Developing algebraic and didactical knowledge in pre-service primary teacher education

This study analyzes the contribution of a teaching experiment for the development of prospective primary teachers regarding knowledge of algebra and of algebra teaching as well as their professional identity. The case study of a prospective teachersuggests that an exploratory approach combining content and pedagogy supports this development, especially in the need to propose challenging tasks, to provide opportunity for students’ autonomous work and collective discussions and to be attentive to children’s representations and strategies in order to promote algebraic thinking

Studying patterns of use of transport modes through data mining - Application to U.S. national household travel survey data set

Data collection activities related to travel require large amounts of financial and human resources to be conducted successfully. When available resources are scarce, the information hidden in these data sets needs to be exploited, both to increase their added value and to gain support among decision makers not to discontinue such efforts. This study assessed the use of a data mining technique, association analysis, to understand better the patterns of mode use from the 2009 U.S. National Household Travel Survey. Only variables related to self-reported levels of use of the different transportation means are considered, along with those useful to the socioeconomic characterization of the respondents. Association rules potentially showed a substitution effect between cars and public transportation, in economic terms but such an effect was not observed between public transportation and nonmotorized modes (e.g., bicycling and walking). This effect was a policy-relevant finding, because transit marketing should be targeted to car drivers rather than to bikers or walkers for real improvement in the environmental performance of any transportation system. Given the competitive advantage of private modes extensively discussed in the literature, modal diversion from car to transit is seldom observed in practice. However, after such a factor was controlled, the results suggest that modal diversion should mainly occur from cars to transit rather than from nonmotorized modes to transi

From mode choice to modal diversion: A new behavioural paradigm and an application to the study of the demand for innovative transport services

We analyse past research efforts that focus on modal diversion in the transport sector, as opposed to the classical mode choice concept, showing the added value of this alternative framework that emerges from the existing scientific literature. The modal diversion paradigm is then used to assess the relative importance of the technical performances of transport services on one hand and of the subjective factors of its potential users on the other, when forecasting the use of a new means among a group of white-collars working in a French research institute. We quantitatively show that multimodal habits and cognitive attitudes have an importance that is in general not negligible for this group, compared to that of the transport services performances, even if only these latter are routinely considered by engineers and planners. Beyond this, we find that the role of self-related factors further increased when the group was less familiar with the technological background and the subsequent operation of the new system, such as in the case of demand responsive transport service

The importance of information flows temporal attributes for the efficient scheduling of dynamic demand responsive transport services

The operation of a demand responsive transport service usually involves the management of dynamic requests. The underlying algorithms are mainly adaptations of procedures carefully designed to solve static versions of the problem, in which all the requests are known in advance. However there is no guarantee that the effectiveness of an algorithm stays unchanged when it is manipulated to work in a dynamic environment. On the other hand, the way the input is revealed to the algorithm has a decisive role on the schedule quality. We analyze three characteristics of the information flow (percentage of real-time requests, interval between call-in and requested pickup time and length of the computational cycle time), assessing their influence on the effectiveness of the scheduling proces

The very same thing: Extending the object token concept to incorporate causal constraints on individual identity

The contributions of feature recognition, object categorization, and recollection of episodic memories to the re-identification of a perceived object as the very same thing encountered in a previous perceptual episode are well understood in terms of both cognitive-behavioral phenomenology and neurofunctional implementation. Human beings do not, however, rely solely on features and context to re-identify individuals; in the presence of featural change and similarly-featured distractors, people routinely employ causal constraints to establish object identities. Based on available cognitive and neurofunctional data, the standard object-token based model of individual re-identification is extended to incorporate the construction of unobserved and hence fictive causal histories (FCHs) of observed objects by the pre-motor action planning system. Cognitive-behavioral and implementation-level predictions of this extended model and methods for testing them are outlined. It is suggested that functional deficits in the construction of FCHs are associated with clinical outcomes in both Autism Spectrum Disorders and later-stage stage Alzheimer's disease.\u

Collectivity and Criticism: (Fragments of) Conversations on Post-dance

Post-dance first unfolded as a conference in MDT in Stockholm, 14-16 October, 2015, created by Danjel Andersson, Andre Lepecki and Gabriel Smeds, and was followed by a multi-authored publication co-edited by Andersson, Mette Edvardsen and Mårten Spångberg (March 2017) that sought to delineate post-dance as a mode of thinking about an expanded contemporary dance and choreographic practice. This experiment in collective criticism thinks through and around post-dance as a critical moment in contemporary dance practice. Authored by Writingshop, a long-term collaborative project between four European critics examining the processes, modes and politics of contemporary, collective critical practice, it intersperses multi-authored notes from and on post-dance with a timeline. This timeline is an edited transcript of the conversation that gave rise to the notes, taking place in a side-chat, on a live Google document. At the same time, whilst this has been a process of selection, there has been little editorial intervention into the chat, in order to preserve its chronology and dynamics, and acknowledge the challenges of us arriving in this document together, from four different places, with different forms of access and points of entry into language

Can the Arts Change the World? The Transformative Power of the Arts in Fostering and Sustaining Social Change

A group of nonprofit leaders working in the arts, advocacy, political organizing, social services, and education explored the connection between community organizing and creative expression by engaging in collective activities, including visiting various examples of community arts, and experimentation with their own practice. Through this process, the group concluded that arts could be socially transformative; that community arts can create a safe space that allows people to trust and be open to changing; that art can help people reflect together and not talk past one another; and that the process of creating together can be healing and sustaining