Acquisition of Complex Systemic Thinking: Mental Models of Evolution

We investigated the impact of introducing college students to complex adaptive systems on their subsequent mental models of evolution compared to those of students taught in the same manner but with no reference to complex systems. The students' mental models (derived from similarity ratings of 12 evolutionary terms using the pathfinder algorithm) were significantly similar to their teachers' mental models and were correlated to their performance on an essay on evolution. Introducing students to complex systems facilitated their understanding of the mechanism of inheritance, the mechanism of evolution, and the role of chance in evolution.     

VI. Patogenia

De la exposición histórica que hemos dado ya, se desprenden dos concepciones principales que pueden resumir los mecanismos patogenéticos de la afasia. Una es la neurológica y la otra la psicológica.     

Individual Education Plans Revisited: A Review of the Literature

Considerable attention and debate has surrounded the implementation of individual education plans (IEPs) for students with special needs during the past two decades. It is, therefore, timely to revisit the IEP process and examine the nature of the debate. In this paper, literature is reviewed to identify what has been learned from implementation of the IEP process and to highlight remaining questions about IEP efficacy and utility. The phases of evolution of the IEP process described by Smith (1990b) provide a framework for reviewing the literature. Issues requiring attention are highlighted and directions for further research are identified.     

The Sources of Error in Spanish Writing (Research Note)

The main aim of this study was to determine the pattern of errors in Spanish spelling. Specifically, we were interested in discovering if all Spanish words have similar levels of spelling difficulty or whether there are types of words that cause a high percentage of spelling errors. 972 children aged between 8 to 10 years were requested to write a short spontaneous story. Our objective was to analyse and to propose a classification system for the errors made by children in the initial stages of the acquisition of spelling skills. The results indicate (a) that the diverse forms of only 20 Spanish words produce 36 per cent of the spelling errors in Spanish, and (b) that substitution is the most frequent type of error (68 per cent of total errors), which occurs as a consequence of an inadequate knowledge of the rules of phoneme-grapheme correspondence. These findings have relevance for the teaching of writing in Spanish.     

An interdisciplinary collaboration between computer engineering and mathematics/bilingual education to develop a curriculum for underrepresented middle school students

There is a strong need in the United States to increase the number of students from underrepresented groups who pursue careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Drawing from sociocultural theory, we present approaches to establishing collaborations between computer engineering and mathematics/bilingual education faculty to address this need. We describe our work through the Advancing Out-of-School Learning in Mathematics and Engineering project by illustrating how an integrated curriculum that is based on mathematics with applications in image and video processing can be designed and how it can be implemented with middle school students from underrepresented groups.