Some practical approaches to a course on paraconsistent logic for engineers

This paper describes a non-classical logic course primarily indicated for graduate students in electrical engineering and energy engineering. The content of this course is based on the vision that it is not enough for a student to indefinitely accumulate knowledge; it is necessary to explore all the occasions to update, deepen, and enrich that knowledge, adapting it to a complex world. Therefore, this course is not tied to theoretical formalities and tries at each moment to provide a practical view of the non-classical logic. In the real world, the inconsistencies are important and cannot be ignored because contradictory information brings relevant facts, sometimes modifying the entire result of the analysis. As consequence, the non-classical logics, such as annotated paraconsistent logic – APL, are efficiently framed in the approach of complex situations of the real world. In APL, the concepts of unknown, partial, ambiguous, and inconsistent knowledge are referred not to trivialise any system in analysis. This course presents theoretical and applicable aspects of APL, which are successfully used in decision-making structures. The course is divided into modules: Basic, 2vAPL, 3vAPL, 4vAPL, and Final Project.     

VOCAL PITCH MATCHING ABILITY IN CHILDREN BETWEEN FOUR AND NINE YEARS OF AGE

Results from a developmental study on pitch matching ability (PMA) were used to draw conclusions on diagnostic and educational practice in music. Forty children from 3 age groups (4, 6, 8 years) participated in a cross‐sectional study with repeated measurements. The factor age was not important in the development of vocal PMA, whereas timbre of note presentation had strong effects on reproduction: Children in all age groups were more successful with vocal than with instrumental presentation. Remarkable were the large individual differences: There are 4‐year‐old children who hare higher ability than many 8‐year‐olds. Evidence is presented that actively produced music gives more valid insights into the individual's competence than the perceptually and verbally dominated traditional procedures for assessing PMA. Emphasis is thus placed on vocal activities because they are the earliest musical (and/or prosodic) expressions.     

Speech acts by mother and child: Determining their nature and form

The goal of the present study was to determine to what extent the psychological, social, and cultural features of the communication situation affect the production of speech acts during an interaction between an adult and a child. Variations in the nature of the speech acts produced (assertive, directive, expressive, and commissive) and in their linguistic form (imperative, declarative, interrogative, and exclamative) were studied in relation to three variables describing the communication situation: (a) a psychological variable, the mother’s child-raising style (coercive or inductive) which was assessed using a questionnaire on parental control behavior (MCCP, Tessier, Pilon, & Fecteau, 1985); (b) a social variable, the social role of the speaker (mother or child); and (c) a cultural variable, the origin of the dialogue partners (French or Canadian). For each cultural sample, 15-minute dialogues were recorded while 10 pairs of mothers in interaction with their 5 and 6 year old daughters performed a task involving drawing on a computer. The results suggest that for children between the ages of 5 and 6, the production of speech acts is mainly controlled by the social characteristics of the communication situation rather than by its psychological and cultural features. Mothers appear instead to be sensitive to all three kinds of factors. Moreover, the four types of speech acts were found to differ in their frequency of occurrence, linguistic form, and reaction to the psychological, social, and cultural characteristics of the communication situation. Finally, this study suggests that the effects of these characteristics on speech act production are not uniform, but vary according to the index under consideration.     

甜蜜的上学第一天

在德国,孩子们在上学第一天都会收到一个装满了各种糖果的圆锥形礼包,这个礼包能够让孩子们摆脱紧张不安,愉快甜蜜地度过自己的上学第一天。     

THE CONNECTION BETWEEN MOTIVATIONAL AND COGNITIVE COMPONENTS OF THE PERSONALITY OF GIFTED PUPILS

This paper introduces results of empirical research in connection with motivational and cognitive components of gifted pupils. In all 250 pupils in the 7th and 8th grades were included in this experiment Of these pupils, 177 applied for entrance to a special school for mathematics, natural sciences and technology (research), while 73 formed the control group. The cognitive components were tested–using the Raven Matrices as well as the results of the entrance exams of the special school applicants. The motivational components were measured with tests of striving for knowledge and motivation for physics. There were significant differences between the two groups in terms of cognitive and motivational components, which favored the special school applicants. The pupils also showed a positive correlation between the mathematics and physics exam results and the extent of primary motivation and striving for knowledge.     

Distributed leadership and middle leadership practice in schools: a disconnect?

This article reports on a small-scale collaborative research study on middle leadership (ML) in Iceland and Ireland. It explores the ML role using the theoretical lens of distributed leadership (DL). The majority of DL studies to date examine leadership as an organisational resource that can be cultivated and utilised to serve school improvement. This research, however, situates the teacher at the core of DL and commences a discourse on how MLs experience their leadership practice from a DL perspective. The empirical investigation is based on semi-structured focus group interviews across the range of schools in both education contexts. The findings indicate a disconnect between DL theory as outlined in the literature and ML practice as currently experienced in Ireland and Iceland. While a form of DL exists in both contexts, this is strictly at the gift of the Principal rather than a reciprocal relationship with teachers in relation to leading school activities. The findings also signal a need for a proactive approach in School Leadership Preparation Programmes and in Initial Teacher Education to facilitate school leaders and teachers in understanding and adopting a distributed mindset.     

Routines in classroom discourse: An ethnomethodological approach

The approach to routines presented in this paper refers to the phenomenology of Schütz, to symbolic interactionism and in particular to ethonomethodology: The interest is focussed on teachers’ and students’ routines making them establish the common classroom discourse. Routines important in the mathematics classroom — but presumably in other subjects too — are presented. The discussion shows that they have positive functions for the interaction process as well as partly negative consequences for the learning of mathematics.