Teaching energy in high school by making use of history and philosophy of science

How to improve students' understanding of energy transformation and conservation remains one of the main challenges of energy teaching. To address this challenge, we developed a new teaching strategy suited to high school based on history and philosophy of science (HPS). It involves five key ingredients: study and reproduction of Joule's paddle-wheel experiment, introduction of Rankine's definition, study of a historical text of Joule, use of an “ID card of energy,” and early introduction and multiple application of the principle of energy conservation. This strategy was built and implemented in the frame of a collaborative and iterative work involving researchers and teachers. We examined the effects of this HPS-based teaching strategy on students' understanding of energy. We used a quantitative method based on pre- and post-tests (N = 95/87) completed by a qualitative analysis using both video recordings of classroom activities and videos produced by students during one of the teaching sequences. The outcomes show that the teaching strategy had an overall positive impact on students' learning of energy: in particular, Joule's paddle-wheel experiment seems to favor their understanding of the notion of energy transformation, while the early introduction and multiple application of the conservation principle appears as a relevant option to facilitate its mastering. This study illustrates how HPS might actually be introduced in classrooms and brings to light its usefulness for building new science teaching strategies.     

A Taxonomy of Newspapers based on Multi-Platform and Paid Content Strategies: Evidences from Spain

This article examines Spanish newspapers’ means of digital distribution and their adoption of paid content strategies. To that end, the article employs a quantitative, explorative approach with data collected from 88 Spanish newspapers in November 2012. Using a hierarchical cluster analysis four types of newspapers can be differentiated by their utilization of specific means of digital distribution of content. The four distinct clusters differ in their organizational background and their average net circulation. The results of the article highlight the increasing role of digital kiosks for digital distribution in Spain and indicate a high influence of publishing groups on paid content strategies.     

An Audio-Visual Approach to the Spanish Transition

Tele-revista was a biweekly Swiss television broadcast for Spanish immigrants living in Switzerland. It dealt with labour and migration-related issues in Switzerland, information about Spanish cultural manifestations, political rights and interviews with committed immigrants and key figures of Spanish politics in transit on Swiss soil. First aired in 1973, in the final years of General Franco's authoritarian regime, the TV magazine, initially broadcast on the three Swiss TV channels, is an unique source of the Spanish transition to democracy, seen through the eyes of Swiss TV-makers with the collaboration of some Spanish journalists. Tele-revista was aimed for a better integration of Spaniards within Swiss society, who were considered worse integrated than the Italians. The paper pursues to present a general portrayal of the broadcast with a special attention to the years of the Spanish transition to democracy by means of focussing on the information about social, cultural and political issues.     

A Prospect-Guided global query expansion strategy using word embeddings

The effectiveness of query expansion methods depends essentially on identifying good candidates, or prospects, semantically related to query terms. Word embeddings have been used recently in an attempt to address this problem. Nevertheless query disambiguation is still necessary as the semantic relatedness of each word in the corpus is modeled, but choosing the right terms for expansion from the standpoint of the un-modeled query semantics remains an open issue. In this paper we propose a novel query expansion method using word embeddings that models the global query semantics from the standpoint of prospect vocabulary terms. The proposed method allows to explore query-vocabulary semantic closeness in such a way that new terms, semantically related to more relevant topics, are elicited and added in function of the query as a whole. The method includes candidates pooling strategies that address disambiguation issues without using exogenous resources. We tested our method with three topic sets over CLEF corpora and compared it across different Information Retrieval models and against another expansion technique using word embeddings as well. Our experiments indicate that our method achieves significant results that outperform the baselines, improving both recall and precision metrics without relevance feedback.     

The Role of Motor Competences in Predicting Working Memory Maintenance and Preparatory Processing

The purpose of the study was the examination of the longitudinal association between motor competences and changes in preparatory processing during a task requiring working memory maintenance. At baseline, 52 Caucasian children aged 10–12 years completed the MOBAK-5 test battery and a Sternberg task, whereas the cue-P300 and the initial contingent negative variation (iCNV) were recorded via electroencephalography. After 9 months, the Sternberg task was administered again to assess changes in these neurophysiological indices and behavioral performance. Path analyses revealed that motor competences predicted the change in cue-P300 and iCNV from baseline to follow-up. The present findings indicate that the cognitive control strategy during a task demanding working memory maintenance changes as a function of children's baseline motor competences.     

Requirements for electronic note taking systems: A field study of note taking in university classrooms

Note taking is the core activity for students in a classroom. There has been a large amount of research conducted, both from industry and from academia, into facilitating the note-taking process. There is evidence that shows that note taking can be beneficial for the students’ educational growth. There are also many available systems for taking notes electronically (e.g. Tablet PCs, PDAs). However, what has not been given as much attention is how these electronic devices affect (or support) the note taking task. In this paper, we study university students’ current note taking behavior and the changes caused by the use of electronic systems for this activity. The goal of our work is to identify issues that should be considered when evaluating electronic note taking systems and to formulate requirements for future electronic note-taking systems. Our findings show that while the technological support for writing with pens on electronic surfaces is quite advanced, the task of note taking in the classroom is not well supported. We identify the limitations of typical note taking systems and discuss the implications for the design of future note taking systems. Our work consisted of three parts: a survey of current note-taking practices, an observational study in a classroom environment, and a semester long case study of students using electronic note-taking devices. All of these activities took place at a large 4-year university. We found that the people reacted to note-taking devices very differently and that their current practices were not always well supported. The users all wanted to input information as fast as possible, in the manner they wanted but they were not always able to achieve that. Hardware limitations (i.e. screen size, responsiveness) added to this issue. We also found that the features that are well supported in an electronic medium (i.e. modification, reorganizing, multiple pen colors/styles, handwriting recognition, sharing) were not commonly used or wanted.     

Using the Web as corpus for self-training text categorization

Most current methods for automatic text categorization are based on supervised learning techniques and, therefore, they face the problem of requiring a great number of training instances to construct an accurate classifier. In order to tackle this problem, this paper proposes a new semi-supervised method for text categorization, which considers the automatic extraction of unlabeled examples from the Web and the application of an enriched self-training approach for the construction of the classifier. This method, even though language independent, is more pertinent for scenarios where large sets of labeled resources do not exist. That, for instance, could be the case of several application domains in different non-English languages such as Spanish. The experimental evaluation of the method was carried out in three different tasks and in two different languages. The achieved results demonstrate the applicability and usefulness of the proposed method.     

Spatial differences in the quality of university patenting: Do regions matter?

This paper uses patent citation data to analyze the quality of university technology across European regions. The empirical analysis draws on a panel dataset of 4580 European university-owned patents classified by 202 European regions over the period 1998-2004. The methodology involves a multilevel framework to identify the effects of factors at three hierarchical levels (individual, university, and regional) on the quality of university patenting. The results suggest that regional factors, such as the level of development, industrial potential, and regional higher education R&D expenditure, do not play any significant role in determining the quality of European university patents. We instead find that the factors affecting patent quality stem from their specific characteristics. We also find that university size does not explain the quality of patents. However, there is significant unobserved heterogeneity at the university level in all models, suggesting that differences in other university characteristics explain a substantial part of the variance in patent quality.     

Self-efficacy beliefs and the relation between career planning and perception of barriers

This study tested the hypothesis that self-efficacy in career roles moderates the relation between perception of career barriers and career planning, in a study with Portuguese students, 488 in Grade 9 and 517 in Grade 12. The results supported the hypothesis only among Grade 9 girls, showing that perception of career barriers leads to less career planning among girls low in self-efficacy. The findings suggest that variables such as gender and psychological maturity need to be considered in understanding career planning.