On the Goals of Epistemic Education: Promoting Apt Epistemic Performance

Recent years have seen a surge in educational efforts to foster the development of learners’ epistemologies. Our 1^st aim is to problematize some current assumptions about the goals of epistemic education and to argue that existing models of lay or expert epistemologies cannot directly translate into educational goals. Our 2^nd aim is to present a fresh integrative analysis of the goals of epistemic education based on both philosophical arguments and empirical research. Synthesizing these sources, we propose that the overarching purpose of epistemic education is to promote learners’ apt epistemic performance, defined as performance that achieves valuable epistemic aims through competence. We identify 5 key aspects of epistemic performance that are important to achieving this goal: engaging in reliable cognitive processes that lead to the achievement of epistemic aims, adapting epistemic performance to diverse situations, metacognitively regulating and understanding epistemic performance, caring about and enjoying epistemic performance, and participating in epistemic performance together with others. Each of these aspects involves competent engagement with epistemic aims and value, epistemic ideals, and reliable epistemic processes. Our analysis can help educators plan and evaluate epistemic education and suggests ways in which current curricula might be better designed to promote epistemic growth.     

JUSTIFICATIONS AND EXPLANATIONS IN ISRAELI 7TH GRADE MATH TEXTBOOKS

This study analyzes six seventh grade Israeli mathematics textbooks, examining (1) the extent to which students are required to justify and explain their mathematical work, and (2) whether students are asked to justify a mathematical claim that is stated by the textbook or a mathematical claim that they themselves generated when solving a problem. Two different units of analysis were used to analyze two central topics in the seventh grade curriculum as follows: (1) equation solving in algebra and (2) triangle properties in geometry. The findings indicate that all six textbooks had considerably larger percentages of geometric tasks than algebraic tasks, which required students to justify or explain their mathematical work. Moreover, considerable differences were found among the six textbooks regarding the percentages of tasks that required students to justify and explain in both topics, but more so with the algebraic topic. Analysis of whether the textbook tasks required students to justify a mathematical claim that is stated by the textbook or a mathematical claim that the students themselves generated also revealed substantial differences among the textbooks. These findings are discussed, as well as the research methods used, in light of relevant literature.

     

Monstrous Methods for Teaching Central Tendency Concepts

This article describes an interactive way to help students learn to evaluate central tendency measures using a fictional story. The use of humour and fictional dire consequences may increase student understanding and engagement while reducing anxiety.     

OSGS—A Personalized Online Store for E-Commerce Environments

Current online stores suffer from a cardinal problem. There are too many products to offer, and customers find themselves lost due to the vast selection. As opposed to traditional stores, there is little or no guidance that helps the customers as they search. In this paper, we propose a new approach for designing a successful personalized online store enabling the successful searching of customers in the store. This approach is based on algorithms commonly used in recommendation systems, but which are rarely used for searches in online stores. We employ this approach for both keyword and browse searches, and present an implementation of this approach. We compared several search guide algorithms experimentally, and the experiments' results show that the suggested algorithms are applicable to the domain of online stores.     

Developing a student veterans center: The confluence of academic and military cultures

Lynette Cook Francis and Amanda Kraus describe the benefits and challenges of working together with student veterans to develop a program that contributes to their successful transition to higher education.