Do mathematicians and undergraduates agree about explanation quality?

Educational Studies in Mathematics - Offering explanations is a central part of teaching mathematics, and understanding those explanations is a vital activity for learners. Given this, it is...     

Knowledge Production,Mobilization and Standardization in Chile’s HidroAysén Case

The Aysén Hydroelectric Project in Chilean Patagonia proposed the construction of the country’s largest power facility to supply its capital, nearly 2,000 kilometres away. We seek to explain the way science, politics, law, business and the civilian population are joined up. To this end, we analyse the project’s evolution, the construction of techno-scientific arguments by the participants and how Chilean regulations are adapting to this process.     

Factors Influencing Scientific Achievements of Medical Students in the Anatomy Research Group: An Analysis From the Autonomous University of Nuevo León in Mexico

Scientific research and student involvement are critical to the formation of physicians, yet the number of medical researchers has decreased over time. To implement corrective strategies, the variables associated with positive research attitudes and productivity among medical students must be identified. The aim of this study was to evaluate the variables associated with students interested or involved in research. A validated questionnaire was applied to the student members of an established anatomy research group in a Mexican medical school with a six-year medical program. Data were collected and analyzed. A total of 85.5% (n = 77/90) students answered the survey with most respondents being second-year medical students. The majority of respondents indicated that the important component of conducting research was a contribution to the new knowledge (45.5%) and to the scientific community (42.9%). More than half of respondents mentioned a professor or a peer as the initial motivation to become involved in research. Lack of time was the main limitation (59.7%) to research involvement. Perceived benefits were knowledge and team work skills. Of those involved, most (85.7%) wished to continue participating in research as a complement to their clinical work. Professors and student colleagues were found to play an important motivational and recruitment role for medical research. These efforts in turn have developed into long-lasting mentor-mentee relationships. Students also anticipated that early involvement in research will positively influence the likelihood of future physicians' contribution and collaboration in research.     

The influence of trait meta-mood on subjective well-being in high school students: a random intercept cross-lagged panel analysis

Trait meta-mood refers to people’s conscious awareness of their own emotions. This reflexive process is relevant to developing a better adaptation to the environment, understanding the individual differences in how people perceive and attend to emotions, and how they can understand and regulate them in an optimal way. Previous research has indicated that trait meta-mood plays an important role in well-being. Accordingly, the main objective of this study was to analyse the prospective effects of trait meta-mood on levels of subjective well-being. A sample of 570 high school students (289 females), from 12 to 17 years (M?=?13.80, SD?=?1.45), completed measures of trait meta-mood, satisfaction with life, and positive and negative mood states across three waves separated by 1-year intervals. Random intercept cross-lagged panel analyses indicated that the dimensions of meta-mood accounted for a significant amount of variance in both cognitive and affective dimensions of well-being across time.     

Investigación y práctica educativa en el desarrollo de la comprensión lectora

Resumen

Se revisan en este artículo los procesos de adquisición y uso del lenguaje y la lectoescritura en la escuela, como conformadores de los diversos mecanismos de comprensión. Se valora a continuación la aportación de los modelos teóricos de instrucción en la comprensión: esquemas, estrategias de resumen y extracción de ideas principales, técnicas de estudio y mecanismos metacognitivos de control, con vistas a una renovación de la didáctica de la lectoescritura.     

Perceived emotional intelligence as predictor of psychological adjustment in adolescents: a 1-year prospective study

In recent years, emotional intelligence has appeared as a predictor of adults’ mental health, but little research has examined its involvement in adolescents’ psychological adjustment. In this paper, we analyzed the predictive validity of perceived emotional intelligence (attention to feelings, emotional clarity, and emotional repair) over psychological adjustment in an adolescent sample at two temporal stages with a 1-year interval. At Time 1, the results indicated that adolescents with high scores in attention to feelings and low scores in emotional clarity and repair display poorer psychological adjustment, concretely, higher levels of anxiety, depression, and social stress and lower levels of general mental health. At Time 2, attention to feelings and emotional repair significantly predicted adolescents’ psychological well-being, even when the effects of previous psychological adjustment were controlled for. The findings suggest that perceived emotional intelligence is a stable predictor of adolescent adjustment and may serve as a useful resource for preventive interventions.     

Reading guided by automated graphical representations: How model-based text visualizations facilitate learning in reading comprehension tasks

Our study integrates automated natural language-oriented assessment and analysis methodologies into feasible reading comprehension tasks. With the newly developed T-MITOCAR toolset, prose text can be automatically converted into an association net which has similarities to a concept map. The “text to graph” feature of the software is based on several parsing heuristics and can be used both to assess the learner’s understanding by generating graphical information from his or her text and to generate conceptual graphs from text which can be used as learning materials. In this study we investigate the effects of association nets made available to learners prior to reading. The results reveal that the automatically created graphs are highly similar to classical expert graphs. However, neither the association nets nor the expert graphs had a significant effect on learning, although the latter have been reported to have an effect in previous studies.     

ZigID: Improving visibility in industrial environments by combining WSN and RFID

The objective of this work is to provide decision-making processes with an updated/real picture of the mobile resources in industrial environments through a constant feedback of information. The combination of identification technologies and wireless sensor networks (WSN) is proposed as a key development to guarantee an accurate and timely supply of online information regarding the localization and tracking of the mobile wireless devices. This approach uses a cooperative and distributed localization system, called ZigID, which is a WSN based on a Zigbee network with radio frequency identification (RFID) active tags as end nodes. The WSN can recover not only the ID information stored at the tags attached to mobile resources, but also any other useful data captured by specific sensors for acceleration, temperature, humidity and fuel status. This paper also shows the development of ZigID, including devices and information flows, as well as its implementation in ground handling operations at the Ciudad Real Central Airport, Spain.     

Using structural contexts to compress semistructured text collections

We describe a compression model for semistructured documents, called Structural Contexts Model (SCM), which takes advantage of the context information usually implicit in the structure of the text. The idea is to use a separate model to compress the text that lies inside each different structure type (e.g., different XML tag). The intuition behind SCM is that the distribution of all the texts that belong to a given structure type should be similar, and different from that of other structure types.