How Do Children Socially Learn from Narrative Fiction: Getting the Lesson,Simulating Social Worlds,or Dialogic Inquiry?

Educational Psychology Review - Educators read narrative fiction with children not only to promote their literacy skills, but also to support their sociomoral development. However, different...     

Correction to: How Do Children Socially Learn from Narrative Fiction: Getting the Lesson,Simulating Social Worlds,or Dialogic Inquiry?

Educational Psychology Review -     

One year of anatomy teaching and learning in the outbreak: Has the Covid-19 pandemic marked the end of a century-old practice? A systematic review

At the end of 2019, the Covid-19 pandemic spread caused restrictions in business and social spheres. Higher education was also severely affected: universities and medical schools moved online to distance learning and laboratory facilities closed. Questions arise about the long-term effects of this pandemic on anatomical education. In this systematic review, the authors investigated whether or not anatomical educators were able to deliver anatomical knowledge during this pandemic. They also discuss the challenges that anatomical education has faced over the last year. The search strategy was conducted between July 2020 and July 2021. Two hundred and one records were identified, and a total of 79 studies were finally included. How best to deliver anatomy to students remains a moot point. In the last years, the advent of new technologies has raised the question of the possible overcoming of dissection as the main instrument in anatomical education. The Covid-19 pandemic further sharpened the debate. Remote learning enhanced the use of technologies other than cadaveric dissection to teach anatomy. Moreover, from the analyzed records it appears that both from students' perspective as well as teachers' there is a clear tear between those who endorse dissection and those who believe it could be easily overcome or at least integrated by virtual reality and online learning. The authors strongly believe that the best anatomy teaching practice requires the careful adaptation of resources and methods. Nevertheless, they support cadaveric dissection and hope that it will not be replaced entirely as a result of this pandemic.     

Impact of an inquiry unit on grade 4 students’ science learning

This paper concerns the identification of teaching strategies that enhance the development of 4th grade students’ experimental design skills at a public primary school in Argentina. Students’ performance in the design of relevant experiments was evaluated before and after an eight-week intervention compared to a control group, as well as the persistence of this learning after eight months. The study involved a quasi-experimental longitudinal study with pre-test/post-test/delayed post-test measures, complemented with semi-structured interviews with randomly selected students. Our findings showed improvement in the experimental design skills as well as its sustainability among students working with the inquiry-based sequence. After the intervention, students were able to establish valid comparisons, propose pertinent designs and identify variables that should remain constant. Contrarily, students in the control group showed no improvement and continued to solve the posed problems based on prior beliefs. In summary, this paper shows evidence that implementing inquiry-based units involving problems set in cross-domain everyday situations that combine independent student work with teacher guidance significantly improves the development of scientific skills in real classroom contexts.     

On time-varying collaboration networks

The patterns of scientific collaboration have been frequently investigated in terms of complex networks without reference to time evolution. In the present work, we derive collaborative networks (from the arXiv repository) parameterized along time. By defining the concept of affine group, we identify several interesting trends in scientific collaboration, including the fact that the average size of the affine groups grows exponentially, while the number of authors increases as a power law. We were therefore able to identify, through extrapolation, the possible date when a single affine group is expected to emerge. Characteristic collaboration patterns were identified for each researcher, and their analysis revealed that larger affine groups tend to be less stable.