Contribution a L'etude de L'analphabetisme

Sans résumé

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A contribution to the study of illiteracy

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Ein Beitrag zur Untersuchung des Analphabetentums

     

The cognitive levels test: Its relationship with reading and mathematics achievement

Any instrument designed to measure broad cognitive ability is expected to correlate substantially with valid measures of academic achievement. This report describes an investigation designed to evaluate the relationship between the Cognitive Levels Test, a newly available instrument, and two tests of academic achievement that have been widely used for nearly two decades: the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests and the KeyMath Diagnostic Arithmetic Test. The study included children in grades K-2 who were enrolled in a remedial summer school program. The results showed the Cognitive Levels Test (Cognitive Index) to be rather highly correlated with the KeyMath Diagnostic Arithmetic Test Total score (r=.72) and moderately correlated with the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests Total Reading score (r=.55). A repeated measures analysis of variance comparing standard scores for the Cognitive Levels Test with those of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests indicated few mean differences between the two sets of scores. Implications concerning the validity of the Cognitive Levels Test were discussed.     

Anonymity versus commitment: The dangers of education on the internet

I shall translate Kierkegaard's account of the dangers and opportunities of what he called the Press into a critique of the Internet so as to raise the question: what contribution -- for good or ill -- can the World Wide Web, with its ability to deliver vast amounts of information to users all over the world, make to educators trying to pass on knowledge and to develop skills and wisdom in their students? I will then use Kierkegaard's three-stage answer to the problem of lack of involvement posed by the Press -- his claim that to have a meaningful life the learner must pass through the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious spheres of existence -- to suggest that only the first two stages -- the aesthetic and the ethical -- can be implemented with Information Technology, while the final stage, which alone makes meaningful learning possible, is undermined rather than supported by the tendencies of the desituated and anonymous Net.     

Fictitious social position of competence, and performance in a foreign-language interaction situation: An experimental approach

A substantial body of research has shown that in experiments where subjects are required to accomplish an intellectual task, their cognitive performance is influenced by the social aspects of the situation. The goal of this study was to determine how a fictitious social position of inferiority or superiority affects cognitive activity. Two studies in which subjects interacted with a partner are reported. In the first, the subject’s position in comparison to his/her partner stemmed from a fictitious level of competence assigned on a single comparative dimension (foreign-language proficiency). In the second, another comparative dimension whose social status was either high (geometry) or low (art) was added. The results showed that in a communicative interaction, what subjects are told about themselves and about their partner along one or two comparative dimensions is a determinant of the quantity and quality of what they produce. Theoretical explanations are proposed. One of them is based on classical studies on the working self-concept. A general point that emerges from these studies is that cognitive performance should be investigated not only in a cognitive and didactic perspective, but also from a sociocognitive standpoint.     

Open access developments in France: the HAL Open Archives System

This article presents an overview of open access publishing and open access archiving in France. In natural sciences, most articles are published in international journals; authors must therefore comply with the policies of their publishers, irrespective of their nationality. For humanities and social sciences, where publication tends to be distributed among many small journals, portals have been created to provide electronic publishing, with varied access policies. Open archives repositories have been in existence in France since 2001; from 2006, a proactive policy led the main research agencies and universities to coordinate their actions towards a common archiving platform, HAL (Hyper Articles on Line), operated by CNRS (Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique), with individual portals, either thematic or institutional. HAL stores now the majority of open access records – presently some 10–15% of French output – and is growing almost exponentially.     

Extracting the hydrodynamic resistance of droplets from their behavior in microchannel networks

The overall traffic of droplets in a network of microfluidic channels is strongly influenced by the liquid properties of the moving droplets. In particular, the effective hydrodynamic resistance of individual droplets plays a key role in their global behavior. Here we propose two simple and low-cost experimental methods for measuring this parameter by analyzing the dynamics of a regular sequence of droplets injected into an “asymmetric loop” network. The choice of a droplet taking either route through the loop is influenced by the presence of previous droplets that modulate the hydrodynamic resistance of the branches they are sitting in. We propose to extract the effective resistance of a droplet from easily observable time series, namely, from the choices the droplets make at junctions and from the interdroplet distances. This becomes possible when utilizing a recently proposed theoretical model based on a number of simplifying assumptions. Here we present several sets of measurements of the hydrodynamic resistance of droplets, expressed in terms of a “resistance length.” The aim is twofold: (1) to reveal its dependence on a number of parameters, such as the viscosity, the volume of droplets, their velocity as well as the spacing between them. At the same time (2), by using a standard measurement technique, we compare the limitations of the proposed methods. As an important result of this comparison, we obtain the range of validity of the simplifying assumptions made in the theoretical model.