Modern Logic and Judicial Decision Making: A Sketch of One View

Two hundred years elapsed before the nineteenth century logicians Boole, De Morgan, and others, finally succeeded in formally developing the calculus of reason-ing first suggested by the German mathematician, Leibniz. It is, perhaps, to the credit of the legal profession that less than one century has subsequently elapsed, and already some lawyers and legal writers, along with other scholars, are beginning to explore the relationship between modern logic and law. What is attempted here is to outline the bare bones of one tentative way of looking at the relationship between modern logic and the judicial decision process. From the useful vantage point of a Lasswellian social process framework of analysis, logic and judicial decision making are considered contextually within that total mani-fold of events that we call the world. Thus viewed, the judicial decision making process is just one constituent of the complex unfolding of events through time. We attempt to represent some of the complexities involved in each of these processes and the relationships between them by means of a series of diagrams. By suggesting that we begin with the world as our context, we make no claim to describing it in complete detail. To the contrary, the sketch presented here-we would emphasize the word sketch and the word tentative -is rough, incomplete, and subject to considerable improvement. But one of our purposes will be served if the outline points the way toward cumulative efforts to achieve a comprehensive description of the judicial decision process. In addition to this broad look at logic, judicial decision making, and the world, a more modest aim is to describe, in some detail and with reasonable clarity, one aspect of the relation between logic and judicial decision making

Automated detection of reflection in texts. A machine learning based approach

Promoting reflective thinking is an important educational goal. A common educational practice is to provide opportunities for learners to express their reflective thoughts in writing. The analysis of such text with regard to reflection is mainly a manual task that employs the principles of content analysis. Considering the amount of text produced by online learning systems, tools that automatically analyse text with regard to reflection would greatly benefit research and practice. Previous research has explored the potential of dictionary-based approaches that automatically map keywords to categories associated with reflection. Other automated methods use manually constructed rules to gauge insight from text. Machine learning has shown potential for classifying text with regard to reflection-related constructs. However, not much is known of whether machine learning can be used to reliably analyse text with regard to the categories of reflective writing models. This thesis investigates the reliability of machine learning algorithms to detect reflective thinking in text. In particular, it studies whether text segments from student writings can be analysed automatically to detect the presence (or absence) of reflective writing model categories. A synthesis of the models of reflective writing is performed to determine the categories frequently used to analyse reflective writing. For each of these categories, several machine learning algorithms are evaluated with regard to their ability to reliably detect reflective writing categories. The evaluation finds that many of the categories can be predicted reliably. The automated method, however, does not achieve the same level of reliability as humans do

L2 Reading in Higher Education: Teaching and Evaluation Practices

Due to the importance of the reading skills in the academic field and in the Colombian evaluation system of tertiary education, this research aimed at analyzing how L2 reading is taught and evaluated at tertiary education in the EFL courses of a private university. Therefore, to gather the data from the context and participants it was necessary to choose three teachers as a sample, one of each course, and the students enrolled in them. The data collection tools used were observations, interviews, surveys, and document analysis to triangulate the information collected. The results of this study were directly linked to the objectives proposed for it. The most relevant findings related to the objectives are: first, the role of reading at tertiary education is central for teachers and administrators; however, there are some methodological issues that are not working properly. Second, teachersÕ pedagogical and evaluation practices are adequate in terms of the institutional requirements but insufficient for improving learnersÕ current results. Third, these courses are course book-based, and the text used is grammar/vocabulary-centered. Accordingly, some recommendations are given to improve these coursesÕ pedagogical and assessment practices in order to enhance learnersÕ reading comprehension levels based on PISA (2018) levels. Nevertheless, it is essential to mention that this study suffered some adaptations due to the COVID-19 pandemic and some of the pre-planned items were not able to be carried out.MaestríaMagister en la Enseñanza del Ingle