How Much Does a Shared Name Make Things Similar? Linguistic Labels, Similarity, and the Development of Inductive Inference

This article examines the development of inductive generalization, and presents a model of young children's induction and two experiments testing the model. The model specifies contribution of linguistic labels and perceptual similarity to young children's induction and predicts a correspondence between similarity judgment and induction of young children. In Experiment 1, 4- to 5-year-olds, 7- to 8-year-olds, and 11- to 12-year-olds were presented with triads of schematic faces (a Target and two Test stimuli), which varied in perceptual similarity, with one of the Test stimuli sharing a linguistic label with the Target, and another having a different label. Participants were taught an unobservable biological property about the Target and asked to generalize the property to one of the Test stimuli. Although 4- to 5-year-olds' proportions of label-based inductive generalizations varied with the degree of perceptual similarity among the compared stimuli, 11- to 12-year-olds relied exclusively on labels, and 7- to 8-year-olds appeared to be a transitional group. In Experiment 2 these findings were replicated using naturalistic stimuli (i.e., photographs of animals), with perceptual similarity manipulated by "morphing" naturalistic pictures into each other in a fixed number of steps. Overall results support predictions of the model and point to a developmental shift from treating linguistic labels as an attribute contributing to similarity to treating them as markers of a common category-a shift that appears to occur between 8 and 11 years of age.     

International staff contributions to their host institution: a case study in South Africa

The mobility of academic staff to South Africa is expected to benefit higher education institutions through teaching-research collaboration and capacity building. However, South African institutions do not always have the adequate organisational processes to facilitate host and international staff collaboration. Drawing on individual interviews with 16 lecturers from 12 different countries, all of them teaching in one South African university, this article analyses lecturers’ perceived contributions to their host university and the challenges they encountered. Recommendations revolve around the development of appropriate induction programmes and faculty forums to promote cross-cultural collaboration and the cross-fertilisation of ideas.     

Teachers and teaching in China: a critical reflection

ABSTRACT

This article offers a critical review of the impact of policy-induced changes on school teachers in the Chinese Mainland where educational reform has been an ongoing project for four decades. It addresses three aspects of the current state of teaching and the teaching profession: the contextual factors that have influenced their development; the state policies that effected the teachers; and the lessons that can be drawn from the reform experiences of the teachers. By examining the changes that have occurred in curriculum and teaching, teacher preparation and training, and teacher professionalism and leadership, this paper argues for a more inclusive approach to policy formulation and implementation that can accommodate the needs of frontline teachers serving in the diverse educational settings of Chinese schooling.     

西部大开发中的民族教育

实施西部大开发是党中央面向新世纪的重大战略决策,西部是我国少数民族和民族自治地方的主要分布地区,民族教育在我国西部大开发中具有举足轻重的作用,研究西部大开发中的民族教育是国家实现第三步战略目标的需要,也是西部地区开发和发展的需要。     

学校符号化结构与领袖教师的沟通行为——以院校协作式学校改进为背景

在院校协作式的学校改进中,负责协作计划的校内领袖教师起着重要作用。在推动学校改进计划的过程中,领袖教师需要与相关人员开展大量的沟通活动,而这些沟通行为又与学校的符号化结构也即沟通规则系统密切相关。学校的沟通规则系统分为正式沟通规则以及非正式沟通规则,领袖教师的沟通行为要建基于学校已有的各类沟通规则;同时在学校改进的契机下,领袖教师又会重新构建学校的沟通规则系统。     

Educational reform and teacher development in Hong Kong and on the Chinese Mainland

Open File: Professionalism in Teaching

Educational reform and teacher development in Hong Kong and on the Chinese Mainland     

Adoptive Parenting Cognitions: Acknowledgement of Differences as a Predictor of Adolescents’ Attachment to Parents

SYNOPSIS

Objective. Adoptive parents’ acknowledgment of differences is defined as the propensity to think that adoptive and nonadoptive families are different in important ways. Few studies have examined the implications of such cognitions for the parent–child bond. Design. Structural equation modeling was utilized to examine the relation between adoptive parents’ acknowledgment of differences and adolescents’ later attachment to their parents in a sample of within-race domestic infant adoptions. Data from 189 adoptive families were drawn from two waves (middle childhood, adolescence) of the Minnesota/Texas Adoption Research Project, a longitudinal study of openness in adoption. Results. Levels of acknowledgment of differences displayed by the adoptive mother and adoptive father during middle childhood positively predicted adopted adolescents’ feelings of attachment toward the respective parent 8 years later. This relation depended on adopted adolescents’ attitude toward adoption-related communication during middle childhood as well as the adoptive family’s level of openness during middle childhood. Conclusions. Acknowledgment of differences in adoptive families has positive implications for the parent–child bond.     

Chaotic synchronization based on neural filter

Because of the high sensitivity of chaotic systems to their initial conditions, synchronization of chaotic systems with uncertain parameters has been a challenging problem especially in noisy environment. Since synchronization of the transmitter and receiver systems involves recursive estimation, recursive nonlinear filters are called for and the extended Kalman (EKF) filter and unscented Kalman (UKF) filter have been applied. However, such suboptimal filters incur high synchronization errors and provide no capacity for uncertain environment, which motivated the use of the neural filter for chaotic synchronization in this paper. The neural filter, which is a recurrent neural network, can approximate the minimum-variance to any degree. Furthermore, the neural filter can adapt to a uncertain environment without online filter weight adjustment, which is computationally efficient. Numerical experiments show that the chaotic synchronization scheme based on the neural filter outperforms those based on EKF and UKF by a large margin.     

In the eyes of the beholder: The effect of participant diversity on perceived merits of collaborative innovations

Technological innovations often involve collaboration among firms from diverse industries. Existing literature has largely viewed participant diversity as a conduit for non-redundant information or complementary resources, thereby affecting the ex-post outcomes of innovation projects. However, it is seldom examined how projects are initially evaluated during the resource competition stage. In this study, we develop a theory of diversity as a cognitive primer, asking how collaborators from diverse backgrounds may affect external reviewers’ ex-ante evaluation of potential merits of an innovation project. We argue that there are two logics at work in the process of evaluating innovations: the logic of technological advancement and the logic of market value. When an innovation project involves firms from diverse industries, it may be perceived as having a fuzzier market identity, hence making it less appealing to reviewers who hold with the strong market value logic. However, the penalty associated with participant diversity should be less pronounced among reviewers who hold the technological advancement logic. We also expect the relationship between participant diversity and reviewers’ ratings to be moderated by project novelty and fuzziness of technology category. We find support for our hypotheses with a sample of collaborative innovation projects funded by the Advanced Technology Program of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology.