28 research outputs found

    Comparison of Student Learning in Traditional Physics Labs and Labatorials

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    Traditional, cookbook physics labs are often associated with student dissatisfaction and superficial applications, and are known to leave students with fragmented knowledge. As an alternative, we examine labatorials, a conceptually driven approach to labs. In particular, we develop labatorials to compare with traditional labs in terms of students’ learning experience and the quality of their conceptual learning. In the context of Concordia University’s introductory experimental mechanics course, we collect data spanning semi-structured student and TA interviews, class observations, TA surveys, post-test and final exam scores and responses, and student writing products. Upon analysis and triangulation, we find that due to the scaffolding present in labatorials, students typically exhibit a high degree of collaboration and engagement with the material in a low-pressure environment, which allows students to focus on the learning. Students in traditional labs have a tendency to rely on step-by-step instructions and focus on avoiding errors, which may inhibit their conceptual learning. Although the average final exam scores of the labatorial and traditional groups exhibit no significant difference (p = 0.196), differences do exist for certain question types; namely, traditional lab students tend to perform better on questions involving standardized processes or simple, memorization-based calculations, while labatorial students tend to perform better on conceptual questions

    Human Jurisprudence: Public Law as Political Science

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    This book provides a rare view of a creative scholar at work during a highly productive phase of his career. It shows him as an innovator, theorist, methodologist, “missionary,” critic, and scientist, but he remains, withal, in his fashion, a humanist. He believes that institutions and processes—particularly law, politics, and scholarship—are best understood in human terms. With Holmes, he believes that law is a prediction of what courts will do; hence, to understand law it is necessary to understand judicial behavior. A full explanation of a judge’s behavior would take into account his health (both physical and mental), his personality, his culture and society, and his ideology. Glendon Schubert concedes this but focuses primarily on ideology because he believes the other variables are sublimated in it. Therefore, to him, ideology—attitudes toward human values—is the basic explanation of judicial behavior, and jurisprudence is necessarily human. The studies in this volume are important in the study of judicial behavior, for they broke new ground, and some were forerunners of major books, such as The Judicial Mind, which was published in 1965. Each shows Professor Schubert’s concern at the time they were written, and taken together they show the movement and growth of his ideas and interests

    Aspects of the relation between doctrine and dialectic in Plato

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    An attempt is made to identify a principle underlying the increasing complexity of the early and middle dialogues of Plato without postulating a secret doctrine or straining the text. Socratic argument is argument from a position, and this reserved position is, often the key to the vicissitudes of the argument. Yet he is prevented from expressing this position because there is no generally recognized contemporary framework of philosophical discussion by means of which he can make his argument independent of the reaction of his interlocutors. Thus the whole dialectical situation is part and parcel of the proof. The whole dialectical situation was analysed by Plato in the effort to generalise the application of the proof, to produce a doctrine of character - of the man on whom dialectic works, a doctrine of hypothesis in which dialectic is interpreted to professors of other disciplines in a competition for attention traditional between the disciplines, a doctrine of memory and recollection, based on analysis of the role played by memory in guaranteeing the truth content of a conversation; and a doctrine of mind and perception which is dialectic internalized and transposed to a mental sphere. The fundamental character of Platonic proof is reported dialectic, and in the dialectic reported, at least at the beginning, natural forces work to produce the desired result. The evidence for a formalized dialect is dependent on or independent of or even pre-dating Plato is not sufficient to produce conviction. The ghost of Socrates must always be supplied to the dialectical machine.<p

    On Wondering: The Epistemology of A Questioning Attitude

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    An emerging trend in contemporary epistemology departs from the traditional preoccupation with the nature of knowledge, belief, evidence, justification, and the problems of skepticism. This trend focuses instead on the nature of inquiry itself and especially on the role of questions and questioning attitudes that arise in and define that activity. Naturally, this emerging trend calls for a philosophical exploration of the nature of questioning attitudes like curiosity and wondering, and of the various epistemological considerations pertaining to them. Consequently, this project primarily addresses two questions: what does it mean to wonder? And what is required to wonder well? The project is thus both descriptive and normative, aiming to pin down the place that wondering has in our ontology of epistemologically significant mental states and to determine what kinds of prescriptive norms it is subject to in the course of rational inquiry

