Factors Affecting Junior High School Students' Interest in Physics

We report the results of a study on students' interest in physics at the end of their compulsory schooling in Israel carried out in the framework of the ROSE Project. Factors studied were their opinions about science classes, their out-of-school experiences in physics, and their attitudes toward science and technology. Students' overall interest in physics was “neutral” (neither positive nor negative), with boys showing a higher interest than girls. We found a strong correlation between students' “neutral” interest in physics and their negative opinions about science classes. These findings raise serious questions about the implementation of changes made in the Israeli science curriculum in primary and junior high school, especially if the goal is to prepare the young generation for life in a scientific-technological era. A more in-depth analysis of the results led us to formulate curricular, behavioral, and organizational changes needed to reach this goal. ROSE (The Relevance of Science Education) is an international project with about 40 participating countries. ROSE is organized by Svein Sjoberg and Camilla Schreiner at The University of Oslo and is supported by the Research Council of Norway. Reports and details are available at http://www.ils.uio.no/english/rose/.     

Soothing pain-elicited distress in infants with swaddling and pacifiers

The effectiveness of pacifiers and swaddling in reducing pain-induced distress was compared in 2-week-old infants who underwent heel-sticks and 2-month-old infants who received injections. Crying, state, and heart rate were measured on 32 infants at each age during baseline, the stress of heel-stick or injection, and during 3-min soothing intervention and postintervention periods. At 2 weeks, infants' HR levels and crying declined significantly more rapidly in the pacifier than in the swaddling condition. At 2 months, both conditions produced similar rates of decline in HR and crying. At both ages, infants in the pacifier group spent significantly more time in an alert state than did swaddled infants. Following termination of the intervention at both ages, HR and crying tended to rebound more in the pacifier than in the swaddling group. Swaddling and pacifiers thus reduce pain-elicited distress differently.     

Automated summary evaluation with inbuilt rubric method: An alternative to constructed responses and multiple-choice tests assessments

Automated summary evaluation is proposed as an alternative to rubrics and multiple-choice tests in knowledge assessment. Inbuilt rubric is a recent Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) method that implements rubrics in an artificially-generated semantic space. It was compared with classical LSA’s cosine-based methods assessing knowledge in a within-subjects design regarding two validation sources: a comparison with the results of rubric scores and multiple-choice tests, and the sensitivity of predicting the academic level of the test-taker. Results showed a higher reliability for inbuilt rubric (from Pearson correlation coefficient .81 to .49) over the classical LSA method (from .61 to .34), and a higher sensitivity using binary logistic regressions and effect sizes to predict academic level. It is concluded that inbuilt rubric has a qualitatively higher reliability and validity than classical LSA methods in a way that is complementary to models based on semantic networks. Thus, it is concluded that new automated summary evaluation approaches such as the inbuilt rubric method can be practical in terms of reliability and efficiency, and, thus, they can offer an affordable and valuable form of knowledge assessment in different educational levels.     

Effective compiler error message enhancement for novice programming students

Programming is an essential skill that many computing students are expected to master. However, programming can be difficult to learn. Successfully interpreting compiler error messages (CEMs) is crucial for correcting errors and progressing toward success in programming. Yet these messages are often difficult to understand and pose a barrier to progress for many novices, with struggling students often exhibiting high frequencies of errors, particularly repeated errors. This paper presents a control/intervention study on the effectiveness of enhancing Java CEMs. Results show that the intervention group experienced reductions in the number of overall errors, errors per student, and several repeated error metrics. These results are important as the effectiveness of CEM enhancement has been recently debated. Further, generalizing these results should be possible at least in part, as the control group is shown to be comparable to those in several studies using Java and other languages.     

On Mathematical Visualization and the Place Where We Live

This paper is a case study of how a high school student, whom we call Karen, used a computer-based tool, the Contour Analyzer, to create graphs of height vs. distance and slope vs. distance for a flat board that she positioned with different slants and orientations. With the Contour Analyzer one can generate, on a computer screen, graphs representing functions of height and slope vs. distance corresponding to a line traced along the surface of a real object. Karen was interviewed for three one-hour sessions in an individual teaching experiment. In this paper, our focus is on how Karen came to recognize by visual inspection the mathematical behavior of the slope vs. distance function corresponding to contours traced on a flat board. Karen strove to organize her visual experience by distinguishing which aspects of the board are to be noticed and which ones are to be ignored, as well as by determining the point of view that one should adopt in order to see the variation of slope along an object. We have found it inspiring to use Winnicott's (1971) ideas about transitional objects to examine the role of the graphing instrument for Karen. This theoretical background helped us to articulate a perspective on mathematical visualization that goes beyond the dualism between internal and external representations frequently assumed in the literature, and focuses on the lived-in space that Karen experienced which encompassed at once physical attributes of the tool and human possibilities of action.This revised version was published online in September 2005 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Facilitating Grounded Online Interactions in Video-Case-Based Teacher Professional Development

The use of interactive video cases for teacher professional development is an emergent medium inspired by case study methods used extensively in law, management, and medicine, and by the advent of multimedia technology available to support online discussions. This paper focuses on Web-based grounded discussions—in which the participants base their contributions on specific events portrayed in the case—and the role facilitators play in these online interactions. This paper analyzes the online exchange of messages in one school district that participated in a video-case-based program of teacher professional development and derives principles that will help facilitators lead grounded online interactions.     

The Evolutionary Thought of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

Science & Education - The name Lamarck is very well known in the teaching of biology, being associated with an early effort to explain evolution. Nevertheless, when evolution is taught in the...