Argumentation in Science Teacher Education: The simulated jury as a resource for teaching and learning

In this article, we focus on the contributions that a simulated jury-based activity might have for pre-service teachers, especially for their active participation and learning in teacher education. We observed a teacher educator using a series of simulated juries as teaching resources to help pre-service teachers develop their pedagogical knowledge and their argumentation abilities in a physics teacher methods course. For the purposes of this article, we have selected one simulated jury-based activity, comprising two opposed groups of pre-service teachers that presented aspects that hinder the teachers' development of professional knowledge (against group) and aspects that allow this development (favor group). After the groups’ presentations, a group of judges was formed to evaluate the discussion. We applied a multi-level method for discourse analysis and the results showed that (1) the simulated jury afforded the pre-service teachers to position themselves as active knowledge producers; (2) the teacher acted as ‘animator' of the pre-service teachers' actions, showing responsiveness to the emergence of circumstantial teaching and learning opportunities and (3) the simulated jury culminated in the judges’ identification of the pattern ‘concrete/obstacles–ideological/possibilities' in the groups’ responses, which was elaborated by the teacher for the whole class. Implications from this study include using simulated juries for teaching and learning and for the development of the pre-service teachers’ argumentative abilities. The potential of simulated juries to improve teaching and learning needs to be further explored in order to inform the uses and reflections of this resource in science education.     

The societal embeddedness of records: teaching the meaning of the fourth dimension of the Records Continuum Model in different cultural contexts

The Continuum concept of pluralisation is often misunderstood. This paper aims to explain how records are embedded in the society that created them from the time of their creation and how they can be further embedded throughout their lifespan by adding metadata to them, placing them in context, making them accessible to those who will need them in the future and potentially sharing them with the broader society according to societal rules. The author proposes to use the concept of societal embeddedness, which indicates that pluralisation is not just about sharing in the future, but also about incorporating societal expectations in records and recordkeeping systems, to help explain the concept of pluralisation. She shows how using simple examples from everyday life and discussing the societal context of the creation and use of records can help explain Records Continuum concepts, and in particular the concept of pluralisation, to students from non-English speaking backgrounds.

     

An Epistemological and Didactic Study of a Specific Calculus Reasoning Rule

Abstract It is widely attested that university students face considerable difficulties with reasoning in analysis, especially when dealing with statements involving two different quantifiers. We focus in this paper on a specific mistake which appears in proofs where one applies twice or more a statement of the kind “for all X, there exists Y such that R(X, Y)”, and forgets that in that case, a priori, “Y depends on X”. We analyse this mistake from both a logical and mathematical point of view, and study it through two inquiries, an historical one and a didactic one. We show that mathematics teachers emphasise the importance of the dependence rule in order to avoid this kind of mistake, while natural deduction in predicate calculus provides a logical framework to analyse and control the use of quantifiers. We show that the relevance of this dependence rule depends heavily on the context: nearly without interest in geometry, but fundamental in analysis or linear algebra. As a consequence, mathematical knowledge is a key to correct reasoning, so that there is a large distance between beginners' and experts' abilities regarding control of validity, that, to be shortened, probably requires more than a syntactic rule or informal advice. Résumé Les difficultés de manipulation, par les étudiants, des énoncés contenant deux quantificateurs différents, rencontrés dans de nombreux raisonnements en analyse, sont bien attestées. Nous nous intéressons plus spécialement dans cet article à une erreur qui appara?t dans certaines preuves lorsque l'on applique deux fois ou plus un énoncé de la forme “pour tout X, il existe Y tel que R(X,Y)” et que l'on oublie que dans un tel cas, a priori, “Y dépend de X”. Nous analysons cette erreur d'un point de vue logique et d'un point de vue mathématique, puis nous l'étudions à travers deux enquêtes, l'une historique et l'autre didactique. Nous montrons que les professeurs de mathématiques soulignent l'importance de la règle de dépendance pour éviter ce type d'erreur, tandis que la déduction naturelle dans le calcul des prédicats fournit un cadre de référence logique pour analyser et contr?ler l'usage des quantificateurs. Nous montrons que la pertinence de la règle de dépendance dépend fortement du contexte: pratiquement sans intérêt en géométrie, elle est tout à fait fondamentale en analyse et en algèbre linéaire. De ce fait, les connaissances mathématiques sont la clé d'un raisonnement correct, si bien qu'il y a une grande distance entre le débutant et l'expert concernant le contr?le de la validité, que quelques règles syntaxiques ou quelques conseils informels ne permettent vraisemblablement pas de réduire.     

Care Leavers’ records: a case for a Repurposed Archive Continuum Model

The historical records created by Australian child welfare agencies were never intended to be released to the children after they left ‘care’. They were administrative records that were compiled for the agencies’ own use, not to meet the needs of the children or their adult selves. What happened after records were released to Care Leavers and reused by them is not what the agencies intended to happen. The author argues that this cannot be adequately mapped onto the Records Continuum Model and proposes a Repurposed Archive Continuum Model to represent the processes involved when Care Leavers are attempting to access their records.     

Relevance feedback and cross-language information retrieval

This paper presents a study of relevance feedback in a cross-language information retrieval environment. We have performed an experiment in which Portuguese speakers are asked to judge the relevance of English documents; documents hand-translated to Portuguese and documents automatically translated to Portuguese. The goals of the experiment were to answer two questions (i) how well can native Portuguese searchers recognise relevant documents written in English, compared to documents that are hand translated and automatically translated to Portuguese; and (ii) what is the impact of misjudged documents on the performance improvement that can be achieved by relevance feedback. Surprisingly, the results show that machine translation is as effective as hand translation in aiding users to assess relevance in the experiment. In addition, the impact of misjudged documents on the performance of RF is overall just moderate, and varies greatly for different query topics.