STEM learning research through a funds of knowledge lens

This article examines STEM learning as a cultural process with a focus on non-dominant communities. Building on my work in funds of knowledge and mathematics education, I present three vignettes to raise some questions around connections between in-school and out-of-school mathematics. How do we define competence? How do task and environment affect engagement? What is the role of affect, language, and cognition in different settings? These vignettes serve to highlight the complexity of moving across different domains of STEM practice—everyday life, school, and STEM disciplines. Based on findings from occupational interviews I discuss characteristics of learning and engaging in everyday practices and propose several areas for further research, including the nature of everyday STEM practices, valorization of knowledge, language choice, and different forms of engagement.     

工程实例在CAD教学中的实践应用

CAD是土木工程专业的学生走向工作岗位必备的最实用的工具。为了满足社会对高等学校培养的专业人才能熟练掌握CAD这门课程的能力的需要,明确CAD课程的教学目标,探寻出目前CAD教学中存在的主要问题,在CAD教学中运用工程实例方法取得较好的教学效果。     

Low-achieving (learning disabled) pupils in year 2 of the primary school in Hungary

We selected 60 low-achieving children from a sample of 263 pupils in Year 2 of the primary school in order to analyse the problems of learning disabilities. We explored two questions: whether teachers evaluate the pupils' school performances correctly; and what kind of relationship exists between the low-achieving pupils' cognitive abilities and their school performance. Methods used were questionnaires, pedagogical tests and traditional psychological tests. We obtained the following results: the teachers generally evaluate the pupils' school performance fairly well, but they are inclined to assume a close correlation between the achievements in different subjects, and the teachers' knowledge of the low-achieving children is more reliable regarding the group of pupils as a whole rather than each pupil individually; and the low-achieving pupils' cognitive learning abilities prove to be significantly weaker than their general intellectual abilities.     

What are Emergent Democratic Societies Doing to Democracy?

New evidence from the largest democracy in the world, India,and her four neighboring countries in South Asia has come tocomplete a picture that is difficult to ignore. Today we gather,in the Globalbarometer, public opinion data from 46 emergentdemocracies. The query posed by the new South Asian Barometeris not what democracy is doing to these societies, but whatthese societies are doing to democracy. Comparing results for Africa, Latin America, East Asia, andSouth Asia renders a map of a reduced understanding of democracy.It appears that the more democracy spreads, the more simplethe conception of democracy in people's minds gets. It seemswith few exceptions in the countries surveyed that democracyto the people means above all freedom, whereas the institutionaland procedural dimension of the concept is not so salient     

Orthographic learning in Spanish children

In order to read fluently, children have to form orthographic representations. Despite numerous investigations, there is no clear answer to the question of the number of times they need to read a word to form an orthographic representation. We used length effect on reading times as a measure, because there are large differences between long and short words for unknown words, differences that disappear when reading frequent words. Two lists of new words (half short and half long) were presented to 102 second‐grade to sixth‐grade Spanish children, to be read aloud six times. One of the lists was presented as part of a story and the other in isolation. Comparison of the length effect at the first and sixth exposure showed large differences between short and long words in the first presentation and small differences at the sixth presentation, indicating that Spanish children develop representations of words after just a few repetitions.     

Temperament Dimensions in Preschool Children: Links With Cognitive and Affective Theory of Mind

Research Findings: The present cross-sectional study investigated the question of whether 6 different temperament dimensions (inhibition to novelty, social orientation, motor activity, positive emotionality, negative emotionality, and attention) influenced cognitive and affective theory of mind (ToM) in 168 children (86 three/four-year-olds and 82 four/five-year-olds). Temperament was measured via a parent-report questionnaire, cognitive ToM via a classical false-belief task, and affective ToM via a comprehensive test tapping 3 levels of emotion comprehension (external, mental, and reflexive). In addition, language competence was assessed with a direct test evaluating both receptive and expressive language. The results showed that after we controlled for language ability, inhibition to novelty predicted higher levels of cognitive ToM in 4/5-year-old children. In addition, higher levels of social orientation predicted better comprehension of the external aspects of emotion in both younger and older children. Practice or Policy: Our results highlight the importance of the early identification of less sociable children, who might benefit from training interventions aimed at increasing their affective ToM abilities. At the same time, they are also consistent with previous evidence indicating that an inhibited approach to social interaction can promote false-belief understanding.     

领航与导航课程体系的创新

我校领航与导航课程在教学内容、实践环节以及考核等各个环节均存在一定的问题,不能完全适应素质教育要求。本文深入地分析了我校领航与导航课程体系中存在的问题,着力探索和构建适应民航发展和高等教育规律的课程体系的新思路、新方法,以期指导领航与导航课程教学。     

What makes a landmark effective? Sex differences in a navigation task

In Experiment 1, two groups of female rats were trained in a triangular pool to find a hidden platform whose location was defined in terms of a single a landmark, a cylinder outside the pool. For one group, the landmark had only a single pattern (i.e., it looked the same when approached from any direction), while for the other, the landmark contained four different patterns (i.e., it looked different when approached from different directions). The first group learned to swim to the platform more rapidly than the second. Experiment 2 confirmed this difference when female rats were trained in a circular pool but found that male rats learned equally rapidly (and as rapidly as females trained with the single-pattern landmark) with both landmarks. This second finding was confirmed in Experiment 3. Finally, in Experiment 4a and 4b, male and female rats were trained either with the same, single-pattern landmark on all trials or with a different landmark each day. Males learned equally rapidly (and as rapidly as females trained with the unchanged landmark) whether the landmark changed or not. We conclude that male and female rats learn rather different things about the landmark that signals the location of the platform.