Where are the Missing Masses? The Quasi-Publics and Non-Publics of Technoscience

The paper offers a political-philosophical analysis of the state and publics in the age of technoscience to propose three distinct categories of publics: scientific-citizen publics constituted by civil society, quasi-publics that initiate another kind of engagement through the activation of ??political society,?? and non-publics cast outside these spheres of engagement. This re-categorization is possible when the central role of the state in its citizens?? engagement with technoscience is put upfront and the non-Western empirical contexts are taken seriously by Science, Technology and Policy (STP) studies. The paper argues that in most of the world the state maintains a political contract with technoscience to form a functional coupling as the state-technoscience duo, which shapes public engagement with science through different functional modalities of government. Civil society is the sphere of legitimate engagement and participation in technoscientific issues for the scientific-citizen publics. The quasi-publics choose to be in the shady zone of political society establishing a paralegal relationship with the state-technoscience duo, while the non-publics come into being due to conditions of extra-legality created by the duo. The non-publics are implicated in the political community paradoxically as an excluded category who cannot be included in deliberation because of their status as being expelled from political community in a ??state of exception.?? The paper proposes that the scientific-citizen publics are mobilized in contrast to the quasi-publics and with reference to the non-publics, helping STP studies to identify the ??missing masses?? of technoscience.     

‘My work is bleeding’: exploring students’ emotional responses to first-year assignment feedback

This paper explores the emotional responses that assignment feedback can provoke in first-year undergraduates. The literature on the link between emotions and learning is well established, but surprisingly research on the relationship between emotions and feedback is still relatively scarce. This article aims to make an additional contribution to this emerging field. Semi-structured interviews with 24 first-year undergraduate students from the Humanities and Social Sciences department in a post-1992 institution were conducted. The interview narratives identified how the emotional impact of feedback was related to: prior experiences of education, the significance participants attached to the feedback received on their first assignment and how their interpretations of feedback comments were linked to beliefs about themselves as learners. The implications of these experiences on student ‘belonging’ and learning are discussed. The underlying themes that emerged from the findings are the polarised emotions of anxiety and confidence. Based on the findings, the paper concludes by making recommendations for reconceptualising feedback on first-year assignments. It suggests that a holistic assessment approach, which incorporates timely feedback indicating if students are ‘on the right lines’ with low-stakes assignments, is a practice that may both reduce anxiety and increase confidence to support students.     

The relationship between child behaviour problems at school entrance and teenage vocabulary acquisition: A comparison of two generations of British children born 30 years apart

Behaviour problems in early childhood have a lasting impact on cognitive development and education attainment in later adolescence and into adulthood. Here we address the relationship conduct and hyperactivity problems at school entrance, and vocabulary acquisition in adolescence. We compare performance in identical assessments across two generations of British children born 30 years apart in 1970 (n = 15,676) and 2000/2 (n = 16,628) and find that both conduct and hyperactivity problems have a negative association with later vocabulary in both generations. We take advantage of rich longitudinal birth cohort data and establish that these relationships hold once family socioeconomic status and a child’s personal characteristics and earlier vocabulary acquisition are taken into account. We also find that teenagers today achieved substantively lower scores in the vocabulary assessment compared to their counterparts born 30 years earlier, and that this holds across all categories within each of the family and individual characteristics considered in this article. As vocabulary and language skills are key prerequisites for wider learning, we discuss implications the findings have for education policies.     

THE ACHIEVEMENT GOALS ORIENTATION OF SOUTH AFRICAN FIRST YEAR UNIVERSITY PHYSICS STUDENTS

This paper is concerned with organizational principles of a pool of familiar problems of expert problem posers and the ways by which they are utilized for creating new problems. The presented case of Leo is part of a multiple-case study with expert problem posers for mathematics competitions. We present and inductively analyze the data collected in a reflective interview and in a clinical task-based interview with Leo. In the first interview, Leo was asked to share with us the stories behind some problems posed by him in the past. In the second interview, he was asked to pose a new competition problem in a thinking-aloud mode. We found that Leo’s pool of familiar problems is organized in classes according to certain nesting ideas. Furthermore, these nesting ideas serve him in posing problems that, ideally, are perceived by Leo as novel and surprising not only to potential solvers, but also to himself. Because of the lack of empirical research on experts in mathematical problem posing, the findings are discussed in light of research on experts in problem solving and on novices in mathematical problem posing.     

Supporting Transgender College Students: Implications for Clinical Intervention and Campus Prevention

This study examines the experiences of transgender college students in coping with stress in comparison to their cisgender peers. Undergraduate and graduate students from 73 colleges, totaling 26,292 participants, of which 47 identified as transgender completed an online survey. Transgender students reported greater exposure to trauma and higher rates of suicidal experiences, as well as different precipitants to reported stressful periods and sources of support than their cisgender peers. Implications for individual and group counseling as well as outreach and prevention to better support transgender students are explored.