Mathematical Problem Solving Skills in Undergraduate Preservice Teacher Education Students

Problem solving is now an integral part of the teaching of mathematics in elementary classrooms. Accordingly, preservice teacher education students need to be prepared to teach mathematics utilizing problem solving as both a pedagogical methodology and as a heuristic that should be actively taught to students. The purpose of this study was to examine the mathematical problem solving skills of preservice teacher education students. Twenty-seven students enrolled in one of two sections of an elementary mathematics methods course in an upper midwestern university during the fall term of 2003 participated in the study. Variables examined in the study included problem solving, math anxiety, and approach to learning as defined by strategies associated with the three approaches: surface, strategic, and deep. The relationships between the variables were also studied. Students related the extent to which they perceived that they experienced math anxiety and employed the strategies associated with problem solving and the three approaches to learning through their responses to pre- and postcourse administrations of the Mathematics Information Processing Scale survey. These students indicated that they employed problem solving strategies and that the strategies used increased by the end of the course. Students also indicated that they typically experienced math anxiety and this neither increased nor decreased significantly by the end of this course. Math anxiety was not correlated to problem solving on the pre-course survey, but it was on the post. The most common approach to learning reported by these preservice students was the Strategic Study approach, both before and after the course. By the end of the course, the Deep-Associative Study approach supplanted the Surface-Disintegrated Study approach for second place. This indicated growth in these preservice teacher education students as mathematicians and problem solvers since the Surface approach to learning has negative connotations and the Deep approach is a much more positive and deeply intrinsic approach to learning. Positive correlations were found between both the Strategic Study and Deep-Associative study approaches to learning and problem solving. No correlation was found between the Surface-Disintegrated study approach and problem solving

The Repertory of Social Care of the Elderly

This paper is an analysis of aspects of the emergence of a repertory of social care services for the elderly from the vantage point of the common theory of voluntary action. One facet of that theory, labeled here as endowment theory, is an emerging rational choice model of the praxeological implications of voluntary action within the pragmatic problem-solving tradition. Three terms – endowment, repertory and commons – are presented in the paper as terms whose conventional meanings contain previously undisclosed connotations relevant to a fuller understanding of voluntary action

Ask, and shall you receive?: Understanding Desire Fulfillment in Natural Language Text

The ability to comprehend wishes or desires and their fulfillment is important to Natural Language Understanding. This paper introduces the task of identifying if a desire expressed by a subject in a given short piece of text was fulfilled. We propose various unstructured and structured models that capture fulfillment cues such as the subject's emotional state and actions. Our experiments with two different datasets demonstrate the importance of understanding the narrative and discourse structure to address this task

Inferring Interpersonal Relations in Narrative Summaries

Characterizing relationships between people is fundamental for the understanding of narratives. In this work, we address the problem of inferring the polarity of relationships between people in narrative summaries. We formulate the problem as a joint structured prediction for each narrative, and present a model that combines evidence from linguistic and semantic features, as well as features based on the structure of the social community in the text. We also provide a clustering-based approach that can exploit regularities in narrative types. e.g., learn an affinity for love-triangles in romantic stories. On a dataset of movie summaries from Wikipedia, our structured models provide more than a 30% error-reduction over a competitive baseline that considers pairs of characters in isolation

Multiple perspectives on the concept of conditional probability

Conditional probability is a key to the subjectivist theory of probability; however, it plays a subsidiary role in the usual conception of probability where its counterpart, namely independence is of basic importance. The paper investigates these concepts from various perspectives in order to shed light on their multi-faceted character. We will include the mathematical, philosophical, and educational perspectives. Furthermore, we will inspect conditional probability from the corners of competing ideas and solving strategies. For the comprehension of conditional probability, a wider approach is urgently needed to overcome the well-known problems in learning the concepts, which seem nearly unaffected by teaching

Economic management function of the state of the socialist Republic of Vietnam

Mankind history has recorded the birth, development, survival struggle, and decline of various forms of states. Along with that process, the role and function of the State in socio-economic development have been strongly highlighted, represented not only social classes but also the characteristics of institutions, structures, and organizations of society in each period, and in accordance with the development of human cognition. The state in a socialist-oriented market economy has similar connotations and differences in comparison with states in general. However, due to the lack of clear definitions to distinguish the two concepts of "economic function" and "economic management function," the design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of the effectiveness of state management policies are ineffective, as right now there exist many fuzzy and overlapping gaps in theory. Not only that, the gap between the designed policy and the actualization of policy decisions is quite far from reality. Therefore, from the time the policies are established and issued until those policies take effects, there are many issues worth discussing