Systemizing and the gender gap: examining academic achievement and perseverance in STEM

For years, a popular explanation for women choosing to abandon studies in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) has been their lack of aptitude. This study challenged that notion by integrating theories of cognitive style, academic emotion, self-efficacy, and motivation to explain students’ academic achievement and perseverance in STEM when transitioning to college. A sample of 1597 high school and junior college students participated. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were first conducted to validate a reduced version of the cognitive style questionnaire. Structural equation modeling revealed that the cognitive style known as systemizing indirectly predicted STEM achievement and persistence by way of intrinsic motivation, learning anxiety, and self-efficacy, providing a new perspective for re-examining the gender gap in STEM.

     

Relating Narrative, Inquiry, and Inscriptions: Supporting Consequential Play

In this paper we describe our research using a multi-user virtual environment, Quest Atlantis, to embed fourth grade students in an aquatic habitat simulation. Specifically targeted towards engaging students in a rich inquiry investigation, we layered a socio-scientific narrative and an interactive rule set into a multi-user virtual environment gaming engine to establish a virtual world through which students learned about science inquiry, water quality concepts, and the challenges in balancing scientific and socio-economic factors. Overall, students were clearly engaged, participated in rich scientific discourse, submitted quality work, and learned science content. Further, through participation in this narrative, students developed a rich perceptual, conceptual, and ethical understanding of science. This study suggests that multi-user virtual worlds can be effectively leveraged to support academic content learning.     

A Physical Interpretation of Factorization and Factor Modification in Structural Analysis

The physical interpretation of LDL^t factorization and Bennett's method for matrix factor modification applied to structural analysis are studied. The sparsity of the matrix factors and their effect on matrix modification are examined.     

现代炼钛金术

踏破铁鞋无觅处，得来全不费工夫。发现之神将高科技材料的低成本生产工艺传授给我们。     

Studying mathematics learning in collective activity

This paper describes a study of the interplay between social and developmental processes in children's mathematics learning. The focus is on children's play of an educational game, Treasure Hunt, and the way children's interactions in play frame developmental processes involving arithmetic with base-10 blocks. Sixty-four third and fourth graders were grouped in same- and mixed-grade dyads. Analyses of interactions revealed that players were frequently involved with jointly structuring arithmetical problems involving base-10 blocks. However, the arithmetical goals that members of dyads created often differed as labor became divided in their activity. Two findings were of particular interest: (1) differences in divisions of labor as a function of players' grades and grades of their opponents led to construction of different arithmetical goals, and (2) differences in goals led to different sequences in children's strategic developments, sequences that differed from the developmental trajectory in our matched controls.