Fostering Pre-service Teachers\u27 Understanding of Basic Arithmetic Principles

Arithmetic properties (commutative, associative, distributive, identity, and inverse) provide one of the most critical avenues to higher-level thinking and conceptual understanding. The present study was designed to promote understanding and use of arithmetic properties among sixty-five pre-service teachers enrolled in two Foundations of Numbers and Operations classes. The intervention employed involved using various models to promote conceptual understanding of the arithmetic properties and use them as a problem-solving tool while identifying any possible misconceptions. A pretest-posttest design was employed. The results revealed that the intervention was effective in promoting understanding of the commutative, associative, identity, and inverse properties, and was somewhat effective in promoting understanding of the distributive property. The intervention also resulted in increasing participants’ confidence level for using arithmetic properties to use as a problem-solving tool and addressing misapplication of the properties. The findings reveal that there is an urgent need for pre-service teacher training programs to focus on the content knowledge, and identifying the areas where content knowledge is lacking and needs to be improved. The methods and ideas presented in the study can be used by teacher educators to prepare pre-service teachers for effectively teaching these properties at schools

Using protocol analysis to explore the creative requirements engineering process

Protocol analysis is an empirical method applied by researchers in cognitive psychology and behavioural analysis. Protocol analysis can be used to collect, document and analyse thought processes by an individual problem solver. In general, research subjects are asked to think aloud when performing a given task. Their verbal reports are transcribed and represent a sequence of their thoughts and cognitive activities. These verbal reports are analysed to identify relevant segments of cognitive behaviours by the research subjects. The analysis results may be cross-examined (or validated through retrospective interviews with the research subjects). This paper offers a critical analysis of this research method, its approaches to data collection and analysis, strengths and limitations, and discusses its use in information systems research. The aim is to explore the use of protocol analysis in studying the creative requirements engineering process.<br /

Difficult forms: critical practices of design and research

As a kind of 'criticism from within', conceptual and critical design inquire into what design is about – how the market operates, what is considered 'good design', and how the design and development of technology typically works. Tracing relations of conceptual and critical design to (post-)critical architecture and anti-design, we discuss a series of issues related to the operational and intellectual basis for 'critical practice', and how these might open up for a new kind of development of the conceptual and theoretical frameworks of design. Rather than prescribing a practice on the basis of theoretical considerations, these critical practices seem to build an intellectual basis for design on the basis of its own modes of operation, a kind of theoretical development that happens through, and from within, design practice and not by means of external descriptions or analyses of its practices and products

A comprehensive tool for developing new human-centred and social inclusion-oriented design strategies and guidelines

While Human-Centred Design is by the time considered a consolidated design methodology, emerging social inclusion-oriented theories need to be more comprehended in order to understand their potential applications in the development of new design solutions. This sort of discrepancy often generates contradictory phenomena: solutions developed using such approaches cannot be considered, at the same time, fully human-centred and social inclusion-oriented. The purpose of this article is to describe a new comprehensive tool, conceived both for designers and researchers, able to develop human-centred and social inclusion-oriented design strategies and guidelines. The tool, which is called ‘HSDT’ (Human-Social Design Tool), is an easy-to-use methodological instrument useful to identify focused results oriented toward Human-Centred Design and Social Inclusion. Using logical sequences, it allows to develop new conceptual definitions for both design and non-design subjects into new human-centred and social inclusion-oriented records. Theoretical foundations, methodological approaches, development stages and applications in design and non-design areas are presented and discussed to demonstrate real benefits resulting from the introduction of a new type of interdisciplinary tool and, later, the opportunity for designers and researchers to adopt new problem-solving approaches to bridging the gaps within Design literature

Designing as Construction of Representations: A Dynamic Viewpoint in Cognitive Design Research

This article presents a cognitively oriented viewpoint on design. It focuses on cognitive, dynamic aspects of real design, i.e., the actual cognitive activity implemented by designers during their work on professional design projects. Rather than conceiving de-signing as problem solving - Simon's symbolic information processing (SIP) approach - or as a reflective practice or some other form of situated activity - the situativity (SIT) approach - we consider that, from a cognitive viewpoint, designing is most appropriately characterised as a construction of representations. After a critical discussion of the SIP and SIT approaches to design, we present our view-point. This presentation concerns the evolving nature of representations regarding levels of abstraction and degrees of precision, the function of external representations, and specific qualities of representation in collective design. Designing is described at three levels: the organisation of the activity, its strategies, and its design-representation construction activities (different ways to generate, trans-form, and evaluate representations). Even if we adopt a "generic design" stance, we claim that design can take different forms depending on the nature of the artefact, and we propose some candidates for dimensions that allow a distinction to be made between these forms of design. We discuss the potential specificity of HCI design, and the lack of cognitive design research occupied with the quality of design. We close our discussion of representational structures and activities by an outline of some directions regarding their functional linkages

