SKILLS LEARNING COMPETENCY OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS IN THE PHYSICS LABORATORY

Practical skills occupy a pivotal position in the laboratory teaching learning process. Developing the practical skills in the students is a very common objective of teaching Physics. Laboratories are one of the characteristic features of education in the sciences at all levels. It would be rare to find any course in any institution of education without a substantial component of laboratory activity.This paper describes the performance of girl students’ skills learning at secondary school level in the Physics laboratory. A teacher made criterion - reference test was applied to measure three practical skills that is measuring skills, graph drawing skills and graph interpreting skills. The objectives were to study competency in measurement skills, in graph drawing skills and in graph interpreting skills. Only eight percent of the student achieved the mastery level in any of the three skills. The performance of the students in measurement skills was comparatively better than the other two skills. The performance of the students in graph interpreting was very poor of all the three skills.It is important to think about the ways of teaching in the context of laboratory work and also the facilities in the laboratories. In developed countries like UK, where great time and money is spent on doing practical work in schools, there is a need for sound empirical based evidence to justify the laboratory work. For developing countries, like Pakistan, the same justification is needed in order to set up and manage good laboratory for all science courses.This study has aimed at exploring the competency in Physics laboratory skills learning of the secondary school level students.Only 8% students achieved the mastery level in learning the three skills. The competences of the students were much below than the criterion marks (80%) fixed for this study

Family planning, growth and income distribution in Rwanda: SAM multiplier and graph-theoretic path analysis

This paper examines the linkages among family planning, sectoral growth and income distribution in Rwanda. Drawing on the 2006 SAM accounting multipliers, macroeconomic e¤ects of alternative income policies are evaluated. Furthermore, the high and low-income gain pathways are identi�ed by applying the graph-theoretic path analysis. The following �ndings are noted. The rural income gain spreads over the entire economy, whereas the urban income gain largely remains within urban areas, suggesting relatively larger income multiplier e¤ects of rural development policies. Second, investing in education, health and family planning promises a signi�cant increase in agricultural production, which in turn creates considerable employment in rural areas. Targeted rural development policies thus seem to be the best strategy to bring growth and harmoniously improve income distribution. Third, a unit increase in the demand for family planning-health commodities generates 60% more income for the urban-Kigali households than rural households. Finally,a unit increase in the family planning-health demand raises agricultural production by 1.3 unit, which is followed by 1.2 unit increase in service production and by 0.74 unit increase in manufacturing production. To sum up, investing in family planning-health is a viable strategy to promote agricultural growth and reduce poverty through employment created in the rural sector.Family planning; growth; income distribution; Rwanda; SAM multiplier; Graph-theoretic path analysis

Web-based haptic applications for blind people to create virtual graphs

Haptic technology has great potentials in many applications. This paper introduces our work on delivery haptic information via the Web. A multimodal tool has been developed to allow blind people to create virtual graphs independently. Multimodal interactions in the process of graph creation and exploration are provided by using a low-cost haptic device, the Logitech WingMan Force Feedback Mouse, and Web audio. The Web-based tool also provides blind people with the convenience of receiving information at home. In this paper, we present the development of the tool and evaluation results. Discussions on the issues related to the design of similar Web-based haptic applications are also given

On The Teaching Of Analyzing The Effects Of Parameter Changes On The Graph Of Function

The proficiency level of some tenth and eleventh graders on analyzing the effects of parameter changes on the graph of function is observed in this project. The result shows the level is low. It seems that those students did not sufficiently work on math problems involving deep reasoning. The students used to solve math problems by plugging in formulas only. In this project, the causes are found and reported. At the end part, an alternative teaching approach is proposed. Key Words: parameter, graph of function, alternative teaching

An eMath Teacher TOOL for ACTIVE LEARNING FLEURY'S ALGORITHM

An eMathTeacher [Sánchez-Torrubia 2007a] is an eLearning on line self assessment tool that help students to active learning math algorithms by themselves, correcting their mistakes and providing them with clues to find the right solution. The tool presented in this paper is an example of this new concept on Computer Aided Instruction (CAI) resources and has been implemented as a Java applet and designed as an auxiliary instrument for both classroom teaching and individual practicing of Fleury’s algorithm. This tool, included within a set of eMathTeacher tools, has been designed as educational complement of Graph Algorithm active learning for first course students. Its characteristics of visualization, simplicity and interactivity, make this tutorial a great value pedagogical instrument

James J. Kaput (1942–2005) imagineer and futurologist of mathematics education

Jim Kaput lived a full life in mathematics education and we have many reasons to be grateful to him, not only for his vision of the use of technology in mathematics, but also for his fundamental humanity. This paper considers the origins of his ‘big ideas’ as he lived through the most amazing innovations in technology that have changed our lives more in a generation than in many centuries before. His vision continues as is exemplified by the collected papers in this tribute to his life and work

Dynamic Animations of Journal Maps: Indicators of Structural Changes and Interdisciplinary Developments

The dynamic analysis of structural change in the organization of the sciences requires methodologically the integration of multivariate and time-series analysis. Structural change--e.g., interdisciplinary development--is often an objective of government interventions. Recent developments in multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) enable us to distinguish the stress originating in each time-slice from the stress originating from the sequencing of time-slices, and thus to locally optimize the trade-offs between these two sources of variance in the animation. Furthermore, visualization programs like Pajek and Visone allow us to show not only the positions of the nodes, but also their relational attributes like betweenness centrality. Betweenness centrality in the vector space can be considered as an indicator of interdisciplinarity. Using this indicator, the dynamics of the citation impact environments of the journals Cognitive Science, Social Networks, and Nanotechnology are animated and assessed in terms of interdisciplinarity among the disciplines involved