60,316 research outputs found
What’s Wrong with Contemporary Economics?
It is argued that in educating economists we should sacrifice some of the more technical aspects of economics (which can be learned later), in favour of the compulsory inclusion of (a) philosophy, (b) political science and (c) economic history. Three reasons for interdisciplinary studies are given. In the discussion of the place of mathematics in economics fuzziness enters when the symbols a, b, c are identified with individuals, firms, or farms. The identification of the precise symbol with the often ambiguous and fuzzy reality, invites lack of precision and blurs the concepts. If the social sciences, including economics, are regarded as a “soft” technology compared with the “hard” technology of the natural sciences, development studies have been regarded as the soft underbelly of “economic science”. In development economics the important question is: what are the springs of development? We must confess that we cannot answer this question, that we do not know what causes successful development.
Where does good evidence come from?
This paper started as a debate between the two authors. Both authors present a series of propositions about quality standards in education research. Cook’s propositions, as might be expected, concern the importance of experimental trials for establishing the security of causal evidence, but they also include some important practical and acceptable alternatives such as regression discontinuity analysis. Gorard’s propositions, again as might be expected, tend to place experimental trials within a larger mixed method sequence of research activities, treating them as important but without giving them primacy. The paper concludes with a synthesis of these ideas, summarising the many areas of agreement and clarifying the few areas of disagreement. The latter include what proportion of available research funds should be devoted to trials, how urgent the need for more trials is, and whether the call for more truly mixed methods work requires a major shift in the community
Reinventing College Physics for Biologists: Explicating an epistemological curriculum
The University of Maryland Physics Education Research Group (UMd-PERG)
carried out a five-year research project to rethink, observe, and reform
introductory algebra-based (college) physics. This class is one of the Maryland
Physics Department's large service courses, serving primarily life-science
majors. After consultation with biologists, we re-focused the class on helping
the students learn to think scientifically -- to build coherence, think in
terms of mechanism, and to follow the implications of assumptions. We designed
the course to tap into students' productive conceptual and epistemological
resources, based on a theoretical framework from research on learning. The
reformed class retains its traditional structure in terms of time and
instructional personnel, but we modified existing best-practices curricular
materials, including Peer Instruction, Interactive Lecture Demonstrations, and
Tutorials. We provided class-controlled spaces for student collaboration, which
allowed us to observe and record students learning directly. We also scanned
all written homework and examinations, and we administered pre-post conceptual
and epistemological surveys. The reformed class enhanced the strong gains on
pre-post conceptual tests produced by the best-practices materials while
obtaining unprecedented pre-post gains on epistemological surveys instead of
the traditional losses.Comment: 35 pages including a 15 page appendix of supplementary material
Eliminating Reasoning via Inferring with Planning: A New Framework to Guide LLMs' Non-linear Thinking
Chain-of-Thought(CoT) prompting and its variants explore equipping large
language models (LLMs) with high-level reasoning abilities by emulating
human-like linear cognition and logic. However, the human mind is complicated
and mixed with both linear and nonlinear thinking. In this work, we propose
\textbf{I}nferential \textbf{E}xclusion \textbf{P}rompting (IEP), a novel
prompting that combines the principles of elimination and inference in order to
guide LLMs to think non-linearly. IEP guides LLMs to plan and then utilize
Natural Language Inference (NLI) to deduce each possible solution's entailment
relation with context, commonsense, or facts, therefore yielding a broader
perspective by thinking back for inferring. This forward planning and backward
eliminating process allows IEP to better simulate the complex human thinking
processes compared to other CoT-based methods, which only reflect linear
cognitive processes. We conducted a series of empirical studies and have
corroborated that IEP consistently outperforms CoT across various tasks.
Additionally, we observe that integrating IEP and CoT further improves the
LLMs' performance on certain tasks, highlighting the necessity of equipping
LLMs with mixed logic processes. Moreover, to better evaluate comprehensive
features inherent in human logic, we introduce \textbf{M}ental-\textbf{A}bility
\textbf{R}easoning \textbf{B}enchmark (MARB). The benchmark comprises six novel
subtasks with a total of 9,115 questions, among which 1,685 are developed with
hand-crafted rationale references. We believe both \textsc{IEP} and
\textsc{MARB} can serve as a promising direction for unveiling LLMs' logic and
verbal reasoning abilities and drive further advancements. \textsc{MARB} will
be available at ~\texttt{anonymity link} soon
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