Romanian psychiatric literature: analysis of accessibility and nature of Romanian psychiatric articles

Background: Romania is a low‐income country of 22 million people and, currently, information regarding mental health research is limited. Romania is one of the last countries in eastern Europe not to have its own bibliographic biomedical database. Aim: To assess the content and quality of Romanian psychiatric research activity over time. Method: embase (1980 to April 2008), medline (1950 to April 2008) and Psyc INFO (1806 to April 2008) were systematically searched for psychiatric articles originating from Romania. The sample from Psyc INFO was described. Results: Psyc INFO was by far the best source of Romanian mental health literature with a considerable increase in the publication activity since 2000 (Psyc INFO identified 3236 hits, medline 549, embase 139). Most papers are in English, but a sizeable minority are in Romanian (30%), French (4%) or Hungarian (4%). The main topics of interest are cognitive processes, creativity, schizophrenia and cognitive development and stress and are, according to Psyc INFO’s indexing, ‘empirical studies’. Seventeen randomised trials were identified with all studies after 2000 being sponsored by industry. Conclusions: Surprisingly, and not in keeping with other studies of the literature of neighbouring countries, Psyc INFO is the major source of psychiatric bibliographic records of this region. There are signs of a resurgence of research activity in Romania and as the number of local mental health workers increases we can expect more output. Industry is now funding evaluative studies in Romania. As everywhere, but perhaps more acutely in situations of severely limited research support, there is a difficult balance to be struck between benefiting support and losing independence.     

Beyond Conceptual Change: Using Representations to Integrate Domain-Specific Structural Models in Learning Mathematics

ABSTRACT— Effective teaching should focus on representational change, which is fundamental to learning and education, rather than conceptual change, which involves transformation of theories in science rather than the gradual building of knowledge that occurs in students. This article addresses the question about how to develop more efficient strategies for promoting representational change across cognitive development. I provide an example of an integrated structural model that highlights the underlying cognitive structures that connect numbers, mathematical operations, and functions. The model emphasizes dynamic multiple representations that students can internalize within the number line and which lead to developing a dynamic mental structure. In teaching practice, the model focuses on a counting task format, which integrates a variety of activities, specifically addressing motor, visual, and verbal skills, as well as various types of learning transfer.     

Fostering students’ participation in creating educational content through crowdsourcing

This paper proposes and evaluates a model of crowdsourcing in microlearning that includes the balancing of collaborative learning and crowdsourcing mechanisms. The goal of the research is to implement a learner-centered approach through crowdsourced content creation and to improve the process and outcomes of learning. Crowdsourced content creation was accomplished through a collaborative project within a higher education institution. Micro-courses in the form of short video lessons were created by students and published on the Coursmos platform and a certain group of students attended these micro-courses. The evaluation was carried out at the Faculty of Organizational Sciences, the University of Belgrade on a sample of 71 students who created micro-courses and 74 students who attended these micro-courses. The results show that the developed model provides simple communication and collaboration among students, high level of their self-organization and satisfaction, efficient management of crowdsourcing network and collaborative knowledge building.     

Teachers’ cultural autobiography as means of civic professional engagement

Abstract

This article will present my autobiographical journey: from communism to capitalism, from the banking system and the pedagogy of the oppressed to problem-posing education. My personal experiences are seen as a way of emigrating internally and as part of the struggle through the process of self-actualisation and self-understanding. In effect, the practice of intellectual freedom shifts from a personal to a civic perspective. My wish for social justice, especially for children from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds living in a global society, will be considered, with reference to the voluntary work in the Romanian community. Thus, from a postmodern perspective, the autobiographical process is not just about self, but also about the Other.     

Question categorization and classification using grammar based approach

Question-answering has become one of the most popular information retrieval applications. Despite that most question-answering systems try to improve the user experience and the technology used in finding relevant results, many difficulties are still faced because of the continuous increase in the amount of web content. Questions Classification (QC) plays an important role in question-answering systems, with one of the major tasks in the enhancement of the classification process being the identification of questions types. A broad range of QC approaches has been proposed with the aim of helping to find a solution for the classification problems; most of these are approaches based on bag-of-words or dictionaries. In this research, we present an analysis of the different type of questions based on their grammatical structure. We identify different patterns and use machine learning algorithms to classify them. A framework is proposed for question classification using a grammar-based approach (GQCC) which exploits the structure of the questions. Our findings indicate that using syntactic categories related to different domain-specific types of Common Nouns, Numeral Numbers and Proper Nouns enable the machine learning algorithms to better differentiate between different question types. The paper presents a wide range of experiments the results show that the GQCC using J48 classifier has outperformed other classification methods with 90.1% accuracy.     

In Search of Structures: How Does the Mind Explore Infinity?

When reasoning about infinite sets, children seem to activate four categories of conceptual structures: geometric (g-structures), arithmetic (a-structures), fractal-type (f-structures), and density-type (d-structures). Students select different problem-solving strategies depending on the structure they recognize within the problem domain. They naturally search for structures in challenging learning contexts. This tendency to search for structure might be a characteristic of human cognition and a necessary condition for human knowledge development. For example, specific fractal structures are intrinsic to concepts such as the numerical system that have been developed by the human race over a long period of time. When these structures are emphasized within teaching, they can facilitate the deep understanding of several basic concepts, in mathematics and beyond.     

Managing personal human capital for professional excellence: an attempt to design a practical methodology

Within the context of the knowledge-based economy, individuals increasingly control their own development, careers and destinies, rather than the organisations that employ them. Work drawing on the new career orientations has been mostly conceptual rather than empirical. The existing literature focuses mainly on explaining the conditions under which new career orientations emerge and the changes these can bring to the lives of individuals. However, we found that there is no practical methodology to help individuals face the challenges of the future in a proactive manner. The aim of this paper is to develop a practical methodology (the PHCN – Personal Human Capital Navigator) that helps individuals to systematically manage their personal human capital so they can achieve their strategic objectives and outstanding results.