Normalising: Children's activity to construct meanings for trend

This paper looks back over a number of exploratory studies which have researched young children's construction of meanings for graphs, produced from data entered in spreadsheets. In this paper we discuss children's use of normalising, an activity in which children correct data towards some perceived norm. Through normalising, children construct meanings for trend in data and in graphs. We discuss how particular aspects of the pedagogical setting including task design encourage the use of normalising.This revised version was published online in October 2005 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The effect of the number of syllables on handwriting production

Four experiments examined whether motor programming in handwriting production can be modulated by the syllable structure of the word to be written. This study manipulated the number of syllables. The items, words and pseudo-words, had 2, 3 or 4 syllables. French adults copied them three times. We measured the latencies between the visual presentation and the first production (L1), the first and second production (L2), and the second and third production (L3). The results show an effect of the number of syllables in L1 for pseudo-words but not for words and on L2 and L3 for all the items (Experiments 1 and 2). Experiment 3 ruled out an interpretation of the latencies for pseudo-words in terms of reading time with a delayed copying task. Experiment 4 replicated the previous results and assessed the effect of varying the temporal interval between the second and third trials. The results of the four experiments confirm the role of the syllable in word writing. The number of syllables of a word modulates the time course of handwriting production.

Are secondary school graduates prepared for the studies of natural sciences? – evaluation and analysis of the result of scientific literacy levels achieved by secondary school graduates

ABSTRACT

Background: In Slovakia, no relevant information is available about the scientific literacy levels achieved by secondary school students.

Purpose: The objective of the research was to identify the levels of scientific literacy among students in the last year of grammar school and examine to what extent this determined the subject chosen for a school-leaving exam, which is related to a student’s personal preferences, as well as to the student’s profile and preparation for university education.

Sample: The research sample consisted of 221 students from 17 grammar schools located in various regions of Slovakia.

Design and methods: To identify the level of scientific literacy, we applied the Test of Scientific Literacy Skills.

Results: The students achieved the lowest success rate in the skill focused on the identification of the research design elements and its strengths and weaknesses. A comparably low success rate was also observed in the skill focused on the justification of the conclusions based on quantitative data. Other difficulties were identified in the field of understanding the basics of statistics, thus indicating an insufficient level of mathematical literacy of the students in the abovementioned field. By contrast, the highest success rate was achieved in the skill focused on the correct application of the scientific results for social purposes.

Conclusions: At the end of secondary school studies, the scientific literacy among Slovak students is at the average level. No differences were observed in terms of gender. In terms of the subjects chosen by the students for their school-leaving exams, we observed that those students who took a school-leaving exam in Biology or Chemistry achieved significantly better results in the test. By contrast, the students who reported on Geography and Civics as the subject of their school-leaving exam achieved significantly worse results in the test.     

Exemplarism in moral education: Problems with applicability and indoctrination

ABSTRACT

This article introduces an account of moral education grounded in Zagzebski’s recent Exemplarist Moral Theory and discusses two problems that have to be solved for the account to become a realistic alternative to other educational models on the market, namely the limited-applicability problem and the problem of indoctrination. The first problem raises worries about the viability of the account in ordinary circumstances. The second charges the proposed educational model with indoctrinating students. The main goal of this article is to show how an exemplar-based account of moral education can handle both problems without compromising its structure and upshot.     

Nature of Science and Science Content Learning

Besides viewing knowledge about the nature of science (NOS) as important for its own value with respect to scientific literacy, an adequate understanding of NOS is expected to improve science content learning by fostering the ability to interrelate scientific concepts and, thus, coherently acquire scientific content knowledge. However, there is a lack of systematic investigations, which clarify the relations between NOS and science content learning. In this paper, we present the results of a study, conducted to investigate how NOS understanding relates to students’ acquisition of a proper understanding of the concept of energy. A total of 82 sixth and seventh grade students received an instructional unit on energy, with 41 of them receiving generic NOS instruction beforehand. This NOS instruction, however, did not result in students having higher scores on the NOS instrument. Thus, correlational analyses were performed to investigate how students’ NOS understanding prior to the energy unit related to their learning about science content. Results show that a more adequate understanding of NOS might relate to students’ perspective on the concept of energy and might support them in understanding the nature of energy as a theoretical concept. Students with higher NOS understanding, for example, seemed to be more capable of learning how to relate the different energy forms to each other and to justify why they can be subsumed under the term of energy. Further, we found that NOS understanding may also be related to students’ approach toward energy degradation—a concept that can be difficult for students to master—while it does not seem to have a substantive impact on students’ learning gain regarding energy forms, transformation, or conservation.     

