Cognitive skills used to solve mathematical word problems and numerical operations: a study of 6- to 7-year-old children

This study investigates the relationship between skills that underpin mathematical word problems and those that underpin numerical operations, such as addition, subtraction, division and multiplication. Sixty children aged 6–7 years were tested on measures of mathematical ability, reading accuracy, reading comprehension, verbal intelligence and phonological awareness, using a mix of standardised and experimenter-designed tests. The experimental hypothesis was that mathematical word problems will call upon cognitive skills that are different and additional to those required by numerical operations, in particular verbal ability and reading comprehension, while phonological awareness and reading accuracy will be associated with both types of mathematical problems. The hypothesis is partly affirmed and partly rejected. Reading comprehension was found to predict performance on mathematical word problems and not numerical operations, and phonological awareness was found to predict performance on both types of mathematics. However, the predictive value of verbal ability and reading accuracy was found to be non-significant.     

Predicting child outcomes from preschool quality in Portugal

The main purpose of this study is to analyze whether quality of preschool classrooms relates to 4- and 5-year-old children developmental outcomes. The study was conducted in 60 classrooms in Porto Metropolitan Area, Portugal. Children (N?=?215) were evaluated in the literacy, math, and behavior domains. Preschool quality was assessed through classroom observations using the ECERS-R and the Early Language and Literacy Classroom Observation. Global classroom quality although relatively low, predicted children’s literacy skills and behavior but not math skills. Quality of language and literacy environment was not consistently related to child outcomes. Mother educational level stood out as consistently predicting most of child developmental outcomes. The relevance of these results is discussed considering the Portuguese educational scenario, in the realm of an international context.     

Problem posing based on investigation activities by university students

This paper reports a classroom-based study involving investigation activities in a university numerical analysis course. The study aims to analyse students' mathematical processes and to understand how these activities provide opportunities for problem posing. The investigations were intended to stimulate students in asking questions, to trigger their thinking processes, to promote their ability to investigate and to support them in learning numerical analysis' concepts and procedures. The results show that the investigations provided opportunities for students to experience mathematical processes, including posing questions, formulating and testing conjectures and, to some extent, proving results. They also provide some understanding about the role of problem posing in these processes. Posing questions occurred mainly in an implicit way, in the interpretation of tasks and in identifying regularities, analysing graphs and testing cases. The conjectures were often based on pattern identification or data manipulation, and the students tended to accept them without testing or proving. The students also proposed alternative formulations for the initial questions and posed new problems from their explorations and attempts to refine previous conjectures.     

Using genetic algorithms to evolve a population of topical queries

Systems for searching the Web based on thematic contexts can be built on top of a conventional search engine and benefit from the huge amount of content as well as from the functionality available through the search engine interface. The quality of the material collected by such systems is highly dependant on the vocabulary used to generate the search queries. In this scenario, selecting good query terms can be seen as an optimization problem where the objective function to be optimized is based on the effectiveness of a query to retrieve relevant material. Some characteristics of this optimization problem are: (1) the high-dimensionality of the search space, where candidate solutions are queries and each term corresponds to a different dimension, (2) the existence of acceptable suboptimal solutions, (3) the possibility of finding multiple solutions, and in many cases (4) the quest for novelty. This article describes optimization techniques based on Genetic Algorithms to evolve “good query terms” in the context of a given topic. The proposed techniques place emphasis on searching for novel material that is related to the search context. We discuss the use of a mutation pool to allow the generation of queries with new terms, study the effect of different mutation rates on the exploration of query-space, and discuss the use of a especially developed fitness function that favors the construction of queries containing novel but related terms.     

Sources of differences in the pattern of adoption of organizational and managerial innovations from early to late 1990s, in the UK

This paper explores empirically how the pattern of adoption of an organizational and managerial innovation changes as diffusion occurs. In particular, the paper investigates whether and how differences over time in the patterns of use of organisational innovation are related to changes in the characteristics of the innovation in terms of its functionality and relative complementarity with other innovations, as well as to changes in the needs and capabilities of firms. For this purpose, firm level data from the British Workplace Industrial Relations Survey, in 1990 and 1998, are used.     

Mapping public support for innovation: A comparison of policy alignment in the UK and France

This paper proposes and tests a three-dimensional model of public support design as a framework to compare public incentives for innovation in firms through time and across countries, and consequently to compare forms of policy alignment of innovation objectives in an economy. Using data on 149 French and British policy programmes from the early 1980s to 2002, this paper shows that policy-makers implement programmes within a different three-dimensional design space in order to align several distinctive objectives and consequently strengthen the impact of governmental measures. Moreover, as the objectives of the national players and policy-makers evolved, the portfolio of innovation policies also evolved in their separate ways. Nevertheless, some similar trends are also observed.     

Elimination of lipaemic interference by high-speed centrifugation

IntroductionIn order to deliver high quality results, detection and elimination of possible analytical interferences, such as lipaemia, is crucial. The aim of this study is to evaluate the efficacy of high-speed centrifugation in eliminating lipaemic interference and to define own lipaemic index (LI) for the studied biochemical analytes.Materials and methodsEvaluated analytes were: albumin, alkaline phosphatase, alanine-aminotransferase (ALT), aspartate-aminotransferase (AST), calcium, creatinine, gamma-glutamyltransferase (GGT), glucose, phosphates, total proteins, urea and total bilirubin. Those analytes and LIs have been analysed in duplicate in the Roche Diagnostics-c8000 analyser in samples centrifuged at 3000 rpm/10 minutes in the SL16 (Thermo Scientific, Waltham, USA) centrifuge and according to an own high-speed centrifugation protocol (12,900 rpm/15 minutes) in the MicroCL17R (Thermo Scientific, Waltham, USA) centrifuge. Lipaemia has been measured in each sample. The efficiency of high-speed centrifugation is verified by the Wilcoxon test (P < 0.05). In cases where significant differences are observed, our own LI is calculated. For ALT and AST, it is verified by McNemar test (P < 0.05). For creatinine, both Wilcoxon and McNemar test were applied.ResultsThere were statistically significant differences in analyte concentration before and after high-speed centrifugation for: albumin, creatinine, GGT, glucose, phosphates, urea and total bilirrubin. Own LI is calculated. McNemar test shows statistically significant diferences in the proportion of delivered results before and after high-speed centrifugation in ALT, AST and creatinine.ConclusionsThis study confirms the efficacy of high-speed centrifugation protocol for all the considered analytes, excepting calcium, alkaline phosphatase and total proteins.     

Photovoice as a research method for higher education research

ABSTRACT

Higher education (HE) research often draws on a range of qualitative research approaches. However, some methods developed in other fields are underutilised in HE research, even though they could be of great use for answering particular kinds of research questions, or for involving students more actively in the research process. In this article, we draw on a study that piloted different methodological approaches to explore students’ conceptions of good teaching and effective learning at university. The participants in our study included 33 high achieving international, Māori, Pacific Island, and (other) local students enrolled in Humanities subjects. Our study used photovoice as a visual data collection approach in conjunction with more traditional methods of data collection: open-ended focus group questions and critical incident technique. In this article, we review the photovoice literature, which is mostly from outside HE. Then, we describe our study, discussing the students’ responses to photovoice, and the different kinds of data it elicited. We note that, while most students expressed appreciation of the photovoice approach, some also found it restrictive and challenging in some respects. We conclude, photovoice offers a useful methodological addition to HE research, while noting, as with all data collection approaches, researchers need to be mindful of its limitations.