Causation and Its Relation to 'Causal Laws'

Many have found attractive views according to which the veracityof specific causal judgements is underwritten by general causallaws. This paper describes various variants of that view andexplores complications that appear when one looks at a certainsimple type of example from physics. To capture certain causaldependencies, physics is driven to look at equations which,I argue, are not causal laws. One place where physics is forcedto look at such equations (and not the only place) is in itshandling of Green's functions which reveal point-wise causaldependencies. Thus, I claim that there is no simple relationshipbetween causal dependence and causal laws of the sort oftenpictured. Rather, this paper explores the complexity of therelationship in a certain well-understood case.

1 Introduction

2 The Causal Covering-Law Thesis

3 The Laws of String Motion

4 Green's Functions and Causation

5 Green's Functions andBoundary Conditions

6 The Green's Function as a Violationof the Wave Equation

6.1The Green's Function and other Sensesof ‘Causal Law’:Temporal Propagation and LocalPropagation

7 The Distributional Wave Equation

8 Whyis not the Green's Function a ‘Causal Law’?

9Conclusion

     

Student absence in South Australian schools

Students who are frequently absent from school (‘non-attenders’) are considered to be ‘at risk’. State education departments have recently begun to improve their collection of student absence data, often to contribute to the development of performance standards for schools. This paper presents a summary of data from the Term 2 collection in South Australian government schools. The data were combined with student information, which allowed examination and comparison of attendance patterns for different groups of students. The author provides details about which students were absent in those years, the frequency of students’ absences, which students had no absences, and the stated reasons for students’ absences. The author recommends that no single attendance standard can be set for schools, based on the differential targets shown for different groups of students.     

Reflective practice,experience, and the interpretation of anxiety symptoms

Abstract

We offer an examination of the processes athletes undertake following a sporting experience in order to learn how to interpret their anxiety-related symptoms as facilitative to performance. Six experienced, elite athletes were interviewed regarding the reflective practices adopted following both positive and negative critical incidents with a view to generating knowledge about their competitive anxiety symptoms. Composite sequence analysis procedures were employed to allow data to be considered as meaningful sequences for both the positive and negative incidents. Findings showed distinctions between the effects of positive and negative incidents on the reflective and learning processes and how this influenced the further appraisal of competitive anxiety symptoms. Support is provided for the use of reflective practice as a framework for experiential learning within sport.     

Linking academic performance to optimistic attributional style: attributions following positive events matter most

European Journal of Psychology of Education - Optimistic attributional style has been shown to be reliably associated with high well-being and low depression and (Hu et al., Journal of Social and...     

Teaching about complex systems is no simple matter: building effective professional development for computer-supported complex systems instruction

The recent next generation science standards in the United States have emphasized learning about complex systems as a core feature of science learning. Over the past 15 years, a number of educational tools and theories have been investigated to help students learn about complex systems; but surprisingly, little research has been devoted to identifying the supports that teachers need to teach about complex systems in the classroom. In this paper, we aim to address this gap in the literature. We describe a 2-year professional development study in which we gathered data on teachers’ abilities and perceptions regarding the delivery of computer-supported complex systems curricula. We present results across the 2 years of the project and demonstrate the need for particular instructional supports to improve implementation efforts, including providing differentiated opportunities to build expertise and addressing teacher beliefs about whether computational-model construction belongs in the science classroom. Results from students’ classroom experiences and learning over the 2 years are offered to further illustrate the impact of these instructional supports.