Development of a spatially uniform low-temperature hydrogen combustor

Examples of the use of additive manufacturing and rapid prototyping in a range of applications are of great interest in order to emphasize their role in development and production technology. In this study, a catalytic low temperature burner for H₂ on a lab scale with an integrated flow distributor was designed, manufactured, and tested for functionality. Based on a theoretical approach, a flow distributor for the burner was designed and a prototype was built using fused deposition modeling (FDM). Based on test results, an optimized version of the burner was then designed and manufactured using selective laser melting (SLM). The functionality of the designed catalytic burner was proven. Several advantages were found in comparison to conventional non-catalytic burners. In particular, flameless uniform low temperature heat generation with temperatures of about 200 °C could be realized. This contribution highlights the potential of additive manufacturing in chemical engineering. Not only was the final product built using SLM, but also during the development process, FDM was used for rapid prototyping.     

The impact of stereoscopic imagery and motion on anatomical structure recognition and visual attention performance

Gross anatomy is located in a three‐dimensional space. Visualizing aspects of structures in gross anatomy education should aim to provide information that best resembles their original spatial proportions. Stereoscopic three‐dimensional imagery might offer possibilities to implement this aim, though some research has revealed potential impairments that may result from observing stereoscopic visualizations, such as discomfort. However, possible impairments of working memory such as decreased visual attention performance due to applying this technology in gross anatomy education have not yet been investigated. Similarly, in gross anatomy education the impact of stereoscopic imagery on learners’ recognition of anatomical‐spatial relationships and the impact of different presentation formats have only been investigated in a small number of studies. In this study, the performance of 171 teacher trainees working on the anatomy of hearing was examined, either with non‐stereoscopic or stereoscopic imagery. Static and dynamic picture presentations were applied. Overall, benefits for stereoscopic imagery on estimating anatomical‐spatial relations were found. The performance on a visual attention test indicates that the impact of stereoscopic visualizations on the human cognitive system varies more from person to person compared to non‐stereoscopic visualizations. In addition, combinations of temporarily moving pictures and stereoscopic imagery lead to decreased visual attention performance compared to combinations of moving pictures and non‐stereoscopic imagery. Anat Sci Educ 11: 15–24. © 2017 American Association of Anatomists.     

p2pDating: Real life inspired semantic overlay networks for Web search

We consider a network of autonomous peers forming a logically global but physically distributed search engine, where every peer has its own local collection generated by independently crawling the Web. A challenging task in such systems is to efficiently route user queries to peers that can deliver high quality results and be able to rank these returned results, thus satisfying the users’ information need. However, the problem inherent with this scenario is selecting a few promising peers out of an a priori unlimited number of peers. In recent research a rather strict notion of semantic overlay networks has been established. In most approaches, peers are connected to other peers based on a rigid semantic profile by clustering them based on their contents. In contrast, our strategy follows the spirit of peer autonomy and creates semantic overlay networks based on the notion of “peer-to-peer dating”. Peers are free to decide which connections they create and which they want to avoid based on various usefulness estimators. The proposed techniques can be easily integrated into existing systems as they require only small additional bandwidth consumption as most messages can be piggybacked onto established communication. We show how we can greatly benefit from these additional semantic relations during query routing in search engines, such as Minerva, and in the JXP algorithm, which computes the PageRank authority measure in a completely decentralized manner.     

The Neolithic or Wood Age

Although perishable under many conditions, wooden artifacts from the Neolithic period have been remarkably well preserved in peat bogs and lakes. Indeed, in view of the large number and quality of the finds, the Neolithic Age might equally well be termed the Wood Age. The objects produced were technically highly sophisticated: the properties of different kinds of wood were well known and used to full advantage, and the skill with which they were made suggests that there may have been craftsmen specializing in woodwork.