Analysing teachers' operations when teaching students: what constitutes scientific theories?

ABSTRACT

The aim of the study is to analyse teachers’ efforts to develop secondary school students’ knowledge and argumentation skills of what constitutes scientific theories. The analysis is based on Leontiev’s three-level structure of activity (activity, action, and operation), as these levels correspond to the questions why, what, and how content is taught. The unit of analysis was a school development project in science education, where design-based interventions were conducted. Data comprised notes and minutes from eight meetings, plans, and video recordings of the lessons, and a written teacher evaluation. The teachers’ (n = 7) learning actions were analysed to identify (a) concept formation in science education, (b) expressions of agency, (c) discursive manifestations of contradictions, and (d) patterns of interaction during the science interventions. Three lessons on what constitutes scientific theories were implemented in three different student groups (n = 24, 23, 24), framed by planning and evaluation meetings for each lesson. The results describe (1) the ways in which teachers became more skilled at ensuring instruction met their students’ needs and (2) the ways in which teachers’ operations during instruction changed as a result of their developed knowledge of how to express the content based on theoretical assumptions.     

Structural aspects of controllability and Sobservability—II. digraph decomposition

The graph theoretic aspects of controllability and observability are examined and related to the tensorial formulation of Part I of the paper. Particular emphasis is given to the significance of the system digraph decomposition and the relevance of this to certain system algebraic properties of interest in control theory.     

The Role of Consistency in Detecting Deception: The Superiority of Correspondence over Coherence

Inconsistency is often considered an indication of deceit. The conceptualization of consistency used in deception research, however, has not made a clear distinction between two concepts long differentiated by philosophers: coherence and correspondence. The existing literature suggests that coherence is not generally useful for deception detection. Correspondence, however, appears to be quite useful. The present research developed a model of how correspondence is utilized to make judgments, and this article reports on four studies designed to elaborate on the model. The results suggest that judges attend strongly to correspondence and that they do so in an additive fashion. As noncorrespondent information accumulates, an increasingly smaller proportion of judges make truthful assessments of guilty suspects. This work provides a basic framework for examining how information is utilized to make deception judgments and forms the correspondence and coherence module of truth-default theory.