Reducing Test Anxiety and Improving Test Performance in American's Schools: Summary of Results From The TestEdge National Demonstration Study

This study determined the correlates and consequences of stress and test anxiety in a large sample of students (980) and investigated the effects of HeartMath tools among 636 of them who were part of an experimental group compared to the other 344 who were in a control group. Teachers received instruction in the Resilient Educator(R), which is designed to boost teacher performance, strengthen resiliency and improve school relationships, and students participated in the TestEdge(R) program, which features tools for reducing stress and test anxiety, improving academic performance and enhancing emotional and relational competence.The study tested two major hypotheses:Enhanced competence in emotional management through learning and practicing the TestEdge tools would result in significant improvements in student emotional self-regulation and psychophysiological coherence. These changes would produce a marked reduction in test anxiety and generate a corresponding improvement in academic and test performance.There would be associated improvements in stress management, emotional stability, and overall student well-being, as well as improvements in classroom climate, organization and function.We found consistent evidence of positive effects from the intervention on the students at the intervention school when their stress levels, emotional stability and the results of other measures were compared with those of students at the control school. Students in the experimental group had acquired the ability to self-activate the coherent state prior to taking an important test. This ability to self-activate coherence was associated with significant reductions in test anxiety and corresponding improvements in measures of emotional disposition

Multi-Objective Materialized View Selection in Data-Intensive Flows

In this thesis we present Forge, a tool for automating multi-objective materialization of intermediate results in data-intensive flows, driven by a set of different quality objectives. We report initial evaluation results, showing the feasibility and efficiency of our approach

Zero-one laws with respect to models of provability logic and two Grzegorczyk logics

It has been shown in the late 1960s that each formula of first-order logic without constants and function symbols obeys a zero-one law: As the number of elements of finite models increases, every formula holds either in almost all or in almost no models of that size. Therefore, many properties of models, such as having an even number of elements, cannot be expressed in the language of first-order logic. Halpern and Kapron proved zero-one laws for classes of models corresponding to the modal logics K, T, S4, and S5 and for frames corresponding to S4 and S5. In this paper, we prove zero-one laws for provability logic and its two siblings Grzegorczyk logic and weak Grzegorczyk logic, with respect to model validity. Moreover, we axiomatize validity in almost all relevant finite models, leading to three different axiom systems

Creativity and its implications for secondary college-preparatory mathematics education

A great deal of research has been done in the area of creativity since 1950. Nevertheless, there is still a scarcity of creativity in the schools today. There are several reasons for this situation. Part of the problem is a lack of consensus as to the meaning of creativity. The term creativity is often used by educators to mean any fun and nonintellectual activity. This misuse of the term causes the student to believe that creativity can be achieved with little effort. Another extreme position is to reserve the term only for those creative geniuses who have produced highly acclaimed products. This reflects an elitist viewpoint of creativity. Neither of these perspectives was espoused in this paper. Creativity was regarded as a universal trait to be developed in every human being. For purposes of this study, creativity was defined as an ability to go beyond the commonplace and ordinary, an ability to combine information and/or experience in a unique and insightful way

24th International Conference on Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases

In the last three decades information modelling and knowledge bases have become essentially important subjects not only in academic communities related to information systems and computer science but also in the business area where information technology is applied. The series of European – Japanese Conference on Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases (EJC) originally started as a co-operation initiative between Japan and Finland in 1982. The practical operations were then organised by professor Ohsuga in Japan and professors Hannu Kangassalo and Hannu Jaakkola in Finland (Nordic countries). Geographical scope has expanded to cover Europe and also other countries. Workshop characteristic - discussion, enough time for presentations and limited number of participants (50) / papers (30) - is typical for the conference. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to: 1. Conceptual modelling: Modelling and specification languages; Domain-specific conceptual modelling; Concepts, concept theories and ontologies; Conceptual modelling of large and heterogeneous systems; Conceptual modelling of spatial, temporal and biological data; Methods for developing, validating and communicating conceptual models. 2. Knowledge and information modelling and discovery: Knowledge discovery, knowledge representation and knowledge management; Advanced data mining and analysis methods; Conceptions of knowledge and information; Modelling information requirements; Intelligent information systems; Information recognition and information modelling. 3. Linguistic modelling: Models of HCI; Information delivery to users; Intelligent informal querying; Linguistic foundation of information and knowledge; Fuzzy linguistic models; Philosophical and linguistic foundations of conceptual models. 4. Cross-cultural communication and social computing: Cross-cultural support systems; Integration, evolution and migration of systems; Collaborative societies; Multicultural web-based software systems; Intercultural collaboration and support systems; Social computing, behavioral modeling and prediction. 5. Environmental modelling and engineering: Environmental information systems (architecture); Spatial, temporal and observational information systems; Large-scale environmental systems; Collaborative knowledge base systems; Agent concepts and conceptualisation; Hazard prediction, prevention and steering systems. 6. Multimedia data modelling and systems: Modelling multimedia information and knowledge; Contentbased multimedia data management; Content-based multimedia retrieval; Privacy and context enhancing technologies; Semantics and pragmatics of multimedia data; Metadata for multimedia information systems. Overall we received 56 submissions. After careful evaluation, 16 papers have been selected as long paper, 17 papers as short papers, 5 papers as position papers, and 3 papers for presentation of perspective challenges. We thank all colleagues for their support of this issue of the EJC conference, especially the program committee, the organising committee, and the programme coordination team. The long and the short papers presented in the conference are revised after the conference and published in the Series of “Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence” by IOS Press (Amsterdam). The books “Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases” are edited by the Editing Committee of the conference. We believe that the conference will be productive and fruitful in the advance of research and application of information modelling and knowledge bases. Bernhard Thalheim Hannu Jaakkola Yasushi Kiyok

New Foundation in the Sciences: Physics without sweeping infinities under the rug

It is widely known among the Frontiers of physics, that “sweeping under the rug” practice has been quite the norm rather than exception. In other words, the leading paradigms have strong tendency to be hailed as the only game in town. For example, renormalization group theory was hailed as cure in order to solve infinity problem in QED theory. For instance, a quote from Richard Feynman goes as follows: “What the three Nobel Prize winners did, in the words of Feynman, was to get rid of the infinities in the calculations. The infinities are still there, but now they can be skirted around . . . We have designed a method for sweeping them under the rug. [1] And Paul Dirac himself also wrote with similar tune: “Hence most physicists are very satisfied with the situation. They say: Quantum electrodynamics is a good theory, and we do not have to worry about it any more. I must say that I am very dissatisfied with the situation, because this so-called good theory does involve neglecting infinities which appear in its equations, neglecting them in an arbitrary way. This is just not sensible mathematics. Sensible mathematics involves neglecting a quantity when it turns out to be small—not neglecting it just because it is infinitely great and you do not want it!”[2] Similarly, dark matter and dark energy were elevated as plausible way to solve the crisis in prevalent Big Bang cosmology. That is why we choose a theme here: New Foundations in the Sciences, in order to emphasize the necessity to introduce a new set of approaches in the Sciences, be it Physics, Cosmology, Consciousness etc