阅读使人明理

有人曾说,"写作"是人类创造美的天赋,那么"阅读"就是这种天赋的延伸。通过阅读,我们能涤荡灵魂,体会我们未曾体验过的人生。请看本刊来自德国的实习生埃琳娜是因何与书结缘,如何通过阅读改变自己的人生轨迹。     

The Congress for Cultural Freedom, <Emphasis Type="Italic">Minerva</Emphasis>, and the Quest for Instituting “Science Studies” in the Age of Cold War

The Congress for Cultural Freedom is remembered as a paramount example of the “cultural cold wars.” In this paper, I discuss the ways in which this powerful transnational organization sought to promote “science studies” as a distinct – and politically relevant – area of expertise, and part of the CCF broader agenda to offer a renewed framework for liberalism. By means of its Study Groups, international conferences and its periodicals, such as Minerva, the Congress developed into an influential forum for examining the ways Big Science impacted the relations between science, society, and politics, thus constituting a semi-institutional niche for Science Studies before its professionalization within academia during the 1970s. I argue that the Congress contributed to the construction of public space in which the relations between science, society and politics were debated, and science was reconceptualized as a social activity. The vision of “science studies” the CCF-associated intellectuals promulgated was different from the science studies we know today. Yet, this alternative vision, in which the issues of science politics appeared inseparable from those of science policy, science organization, and science governance, constituted the “pre-history” of science studies today.     

A research impact indicator for institutions

This paper introduces a new impact indicator for the research effort of a university, ⁿh₃. The number of documents or the number of citations obtained by an institution are used frequently in international ranking of institutions. However, these are very dependent on the size and this is inducing mergers with the apparent sole goal of improving the research ranking. The alternative is to use the ratio of the two measures, the mean citation rate, that is size independent but it has been shown to fluctuate along the time as a consequence of its dependence on a very small number of documents with an extremely good citation performance. In the last few years, the popularity of the Hirsch index as an indicator of the research performance of individual researchers led to its application to journals and institutions. However, the original aim of this h index of giving a mixed measure of the number of documents published and their impact as measured by the citations collected along the time is totally undesirable for institutions as the overall size may be considered irrelevant for the impact evaluation of research. Furthermore, the h index when applied to institutions tends to retain a very small number of documents making all other research production irrelevant for this indicator. The ⁿh₃ index proposed here is designed to measure solely the impact of research in a way that is independent of the size of the institution and is made relatively stable by making a 20-year estimate of the citations of the documents produced in a single year.     

Factors that Differentiate Mathematics Students in Cyprus,Hong Kong,and the USA

The purpose of this study was twofold: to examine how attitudinal and instructional variables differentiated 4th-grade students in Cyprus, Hong Kong, and the USA; and to determine how those variables were related to math performance on the TIMSS test. A discriminant analysis was performed to examine how those variables differentiated the students in the 3 countries. The most striking result was that the students from all 3 countries, who were similar to the average students in Cyprus, had the highest achievement within their countries. Thus, 4th-grade students who liked math, who thought it was important to do well in math for their friends, who did not need private instruction, and who had not been taught using computers or small group procedures, tended to be the better students. However, students who were similar to the average USA student had the lowest achievement within each of the 3 countries.     

Sex education and cultural values: experiences and attitudes of Latina immigrant women

The paper aims to further explore the role that culture plays in the provision and assimilation of sex education among Latina immigrants in the USA. To accomplish this, researchers conducted focus groups and interviews with 30 women from Central and South America who have lived in the USA for at least five years. Participants were asked to reflect on their experience with sex education in their home country and in the USA, and to assess how their attitudes towards sex education may impact their behavioural choices as parents and as sexually-active women. The findings demonstrate a wide range of views that did not follow patterns by common demographical proxy variables, suggesting that such variables are not enough to predict adoption of new cultural values that are different from their family's traditional norms. Instead, adherence to traditional cultural beliefs appeared to be a better predictor of attitudes and behaviours.     

Negotiating Academic Learning and Research: The Spiritual Praxis of Graduate Students of Color

Drawing on data collected in a qualitative study of racially minoritized faculty members, this article examines the challenges these faculty members faced in bringing different aspects of their spirituality into their scholarly work as graduate students. This article explores the questions: How do racially minoritized graduate students negotiate their spiritual identities and integrate their spiritual epistemologies and cultural knowledge into academic practices, and what challenges do they face in doing both? This article presents three salient themes: sacred subjectivity in student-focused research, spiritual praxis in the classroom, and new visions for inclusive spiritual expression in the academy. By focusing our analysis on study participants' strategies for resisting pressures to closet their beliefs, this article affirms the importance of legitimizing the spiritual epistemological perspectives of racially minoritized graduate students in creating a more equitable and diverse higher education culture.     

Cognitive attainment in online learning environments: matching cognitive and technological presence

To know whether students' achievements are the result of online interaction and not just a consequence of individual differences themselves, it seems essential to link the cognitive results to the students' online behavior (technological presence). In technological presence, interaction is based on the degree in which the online student senses the availability of, and connectedness with, other students, the teacher, and the context. Cognitive presence as a part of the interaction process of teaching and learning reflects the level of accomplishment in online learning environments (cognitive attainment). The purpose of this article is to show some evidence of the mutual influence of the students' technological behaviors and the students' cognitive factors in online learning environments – including teacher and instructional design factors. Two thousand one-hundred thirty written computer-mediated communications from 88 participants in four prototypical online learning activities have been analyzed for this purpose. The analysis shows the influence of technological presence on the quality of learning results of the online knowledge construction process. The conclusions point out the importance of considering technological presence as a new and complementary type of presence as it provides relevant information for instructional and technological design.     

Twenty-four-hour movement behaviours and fundamental movement skills in preschool children: A compositional and isotemporal substitution analysis

ABSTRACT

Studies that have analysed the association between the different movement behaviours and fundamental movement skills (FMS) have considered it in an independent manner, disregarding the compositional nature of 24-h movement behaviours (24-h MB). The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between the 24-h MB and FMS in preschoolers using a compositional data analysis . Two hundred and four preschoolers (4.5 ± 0.8 years old; 101 boys) provided objectively assessed physical activity (PA) and sedentary behaviour (SB) data (Actigraph wGT3X), and FMS (TGMD-2). Sleep duration (SD) was reported by parents. Association of daily composition of movement behaviours with FMS was explored using compositional analysis and isotemporal substitution (R Core Team, 3.6.1). When considered as a 24-h MB composition (PA, SB and SD), adjusted for age, BMI and sex, the composition predicted locomotor (r² = 0.31), object control (r² = 0.19), and total motor score (r² = 0.35), respectively (all P < 0.001). Reallocation of time from light to moderate-to-vigorous PA was associated with greatest positive changes in total motor score. Achieving adequate balance between movement behaviours over the 24-h period, and its relationship with locomotor and object control skills should be considered and further investigated in early childhood.