The Community of Practice among Mathematics and Mathematics Education Faculty Members at an Urban Minority Serving Institution in the U.S.

Using narrative inquiry as a research method, four mathematics and mathematics education faculty members explored the integration of theoretical perspectives into their personal narratives as they developed a community of practice. Initially their focus was strictly on improving their students’ mathematical knowledge. As their community of practice matured, however, their work took on a larger meaning as they contributed to the institution’s strategic goal of raising the annual dollar amount of external funding and to the development of their personal and collective identities. This unusual level of inter-departmental collaboration has been recognized by the institution’s highest administrators, who have called upon its members to develop new, collaborative partnerships with regional school districts and community colleges.     

Developing inclusive education systems: what are the levers for change?

This paper argues that inclusion is the major challenge facing educational systems around the world. Reflecting on evidence from a programme of research carried out over the last 10 years, it provides a framework for determining levers that can help to ease systems in a more inclusive direction. The focus is on factors within schools that influence the development of thinking and practice, as well as wider contextual factors that may constrain such developments. It is argued that many of the barriers experienced by learners arise from existing ways of thinking. Consequently, strategies for developing inclusive practices have to involve interruptions to thinking in order to encourage an exploration of overlooked possibilities for moving practice forward.     

The role of the family and the school in the reproduction of educational inequalities in the post‐Communist Czech Republic

Among the more relevant questions in educational research is how the governments and policy‐makers in transition countries address the high educational inequality inherited from the past and what policies they develop in order to reduce the strong effects of the background family and the type of school on students' achievements, their aspirations and their chances of succeeding in the most important educational transitions. This paper addresses one of the most topical issues in this area, namely the social selectivity of Czech basic and secondary education. Special attention is paid to the role of ‘multi‐year’ gymnasia. The results of analyses carried out on data from the Programme for International Student Assessment 2000 study corroborate the initial hypothesis according to which multi‐year gymnasia, introduced into the Czech educational system after 1989, represent one of the main sources of the variation in students' achievements at the end of compulsory education. However, this variation can be almost entirely accounted for by the specific socio‐economic background of the students. The same holds true for their future aspirations. The results of the analysis support the conclusions of the OECD Review of National Policies for Education from 1996.     

Ant colony system algorithm for the optimization of beer fermentation control

Beer fermentation is a dynamic process that must be guided along a temperature profile to obtain the desired results. Ant colony system algorithm was applied to optimize the kinetic model of this process. During a fixed period of fermentation time, a series of different temperature profiles of the mixture were constructed. An optimal one was chosen at last. Optimal temperature profile maximized the final ethanol production and minimized the byproducts concentration and spoilage risk. The satisfactory results obtained did not require much computation effort.     

Relative Effects of English Proficiency on General Admissions Tests Versus Subject Tests

The increasing linguistic diversity of the United States student population has brought to the forefront problems in the interpretation of test scores for non-native speakers of English in graduate admissions. The degree to which test scores reflect English proficiency was studied using data on N = 451 students whose native language was Spanish. They had taken the GRE, English proficiency tests, and the PAEG, a test in Spanish used for admission to graduate schools in Puerto Rico. Regression analyses revealed that the proportion of variance explained by the English proficiency terms (independent of developed skills measured in Spanish) was highest for the GRE verbal test (34%), lowest for the quantitative test (8%) and intermediate for the analytical test (16%), the Psychology (18%) and Biology (17%) Subject tests. These findings are discussed in light of efforts to increase access to higher education for Hispanic students.     

Socialisation and citizenship preparation in vocational education: Pedagogic codes and democratic rights in VET-subjects

ABSTRACT

Previous studies of citizenship preparation in upper secondary school, including studies on vocational programmes, have primarily focused on general subjects. Potential and actual roles of vocational subjects in this context have received little attention, so we have little knowledge of what is likely a significant part of the citizenship preparation that occurs in vocational programmes. Drawing on the work of Basil Bernstein and ethnographic data, this study presents an analysis of socialisation processes in vocational elements of three vocational programmes in Swedish upper secondary school. The analysis addresses the formation of pedagogic codes in various vocational programmes and subjects, and how these codes condition students’ practice of citizenship at individual, social and political levels. The results show how different pedagogic codes have different implications for the students’ practice of citizenship, and thus raise questions about factors and processes that may either constrain or strengthen, this aspect in vocational subject classes.     

Stimulus salience and asymmetric forgetting in the pigeon

Pigeons were trained using a symbolic delayed matching-to-sample procedure involving bright versus dim houselight samples. We hypothesized that when sample stimuli differ in salience, increasing the size of the retention interval will affect performance on trials initiated by the more salient sample only. In agreement with this prediction, accuracy following the dim sample did not decline as the retention interval increased, whereas accuracy following the bright sample declined to well below 50% correct. In a second experiment, the less salient (dim) sample from Experiment 1 was arranged as the more salient sample in a sample/no-sample procedure. Accuracy on dim sample trials then declined to well below 50% correct as the retention interval increased, whereas accuracy on no-sample trials remained constant. The results suggest that when sample stimuli differ in salience, pigeons may transform the nominal discrimination task into a detection task in which they respond on the basis of the presence or absence of the more salient sample.     

The Algebraic Nature of Students’ Numerical Manipulation in the New Zealand Numeracy Project

The New Zealand Ministry of Education has introduced a Numeracy Project for students aged 5–14 years in selected schools. The project encourages the adoption of flexible strategies for solving numerical problems, and discourages reliance on standard computational algorithms. One potential benefit of the project is that the methods students acquire in the project may provide a foundation for algebraic thinking through the use of quasi-variables in numerical operations. In order to evaluate this possibility, we constructed a 21-item test of numerical manipulation that required an underlying awareness of the presence of quasi-variables. The test was administered to 431 12-year-old students who participated in the project and to 468 students who did not. The test consisted of six sections, each of which examined the application of a different aspect of reasoning to numerical problems. The results showed that students who participated in the Numeracy Project solved numerical problems that required manipulation with more success than did students who had not participated in the project. This proved to be the case for three different levels of analysis: for the test as a whole, for each of the six sections of the test, and for every individual item of the test. The results were interpreted as showing that the project fostered students awareness of numbers as quasi-variables and thus provided an early indicator of algebraic thinking.