Elementary School Children’s Explanations of Day and Night

Science & Education - Most students have interacted with scientific representations that are used as teaching resources in schools. Often these external representations present challenges for...     

Youth Social Justice Engagement in the Face of Anti-Latina/o Immigrant Illegitimacy

Drawing from a larger ethnographic study, in this research I examine how a group of newcomer Mexican immigrant high school students counteracted a hostile school climate, educational practices and adverse relationships with mainstream peers and adults. The purpose of this study is to help educators and policy makers understand how engaging in social justice movements in the educational context has helped immigrant students to counteract and reconstruct their adverse schooling experiences into positive contributions to their success. This study suggests that Mexican immigrant youth demonstrate agency through civic engagement and intra-tactical strategies that strengthen their linguistic, cultural, and learner identities. The article concludes with recommendations on how educators and policy makers can facilitate engagement in order to support and improve education for immigrant and Latina/o students.     

Representations over the Earth’s shape and the process of day and night from Nahua indigenous schoolchildren / Representaciones sobre la forma de la Tierra y del proceso día y noche en niños de escuelas indígenas Nahuas

This research presents the way in which children from a Nahua indigenous community build representations of the Earth’s shape, as well as the process that causes day and night. Concepts from school and local culture were studied. For the first case, a questionnaire was applied to 331 children, out of which 38 children were then interviewed on the topics from the questionnaire. For the cultural ideas, three teachers from the region and 30 children from the sample were interviewed. The results show that the representations depend on the form of questioning and the existence of three models: a flat structure with a celestial dome and mechanisms that hide or remove the Sun or the Moon in order to create day and night; a spherical structure with a surrounding sky, where the Sun and Moon rise and set; and a transitional model with a hollow sphere, flat surface and celestial dome. Cultural ideas do not appear to have any influence over these models, probably due to a loss of the community’s cosmogonic knowledge and the age of the children.     

Face Out: The Effect of Book Displays on Collection Usage

Business librarians at Brigham Young University's Harold B. Lee Library are confronted with considerable and consistent declines in usage of print books in business and economic disciplines. Inspired by commercial businesses, where in-store displays are commonly used to increase sales, business librarians decided to highlight the library's business and economics collections by creating book displays. The study revealed that displays produced a substantial increase in circulation. Prior to the displays, featured books had an average usage of less than four times per year; after these books were featured in the displays, their usage per year increased by 58%.     

A business citation analysis: A local follow-up study

While there is no official style for business writing, the most common citation style in business research has not been determined previously. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the top scholarly business journals to determine the most commonly used citation style in business academic research. The author used the list of 452 top business journals included in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) Journal Citation Report. The results show that 69% of business journals use a publisher-dictated style, whereas of the “traditional” citation styles, 11% use the American Psychological Association style, 10% use Harvard style, 8% use Chicago style, and none use Modern Language Association style.     

Veterinary medicine and animal husbandry in Mexico: From empiricism to science and technology

Conclusion Foot-and-mouth disease was the event which led to the increased and improved training of veterinarians able to produce through their research new veterinary knowledge for practical application.It led to the transformation of the Mexican veterinary profession. It changed the kind of knowledge veterinarians received at university, and it also changed the work they did as professionals. Veterinarians gradually began to perform a much wider range of tasks: they did research, taught, worked as civil servants, or assumed positions as academic administrators and as high governmental officials with a large amount of influence on governmental agricultural activities. They also engaged directly in animal husbandry and in food production.In parallel with these changes, the National University, and within it the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine and Animal Husbandry, underwent a concomitant series of changes which ran hand-in-hand with the growth of the Mexican state. The university provided training for specialised research workers by offering scholarships and programmes of graduate study. This consolidated the activities of an academic community working on applied veterinary medicine. The beneficiaries of these efforts take part in and influence, to varying degrees, the planning and programming of agricultural policies in a way that would not formerly have been possible.     

Problem solving and chemical equilibrium: Successful versus unsuccessful performance

The purpose of this study was to describe the problem-solving behaviors of experts and novices engaged in solving seven chemical equilibrium problems. Thirteen novices (five high-school students, five undergraduate majors, and three nonmajors) and ten experts (six doctoral students and four faculty members) were videotaped as they individually solved standard chemical equilibrium problems. The nature of the problems was such that they required more than mere recall or algorithmic learning and yet simple enough to provide the novices a reasonable chance of solving them. Extensive analysis of the think-aloud protocols produced 27 behavioral tendencies that can be used to describe and differentiate between successful and unsuccessful problem solvers. Successful solvers' perceptions of the problem were characterized by careful analysis and reasoning of the task, use of related principles and concepts to justify their answers, frequent checks of the consistency of answers and reasons, and better quality of procedural and strategic knowledge. Unsuccessful subjects had many knowledge gaps and misconceptions about the nature of chemical equilibrium. Even faculty experts were sometimes unable to correctly apply common chemical principles during the problem-solving process. Important theoretical concepts such as molar enthalpy, heat of reaction, free energy of formation, and free energy of reaction were rarely used by novices in explaining problems.