EFFECTIVENESS OF COOPERATIVE LEARNING AND CONCEPTUAL CHANGESTRATEGIES IN IMPROVING LEARNING OUTCOMES OFPROSPECTIVE TEACHERS WITH DIFFERENT RELIGIOUS INCLINATION

The study examined the Effectiveness of Cooperative Learning and Conceptual Change Strategies in improving Learning Outcomes of College of Education Biology Students. The study adopted a non-equivalent pre-test, post-test control group design. The study population comprised Part III Biology Education students in colleges of education in Southwestern Nigeria.  Two instruments were used to collect data for the study. The first instrument is ATE and retention test.  The second instrument is AQE. The data collected were analysed using ANOVA and ANCOVA).The results indicated that the CLS was more effective in improving the performance of Biology education students with Christian, Islamic and traditional religious belief systems more than the CCS, there was a significant  difference between the CLS group pre-test and CLS group post-test (Mean difference = 18.14, p = 0.000). Also, there was a significant difference in the CCS group pre-test and post-test (Mean difference = 10.155, p = 0.000). Moreover, there was also a slight significant difference in the TEM pre-test and post-test scores (mean difference = 6.500, p = 0.036).  Therefore, the hypothesis was rejected. However, if the mean difference between the pretest and the posttest in the three groups were compared, the CLS group has the highest (18.14), CCS group was 10.15, while the TEM group has the lowest (6.500).Moreover, when the means of the groups were compared, the CLS group has the highest mean score (58.02) and the CCS group mean score was 52.05. This is an indication that the CLS group has more positive effect on performance of students in evolution. However, the result indicated that there was a significant difference in the attitude of students in the CLS and CCS groups before and after treatments. This implies that the two strategies (Cooperative Learning Strategy and Conceptual Change Strategy) caused the students to have a change of attitude towards the concept of evolution and most importantly their religious inclination no longer distorts scientific facts.&nbsp

Fostering collaborative knowledge construction with visualization tools

This study investigates to what extent collaborative knowledge construction can be fostered by providing students with visualization tools as structural support. Thirty-two students of Educational Psychology took part in the study. The students were subdivided into dyads and asked to solve a case problem of their learning domain under one of two conditions: 1) with content-specific visualization 2) with content-unspecific visualization. Results show that by being provided with a content-specific visualization tool, both the process and the outcome of the cooperative effort improved. More specifically, dyads under that condition referred to more adequate concepts, risked more conflicts, and were more successful in integrating prior knowledge into the collaborative solution. Moreover, those learning partners had a more similar individual learning outcome

Cooperation, Norms, and Revolutions: A Unified Game-Theoretical Approach

Cooperation is of utmost importance to society as a whole, but is often challenged by individual self-interests. While game theory has studied this problem extensively, there is little work on interactions within and across groups with different preferences or beliefs. Yet, people from different social or cultural backgrounds often meet and interact. This can yield conflict, since behavior that is considered cooperative by one population might be perceived as non-cooperative from the viewpoint of another. To understand the dynamics and outcome of the competitive interactions within and between groups, we study game-dynamical replicator equations for multiple populations with incompatible interests and different power (be this due to different population sizes, material resources, social capital, or other factors). These equations allow us to address various important questions: For example, can cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma be promoted, when two interacting groups have different preferences? Under what conditions can costly punishment, or other mechanisms, foster the evolution of norms? When does cooperation fail, leading to antagonistic behavior, conflict, or even revolutions? And what incentives are needed to reach peaceful agreements between groups with conflicting interests? Our detailed quantitative analysis reveals a large variety of interesting results, which are relevant for society, law and economics, and have implications for the evolution of language and culture as well

An evolved cognitive bias for social norms

Social norms are a widely used concept for explaining human behavior, but there are few studies exploring how we cognitively utilize them. We incorporate here an evolutionary approach to studying social norms, predicting that if norms have been critical to biological fitness, then individuals should have adaptive mechanisms to conform to, and avoid violating, norms. A cognitive bias toward norms is one specific means by which individuals could achieve this. To test this, we assessed whether individuals have greater recall for normative information than for nonnormative information. Three experiments were performed in which participants read a text and were then tested on their recall of behavioral content. The data suggest that individuals have superior recall for normative social information and that performance is not related to rated importance. We discuss how such a cognitive bias may ontogenetically develop and identify possible hypotheses that distinguish between alternative explanatory accounts for social norms

Conceptualizing the Role of Geographical Proximity in Project Based R&D Networks: A Literature Survey

Empirical evidence shows that research is being carried out more in cooperation or in collaboration with others, and the networks described by these collaborative research activities are becoming more and more complex. This phenomenon brings about new strands of research questions and opens up a different research context in the area of geography of innovation. The recent set of literature addressing these new issues shows a high degree of variation in terms of focus, approaches and methodology. Hence to elucidate the relationship between networks and geography it is crucial to have a review them. In this regard, this study focuses on a particular type of networks, namely, project based R&D networks and aims at describing the state-of-the-art in explaining the specificity of geography in formation and evolution of such networks. Towards this aim, we framed the discussion along four lenses: the specificity of geography in partner choice, in successful execution of the collaboration, in the resulting innovation performance both at the organizational and regional level, and the spatio-temporal evolution of networks. The overview provided by the survey is suggestive regarding the theorization of geography and network relationship, and informative regarding the issues demanding further research effort, and promising extensions.