54,783 research outputs found
Understanding and Affecting Student Reasoning About Sound Waves
Student learning of sound waves can be helped through the creation of
group-learning classroom materials whose development and design rely on
explicit investigations into student understanding. We describe reasoning in
terms of sets of resources, i.e. grouped building blocks of thinking that are
commonly used in many different settings. Students in our university physics
classes often used sets of resources that were different from the ones we wish
them to use. By designing curriculum materials that ask students to think about
the physics from a different view, we bring about improvement in student
understanding of sound waves. Our curriculum modifications are specific to our
own classes, but our description of student learning is more generally useful
for teachers. We describe how students can use multiple sets of resources in
their thinking, and raise questions that should be considered by both
instructors and researchers.Comment: 23 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, 28 references, 7 notes. Accepted for
publication in the International Journal of Science Educatio
Using graphical and pictorial representations to teach introductory astronomy students about the detection of extrasolar planets via gravitational microlensing
The detection and study of extrasolar planets is an exciting and thriving
field in modern astrophysics, and an increasingly popular topic in introductory
astronomy courses. One detection method relies on searching for stars whose
light has been gravitationally microlensed by an extrasolar planet. In order to
facilitate instructors' abilities to bring this interesting mix of general
relativity and extrasolar planet detection into the introductory astronomy
classroom, we have developed a new Lecture-Tutorial, "Detecting Exoplanets with
Gravitational Microlensing." In this paper, we describe how this new
Lecture-Tutorial's representations of astrophysical phenomena, which we
selected and created based on theoretically motivated considerations of their
pedagogical affordances, are used to help introductory astronomy students
develop more expert-like reasoning abilities.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in the American
Journal of Physic
The Hidden Web, XML and Semantic Web: A Scientific Data Management Perspective
The World Wide Web no longer consists just of HTML pages. Our work sheds
light on a number of trends on the Internet that go beyond simple Web pages.
The hidden Web provides a wealth of data in semi-structured form, accessible
through Web forms and Web services. These services, as well as numerous other
applications on the Web, commonly use XML, the eXtensible Markup Language. XML
has become the lingua franca of the Internet that allows customized markups to
be defined for specific domains. On top of XML, the Semantic Web grows as a
common structured data source. In this work, we first explain each of these
developments in detail. Using real-world examples from scientific domains of
great interest today, we then demonstrate how these new developments can assist
the managing, harvesting, and organization of data on the Web. On the way, we
also illustrate the current research avenues in these domains. We believe that
this effort would help bridge multiple database tracks, thereby attracting
researchers with a view to extend database technology.Comment: EDBT - Tutorial (2011
Pushing Elephants Uphill - Teaching Ethics. It Works!
Recent releases from the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) highlight the importance of ethics education. Academic institutions employ varying methods of teaching ethics and place varying levels of emphasis on ethics teaching during a business/accounting degree. This paper attempts to evaluate whether teaching ethics to final year accountancy students is beneficial. At the commencement of a semester one class of 155 students were given five ethical scenarios on which to make an ethical decision. During the semester they were subject to three different methods of teaching ethics, a traditional lecture/tutorial; use of a computer based interactive case study to work through an ethical dilemma; and, forming groups to complete a group written assignment solving another ethical dilemma. The subjects were subsequently given the original five ethical scenarios and asked to complete them again. In all five instances the mean responses were more ethical after the instruction methodologies (4 significantly so). When asked to evaluate the methodologies the subjects considered all three to have a positive effect on their ethical thinking and the combined effect was more positive than any individual method. Hence it appears teaching ethics can impact positively, the challenge is to find the optimal method(s)
Sustaining Educational Reforms in Introductory Physics
While it is well known which curricular practices can improve student
performance on measures of conceptual understanding, the sustaining of these
practices and the role of faculty members in implementing these practices are
less well understood. We present a study of the hand-off of Tutorials in
Introductory Physics from initial adopters to other instructors at the
University of Colorado, including traditional faculty not involved in physics
education research. The study examines the impact of implementation of
Tutorials on student conceptual learning across eight first-semester, and seven
second-semester courses, for fifteen faculty over twelve semesters, and
includes roughly 4000 students. It is possible to demonstrate consistently
high, and statistically indistinguishable, student learning gains for different
faculty members; however, such results are not the norm, and appear to rely on
a variety of factors. Student performance varies by faculty background -
faculty involved in, or informed by physics education research, consistently
post higher student learning gains than less-informed faculty. Student
performance in these courses also varies by curricula used - all semesters in
which the research-based Tutorials and Learning Assistants are used have higher
student learning gains than those semesters that rely on non-research based
materials and do not employ Learning Assistants.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figures, and other essential inf
Introduction to the Special Issue on Critical Thinking in Higher Education
The articles included in this issue represent some of the most recent thinking in the
area of critical thinking in higher education. While the emphasis is on work being
done in the Australasian region, there are also papers from the USA and UK that
demonstrate the international interest in advancing research in the area.
‘Critical thinking’ in the guise of the study of logic and rhetoric has, of course,
been around since the days of the ancient Greeks and the early beginnings of universities.
In a narrower sense, critical thinking has been central to higher education as a
desirable attribute of graduates since at least the beginning of the twentieth century.
The work of John Dewey, and others, emphasised the importance of ‘good habits of
thinking’ as early as 1916. In 1945, the Harvard Committee placed emphasis on the
importance of ‘thinking effectively’ as one of three desirable educational abilities in
their General education in a free society. This was later endorsed in 1961 by the US-based
Educational Policies Commission: ‘The purpose which runs through and
strengthens all other educational purposes … is the development of the ability to
think’ (Kennedy, Fisher, & Ennis, 1991, pp. 11–12).
In recent times, universities have made a point of emphasising the importance of
critical thinking as a ‘generic skill’ that is central to most, if not all, subjects. There is
not a university today (in Australia at least) that does not proudly proclaim that their
graduates will – as a result of a degree program in their institution – learn to think critically.
Further, there is rarely a subject taught that does not offer the opportunity to
acquire skills in critical thinking. However, where is the evidence that we teach critical
thinking in higher education? Disturbingly, despite our best intentions, it appears
we may be teaching very little of it
Towards an Intelligent Tutor for Mathematical Proofs
Computer-supported learning is an increasingly important form of study since
it allows for independent learning and individualized instruction. In this
paper, we discuss a novel approach to developing an intelligent tutoring system
for teaching textbook-style mathematical proofs. We characterize the
particularities of the domain and discuss common ITS design models. Our
approach is motivated by phenomena found in a corpus of tutorial dialogs that
were collected in a Wizard-of-Oz experiment. We show how an intelligent tutor
for textbook-style mathematical proofs can be built on top of an adapted
assertion-level proof assistant by reusing representations and proof search
strategies originally developed for automated and interactive theorem proving.
The resulting prototype was successfully evaluated on a corpus of tutorial
dialogs and yields good results.Comment: In Proceedings THedu'11, arXiv:1202.453
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