Approaches to the teaching of STS in science education

The Science, Technology and Society movement is a movement within higher and school education that seeks to bring the science education of students at these respective levels more closely to their needs as members of increasingly technological societies.

As far as school science education is concerned, two parallel developments have been occurring since the mid 1970s. The first is an evolving conception of the ways in which these interactions between Science, Technology and Society may be dealt with in science education. The other is the development of text and other curriculum materials that provide assistance for teachers wishing to teach science with these emphases. This paper outlines these two developments and brings them together by using an epistemological typology from the first to classify the varieties of curriculum materials now available.     

Editorial

Teacher research serves as an innovative redirection of the tradition of framing the education of teachers around curriculum policies. It recognizes and encourages teachers as agents of knowing and constructors of knowledge. It is inquiry‐based, frequently collaborative, and invariably generative of teachers’ craft knowledge. British Columbia is currently in the middle of a most ambitious revision of its education system. This system‐wide attempt at innovation has provided an enabling context within which teachers in the province could engage in classroom‐based research as they attempt to build a learner‐focused curriculum. This article describes the teacher research efforts that have been taking place in the province, and attempts to derive important implications for educational policy. Teacher research permitted teachers to honour the educative agenda of schools, suggesting that more, rather than less, structures like teacher research groups be provided for in the implementation of complex educational innovations, and recognizing that posing questions about teaching and learning represents the essence of being a professional educator. Teacher research groups also provided support, stability and challenge in a community of inquirers, suggesting that such structures are necessary for teachers to engage in continuous, public and systemic critique of proposed changes in school. Finally, teachers were enabled to clarify the principles of learning embedded in the new programmes, to distinguish between learner‐focused and learner‐directed teaching, and to address matters of substance rather than react to the change process.     

PIRUS2: individual article usage statistics — developing a practical,global standard

The most granular level at which COUNTER currently requires reporting of usage is for the individual journal. A number of developments have, however, meant that it is now practical to investigate the development of a COUNTER standard for the recording, reporting, and consolidation of usage statistics at the individual article level. The aim of PIRUS2 (Publisher and Institutional Repository Usage Statistics 2) was to take forward the outcomes of the original PIRUS project and build on its recommendations, by developing a prototype service (including technical, organizational, and economic models) that will enable publishers, repositories, and other organizations to generate and share authoritative, trustworthy usage statistics for the individual articles and other items that they host. The PIRUS2 project was completed in June 2011. This article covers the aims, objectives, outputs and recommendations of the project.     

Lifelong education and transnational migration

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether and through what mechanisms vulnerable adults are empowered through a second-chance education programme. At the same time, the paper aims at unveiling the obstacles hindering learners’ empowerment process and making suggestions for the improvement of the educational programme fostering further empowerment of the learners. To achieve the objectives set by the research, a hybrid methodological design was applied combining hermeneutic phenomenology and critical discourse analysis. Data collection was performed using three tools: semi-structured interviews, reflective journals and document analysis. The results led to the emergence of a multilevel empowerment scheme of vulnerable adults in the programme. The empowerment mechanisms that emerged were as follows: (a) empowerment through participation as a self-value, (b) empowerment through the reconstruction of past experiences, (c) empowerment through the strengthening of their social capital and (d) empowerment through literacy skills. At the same time, the study shed light on a number of factors that inhibit the process of learners’ empowerment, which unveil structural and operational weaknesses of the programme as well as of the policies pursued by the State.     

COUNTER 2005: a new Code of Practice and new applications of COUNTER usage statistics

The article gives an update on the progress with COUNTER to May 2005. In particular it describes the draft Code of Practice for books and reference works and the results of actual use of COUNTER‐compliant data in the journals area.     

Efficient reverse k-nearest neighbor estimation

The reverse k-nearest neighbor (RkNN) problem, i.e. finding all objects in a data set the k-nearest neighbors of which include a specified query object, has received increasing attention recently. Many industrial and scientific applications call for solutions of the RkNN problem in arbitrary metric spaces where the data objects are not Euclidean and only a metric distance function is given for specifying object similarity. Usually, these applications need a solution for the generalized problem where the value of k is not known in advance and may change from query to query. In addition, many applications require a fast approximate answer of RkNN-queries. For these scenarios, it is important to generate a fast answer with high recall. In this paper, we propose the first approach for efficient approximative RkNN search in arbitrary metric spaces where the value of k is specified at query time. Our approach uses the advantages of existing metric index structures but proposes to use an approximation of the nearest-neighbor-distances in order to prune the search space. We show that our method scales significantly better than existing non-approximative approaches while producing an approximation of the true query result with a high recall.     

Government information policy principles

This article analyzes the utility of policy principles advanced by professional associations.