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.     

From body to culture: the need for a developmental psychology view. A commentary on the article Learning beyond the body by Juan-Ignacio Pozo / Del cuerpo a la cultura: la necesidad de una mirada desde la psicología del desarrollo. Un comentario sobre el artículo Aprender más allá del cuerpo de Juan-Ignacio Pozo

The necessity of adopting a developmental perspective to understand the role that the body and action play in children’s representations is argued in proposals made by Pozo in his article Learning beyond the body: from embodied representations to explicitation mediated by external representations. The transformative power of action is valued from this developmental perspective, while at the same time revealing the close link between action, cognition and communication. Similarly, the explicitation and implicitation processes are considered to be recurrent phases that occur in any stage of development, applied to embodied knowledge as well as to more elaborate and explicit knowledge.     

Packaging and unpackaging knowledge in mass higher education—a knowledge management perspective

The progressive deployment of market-oriented regulatory frameworks in mass Higher Education Institutions (MHEI hereafter) triggered, in a wide variety of forms and degrees, the application of Knowledge Management principles in MHEI. This means the application of the knowledge ‘codification strategy’, where the focus is on the economies of the re-use of centrally developed knowledge through codifying, storing and distributing knowledge. This process however, presents significant challenges. Both knowledge and non-knowledge related aspects might constrain the application of knowledge codification strategies in MHEI. The aim of this paper is to better understand the application of knowledge codification strategies in MHEI, from a knowledge management perspective. This is done by examining the use of course outlines as the critical means to ‘transfer’ codified knowledge. The research site was a MHEI that explicitly followed a ‘codification strategy’, where the profits come from the economies of scale and low cost operation. Research findings point out mixed outcomes. The set of cost-saving managerial-oriented initiatives together with the deployment of knowledge codification strategies simultaneously supported the knowledge transfer of codified-oriented courses associated to low levels of tacit knowledge and constrained knowledge transfer of codified-oriented courses associated with slightly higher levels of tacit knowledge. This finding can be credited to a set of both knowledge and non-knowledge related issues. The implications for the management of knowledge in MHEI were explored.     

The construction of a double-entry table: a study of primary and secondary school students’ difficulties

Tables are a presentation format that is commonly used to organize information, and they are widely present in many scenarios of our students’ everyday activities; however, there is a scarcity of studies devoted to their analysis. Some of these studies point out that the organization of data into a double-entry table presents difficulties for primary and secondary school students. The present study analyzes the following: (1) the level of competency of primary and secondary school students in constructing a double-entry table from a set of data and (2) the main difficulties encountered by these students during the task. Our findings showed that the percentage of middle-school students who succeeded in contructing a conventional table was relatively low, and the number did not significantly increase over four school years. A set of difficulties is identified and discussed in terms of cognitive and graphical processes.     

The direct and indirect effect of motivation for learning on students' approaches to learning through the perceptions of workload and task complexity

The present study investigates the direct and indirect influence of motivation for learning, as understood by the self‐determination theory, on students' approaches to learning. Concerning the direct influence of motivation, results show that autonomous motivation is positively related to a deep approach to learning and negatively to a surface approach. Motivation also has an indirect effect on students' approaches to learning through the perceptions of workload and task complexity, in particular through the perception of a lack of information. The greater the extent to which students are autonomously motivated, the less they perceive that they have a lack of information and the less they are inclined to adopt a surface approach to learning.     

Multicultural education, pragmatism, and the goals of science teaching

In this paper, we offer an intermediate position in the multiculturalism/universalism debate, drawing upon Cobern and Loving’s epistemological pluralism, pragmatist philosophies, Southerland’s defense of instructional multicultural science education, and the conceptual profile model. An important element in this position is the proposal that understanding is the proper goal of science education. Our commitment to this proposal is explained in terms of a defense of an ethics of coexistence for dealing with cultural differences, according to which social argumentative processes—including those in science education—should be marked by dialogue and confrontation of arguments in the search of possible solutions, and an effort to (co-)live with differences if a negotiated solution is not reached. To understand the discourses at stake is, in our view, a key requirement for the coexistence of arguments and discourses, and the science classroom is the privileged space for promoting an understanding of the scientific discourse in particular. We argue for “inclusion” of students’ culturally grounded ideas in science education, but in a sense that avoids curricular multicultural science education, and, thus, any attempt to broaden the definition of “science” so that ideas from other ways of knowing might be simply treated as science contents. Science teachers should always take in due account the diversity of students’ worldviews, giving them room in argumentative processes in science classrooms, but should never lose from sight the necessity of stimulating students to understand scientific ideas. This view is grounded on a distinction between the goals of science education and the nature of science instruction, and demands a discussion about how learning is to take place in culturally sensitive science education, and about communicative approaches that might be more productive in science classrooms organized as we propose here. We employ the conceptual profile model to address both issues. We expect this paper can contribute to the elaboration of an instructional multicultural science education approach that eliminates the forced choice between the goals of promoting students’ understanding of scientific ideas and of empowering students through education.

How do students process complex formative feedback in question-answering tasks? A think-aloud study

Metacognition and Learning - The goal of this study was to examine how students process formative feedback that included corrective and elaborative information in online question-answering tasks....     

Multidimensional relevance: Prioritized aggregation in a personalized Information Retrieval setting

A new model for aggregating multiple criteria evaluations for relevance assessment is proposed. An Information Retrieval context is considered, where relevance is modeled as a multidimensional property of documents. The usefulness and effectiveness of such a model are demonstrated by means of a case study on personalized Information Retrieval with multi-criteria relevance. The following criteria are considered to estimate document relevance: aboutness, coverage, appropriateness, and reliability.