WHAT SHOULD WE TEACH AS CONTROVERSIAL? A DEFENSE OF THE EPISTEMIC CRITERION

Abstract There is an emerging consensus that to teach something as controversial is to present it as a matter on which different views are or could be held and to expound those different views as impartially as possible. This raises an important normative question that has yet to receive the attention it deserves from educational theorists: how are we to decide which topics to teach in this way? The answer suggested by Robert Dearden is that we should apply the epistemic criterion: a matter should be taught as controversial when contrary views can be held on it without those views being contrary to reason. In this essay, Michael Hand aims to defend that answer. In the first part of the article he revisits Dearden’s rather thin and unsatisfactory justification for the epistemic criterion and attempts to mend its deficiencies. In the second part, Hand examines an alternative to the epistemic criterion in the area of moral education, an alternative he labels the political criterion, and explains why he thinks we should reject it.     

酷玩乐团：年底再会

Grace刚对摇滚乐产生兴趣的时候,酷玩乐团横空出世,所以他们一直在Grace的心目中占据着特殊的位置。不知不觉,明年酷玩即将迎来第一个十年。虽然现在不再像以前那般狂热,但每次他们出专辑还是会很关注——谁能忽视酷玩的影响力呢?所以听说他们将在12月出EP、明年出新专辑的时候,Grace还是兴奋了好一阵子。出碟速度之快,和之前酝酿了三年之久的《生命万岁》差太远了。不过,不管内容如何,作为粉丝的你,一定不会错过吧。     

Instructional leadership structures across five university departments

Higher Education - In this paper, we investigate leadership related to the instruction of lower division undergraduate courses at five university mathematics departments with strong calculus...     

Analyzing student thinking reflected in self-constructed cognitive maps and its influence on inquiry task performance

Instructional Science - Higher-order thinking is crucial to inquiry learning. It is important to investigate how students think in inquiry contexts. Given the tacit nature of higher-order thinking,...     

Predicting relevance based on assessor disagreement: analysis and practical applications for search evaluation

Evaluation of search engines relies on assessments of search results for selected test queries, from which we would ideally like to draw conclusions in terms of relevance of the results for general (e.g., future, unknown) users. In practice however, most evaluation scenarios only allow us to conclusively determine the relevance towards the particular assessor that provided the judgments. A factor that cannot be ignored when extending conclusions made from assessors towards users, is the possible disagreement on relevance, assuming that a single gold truth label does not exist. This paper presents and analyzes the predicted relevance model (PRM), which allows predicting a particular result’s relevance for a random user, based on an observed assessment and knowledge on the average disagreement between assessors. With the PRM, existing evaluation metrics designed to measure binary assessor relevance, can be transformed into more robust and effectively graded measures that evaluate relevance towards a random user. It also leads to a principled way of quantifying multiple graded or categorical relevance levels for use as gains in established graded relevance measures, such as normalized discounted cumulative gain, which nowadays often use heuristic and data-independent gain values. Given a set of test topics with graded relevance judgments, the PRM allows evaluating systems on different scenarios, such as their capability of retrieving top results, or how well they are able to filter out non-relevant ones. Its use in actual evaluation scenarios is illustrated on several information retrieval test collections.     

Particles in a Box with One Sticky Wall: From ODE to PDE

Abstract

We present noncompetitive adsorption as “particles in a box with one sticky wall.” We start with a general model that can be modeled as a simple ordinary differential equation (ODE). To verify the ODE students run a computer simulation. The ODE’s solution imperfectly fits the simulation’s data. This leads to the diffusion partial differential equation. We show how to determine the diffusion constant from theory; how to determine how many terms in the Fourier series solution need to be summed; and the use of nonlinear regression. As a bonus, the physics of the model will lead us to a series representation of π.     

Teacher self-assessment of evidence-based classroom practices: preliminary findings across primary,intermediate and secondary level teachers

The limited implementation of evidence-based classroom practices and ways to provide effective professional development to address this challenge remain enduring concerns in education. Despite these concerns, there exists a well-established research literature on evidence-based practices for effective classroom management and instructional practices. One identified area of need is research investigating the extent that different classroom practices are more or less important across school and grade levels. The current study examined results from 612 general education teachers across school levels (323 primary, 208 intermediate, 81 secondary) who completed an on-line self-assessment of their use of evidence-based classroom practices. Statistical analysis found significant differences in teachers’ self-reported use of several evidence-based classroom practices across school levels (primary, intermediate, secondary). Implications are presented for using teacher self-assessment to inform professional development in schools.