global self, young children update their global self‐evaluations in flexible, context‐sensitive ways. This evidence suggests continuity in the structure of self‐concepts across childhood.     

It’s a match (?): Tinder usage and attitudes toward interracial dating

ABSTRACT

The increased popularity of dating apps such as Tinder coupled with the rise in interracial marriages form the foundation of this study which explores the role played by visual and cultural cues in people’s dating decisions. Using a within-group 2*3 experimental design (N = 331) among a convenience sample of adults in the Netherlands, this study provides insight into how the ethnicity associated with profile pictures and names impact the evaluation of a potential date on Tinder. Overall, respondents ranked Caucasian-looking Tinder users as more attractive and more likely to be their date of choice. Interestingly, this finding did not hold when narrowed down to respondents identifying as Western-European only: They did not prefer Caucasian-looking or sounding profiles. Perceived attractiveness was shown to partially mediate the choice of a Caucasian-looking profile, regardless of name.     

Mapping the impact of climate change on biomass accumulation on stone

Several climate parameters affect the growth of organisms and, hence, their capacity to accumulate biomass. In the present research, we analyse the influence of two parameters, temperature and precipitation, on biomass accumulation on stone substrate, and propose a function to estimate it in temperate areas. The expression is subsequently used for the first time to evaluate the impact that climate change would have in biomass accumulation in Europe. The models on climate change predict an increase in temperature and precipitation in northern areas of Europe for the far future (2070–2099), which would lead to a higher accumulation of biomass. Otherwise, a significant reduction in precipitation is expected in southern areas of Europe, associated with a lower biomass accumulation in such areas.     

Defining and Operationalizing Appropriation for Science Learning

The goal of this article is to contribute to understanding the interplay between students' disciplinary engagement and their identity construction. The term appropriation, borrowed from scholars in linguistics and education, was chosen to capture this broader sense of productive learning that sits at the nexus of disciplinary engagement and identity. Appropriation implies deep conceptual understanding, but it also involves a reflexive process of transforming scientific discourse in a way that is authentic and personal. The core aim of this article is to turn the term appropriation into a theoretical construct by means of an analytic process of defining, operationalizing, and testing the definition against student interview and classroom data. Five discourse markers for operationalizing appropriation were discovered through this process. Appropriation, in our study, implies students’ discourse is (A) an expression of a personal “signature“ idea, (B) grounded in the discipline, (C) thick, in that it involves a metacognitive and epistemological dimension, (D) non-incidental, in the sense of being consistently used throughout classroom activities, and (E) a carrier of social relationships, in that it positions the student within classroom. The study is grounded in an extended intervention on thermodynamics in an Italian secondary school class (grade 12).     

Embracing the Open-Source Movement for the Management of Spatial Data: A Case Study of African Trypanosomiasis in Kenya

The past decade has seen an explosion in the availability of spatial data not only for researchers, but the public alike. As the quantity of data increases, the ability to effectively navigate and understand the data becomes more challenging. Here we detail a conceptual model for a spatially explicit database management system that addresses the issues raised with the growing data management problem. We demonstrate utility with a case study in disease ecology: to develop a multi-scale predictive model of African Trypanosomiasis in Kenya. International collaborations and varying technical expertise necessitate a modular open-source software solution. Finally, we address three recurring problems with data management: scalability, reliability, and security.     

Designs for Collective Cognitive Responsibility in Knowledge-Building Communities

This article reports a design experiment conducted over three successive school years, with the teacher's goal of having his Grade 4 students assume increasing levels of collective responsibility for advancing their knowledge of optics. Classroom practices conducive to sustained knowledge building were co-constructed by the teacher and students, with Knowledge Forum software supporting the production and refinement of the community's knowledge. Social network analysis and qualitative analyses were used to assess online participatory patterns and knowledge advances, focusing on indicators of collective cognitive responsibility. Data indicate increasingly effective procedures, mirrored in students' knowledge advances, corresponding to the following organizations: (a) Year 1—fixed small-groups; (b) Year 2—interacting small-groups with substantial cross-group knowledge sharing; and (c) Year 3—opportunistic collaboration, with small teams forming and disbanding under the volition of community members, based on emergent goals. The third-year model maps most directly onto organic and distributed social structures in real-world knowledge-creating organizations and resulted in the highest level of collective cognitive responsibility, knowledge advancement, and dynamic diffusion of information. Pedagogical and technological innovations to enculturate youth into a knowledge-creating culture, with classroom practices to encourage distributed and opportunistic collaboration, are discussed.     

A probabilistic relational approach for web document clustering

The exponential growth of information available on the World Wide Web, and retrievable by search engines, has implied the necessity to develop efficient and effective methods for organizing relevant contents. In this field document clustering plays an important role and remains an interesting and challenging problem in the field of web computing. In this paper we present a document clustering method, which takes into account both contents information and hyperlink structure of web page collection, where a document is viewed as a set of semantic units. We exploit this representation to determine the strength of a relation between two linked pages and to define a relational clustering algorithm based on a probabilistic graph representation. The experimental results show that the proposed approach, called RED-clustering, outperforms two of the most well known clustering algorithm as k-Means and Expectation Maximization.