Ontology-driven conceptual modeling: A'systematic literature mapping and review

All rights reserved. Ontology-driven conceptual modeling (ODCM) is still a relatively new research domain in the field of information systems and there is still much discussion on how the research in ODCM should be performed and what the focus of this research should be. Therefore, this article aims to critically survey the existing literature in order to assess the kind of research that has been performed over the years, analyze the nature of the research contributions and establish its current state of the art by positioning, evaluating and interpreting relevant research to date that is related to ODCM. To understand and identify any gaps and research opportunities, our literature study is composed of both a systematic mapping study and a systematic review study. The mapping study aims at structuring and classifying the area that is being investigated in order to give a general overview of the research that has been performed in the field. A review study on the other hand is a more thorough and rigorous inquiry and provides recommendations based on the strength of the found evidence. Our results indicate that there are several research gaps that should be addressed and we further composed several research opportunities that are possible areas for future research

Mediating Cognitive Transformation with VR 3D Sketching during Conceptual Architectural Design Process

Communications for information synchronization during the conceptual design phase require designers to employ more intuitive digital design tools. This paper presents findings of a feasibility study for using VR 3D sketching interface in order to replace current non-intuitive CAD tools. We used a sequential mixed method research methodology including a qualitative case study and a cognitive-based quantitative protocol analysis experiment. Foremost, the case study research was conducted in order to understand how novice designers make intuitive decisions. The case study documented the failure of conventional sketching methods in articulating complicated design ideas and shortcomings of current CAD tools in intuitive ideation. The case study’s findings then became the theoretical foundations for testing the feasibility of using VR 3D sketching interface during design. The latter phase of study evaluated the designers’ spatial cognition and collaboration at six different levels: “physical-actions”, “perceptualac ons”, “functional-actions”, “conceptual-actions”, “cognitive synchronizations”, and “gestures”. The results and confirmed hypotheses showed that the utilized tangible 3D sketching interface improved novice designers’ cognitive and collaborative design activities. In summary this paper presents the influences of current external representation tools on designers’ cognition and collaboration as well as providing the necessary theoretical foundations for implementing VR 3D sketching interface. It contributes towards transforming conceptual architectural design phase from analogue to digital by proposing a new VR design interface. The paper proposes this transformation to fill in the existing gap between analogue conceptual architectural design process and remaining digital engineering parts of building design process hence expediting digital design process

COMPUTATIONAL FOUNDATIONS FOR COMPUTER AIDED CONCEPTUAL DESIGN OF MULTIPLE INTERACTION-STATE MECHATRONIC DEVICES

Increasing autonomy and intelligence in mechatronic devices requires them to be multiple interaction-state devices. Different modes of operations and different types of interactions with the use-environment require the device to have multiple interaction-states, each state capable of producing a different behavior to meet its intended requirements. For multiple interaction-state mechatronic devices, a satisfactory framework does not exist for representing, evaluating, and synthesizing design concepts. Hence, majority of mechatronic designers currently use informal methods for representing and evaluating design concepts during the conceptual design. This leads to the following problems. First, informal representation of design concepts hinders information exchange and reuse. Second, in absence of a validation methodology, it is not clear how to determine if a proposed design concept is consistent with the requirements. Finally, designers cannot perform computer aided evaluation during the conceptual design stage. This dissertation focuses in the area of computational foundations for representing, validating, evaluating, and synthesizing design concepts of multiple interaction-state mechatronic devices. A modeling and simulation framework has been developed for representing design concepts behind multiple interaction-state mechatronic devices. The problem of consistency-checking of interaction-states has been studied and an algorithm has been developed for solving the interaction consistency-checking problem. The problem of determining the presence of unsafe parameter values has been studied and an algorithm has been developed to determine whether an interaction-state in the proposed design concept can attain unsafe parameter values. Algorithms have been developed for evaluating design concepts based on the maximum power consumption and sharability of components. Finally, algorithms have been developed for automatically synthesizing transition diagrams for meeting the desired behavior specifications, given a components library. We believe that the results reported in this dissertation will provide the underlying foundations for constructing the next generation computer aided design tools for conceptual design of mechatronic devices. We expect that these tools would streamline the product development process, facilitate information reuse, and reduce product development time

Model of professional retraining of teachers based on the development of STEM competencies

The article describes a methodology for organizing lifelong learning, professional retraining of teachers in STEM field and their lifelong learning in Volodymyr Hnatiuk Ternopil National Pedagogical University (Ukraine). It analyzes foreign and domestic approaches and concepts for the implementation of STEM in educational institutions. A model of retraining teachers in the prospect of developing their STEM competencies and a model of STEM competencies were created. The developed model of STEM competencies for professional teacher training and lifelong learning includes four components (Problem solving, Working with people, Work with technology, Work with organizational system), which are divided into three domains of STEM competencies: Skills, Knowledge, Work activities. In order to implement and adapt the model of STEM competencies to the practice of the educational process, an experimental study was conducted. The article describes the content of the scientific research and the circle of respondents and analyzes the results of the research