    Metaontological Studies relating to the Problem of Universals

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    My dissertation deals with metaontology or metametaphysics. This is the subdiscipline of philosophy that is concerned with the investigation of metaphysical concepts, statements, theories and problems on the metalevel. It analyses the meaning of metaphysical statements and theories and discusses how they are to be justified. The name "metaontology" is recently coined, but the task of metaontology is the same as Immanuel Kant already dealt with in his Critique of Pure Reason. As methods I use both historical research and logical (or rather semantical) analysis. In order to understand clearly what metaphysical terms or theories mean or should mean we must both look at how they have been characterized in the course of the history of philosophy and then analyse the meanings that have historically been given to them with the methods of modern formal semantics. Metaontological research would be worthless if it could not in the end be applied to solving some substantive ontological questions. In the end of my dissertation, therefore, I give arguments for a solution to the substantively ontological problem of universals, a form of realism about universals called promiscuous realism. To prepare the way for that argument, I argue that the metaontological considerations most relevant to the problem of universals are considerations concerning ontological commitment, as the American philosophers Quine and van Inwagen have argued, not those concerning truthmakers as such philosophers as the Australian realist D. M. Armstrong have argued or those concerning verification conditions as such philosophers as Michael Dummett have argued. To justify this conclusion, I go first through well-known objections to verificationism, and show that they apply also to current verificationist theories such as Dummett's theory and Field's deflationist theory of truth. In the process I also respond to opponents of metaphysics who try to show with the aid of verificationism or structuralism that metaphysical questions would be meaningless or illegitimate in some other way. Having justified the central role of ontological commitment, I try to develop a detailed theory of it. The core of my work is a rigorous formal development of a theory of ontological commitment. I construct it by combining Alonzo Church's theory of ontological commitment with Tarski's theory of truth.Väitöskirjani käsittelee metaontologiaa eli metametafysiikkaa. Tämä on se metafilosofian osa-alue, joka tutkii metafyysisten väitteiden ja termien merkitystä ja sitä, miten metafyysiset väitteet ja teoriat voitaisiin oikeuttaa. Metafysiikka tai ontologia on taas tiede, joka tutkii olevaa yleensä tai kaikkeutta kokonaisuutena. Menetelminä käytän sekä historiallista tutkimusta että loogista (tai pikemminkin semanttista) analyysiä. On olemassa kolme pääasiallista teoriaa siitä, mikä on metaontologian keskeisin käsite. Sellaiset filosofit kuin australialainen Armstrong ovat väittäneet, että se on totuustekijöiden (truthmakers) käsite. Sellaiset anti-realistiset filosofit kuin englantilainen filosofi Michael Dummett ovat taas väittäneet että se on todennettavuusehtojen (verification conditions) käsite. Argumentoin näitä kahta käsitystä vastaan ja kolmannen puolesta, jonka mukaan keskeisin käsite on ontologisten sitoumusten käsite, kuten amerikkalainen filosofi Quine on väittänyt. Argumentoin, että Quinen ontologisten sitoumusten teoria voidaan erottaa hänen muista ontologisista näkemyksistään, kuten hänen semanttisesta holismistaan, ontologisesta relativismistaan tai strukturalismistaan, mitkä ovat mielestäni virheellisiä. Väitöskirjani ydin on täsmällinen teoria ontologisista sitoumuksista, jonka rakennan yhdistämällä Alonzo Churchin teoriaa ontologisista sitoumuksista Alfred Tarskin totuusteoriaan. Metaontologinen tutkimus olisi arvotonta, ellei sitä voisi lopulta käyttää substantiivisten ontologisten kysymysten ratkaisemiseen. Käsittelen siksi väitöskirjani loppupuolella yhtä perinteistä ontologian ongelmaa, universaalien ongelmaa. Jo Aristoteles määritteli teoksessaan Tulkinnasta universaalien olevan olioita, jotka (Lauri Carlsonin käännöksen mukaan) luonnostaan predikoidaan (sanotaan) monesta. Universaaliongelma koskee sitä, ovatko tällaiset universaalit vain kielellisiä ilmauksia, kuten yleisnimet, verbit ja adjektiivit, tai ihmismielestä riippuvia olioita, kuten yleiskäsitteet, vai voidaanko myös sanoa, että maailmassa itsessään olevia olioita voidaan predikoida jostakin. Realistin mukaan vastaus on myöntävä. Esitän väitöskirjan lopussa alustavan argumentin universaaleja koskevan realismin puolesta

    Communication as Symbiogenesis – On the Relationality of Mobile Phoning in Korea

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    This study understands communication as parasitic and symbiogenetic. It recognizes an object or technology no less and no more important than a subject, and appreciates the “process” of the “becoming” of both a subject and an object. Media and individuals create and recreate each other. In the symbiogenetic space in-between, what happens is not a physical addition of a technological object to an individual, but, rather, it is a chemical fusion of the two, which holds unprecedented, distinctive qualities that have not been seen from any of the two constituents. Among various communication media, this study examines why and how the mobile phone is particularly parasitic and symbiogenetic

    Design of an item bank to test reading in English as a foreign language

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    A Stakeholder Approach to Strategic CSR: A Case Study of ExxonMobil and a Capacity Development Initiative in the Niger Delta Region of Nigeria

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    Extant literature suggests that the business case for CSR may ensure a sustainable approach towards CSR practice. Underpinning this concept is the ability to leverage the opportunities provided to a firm through adopting those CSR initiatives which align social and economic goals and also referred to as Strategic CSR. There is scant research on the assessment of the social impact of strategic CSR initiatives on stakeholders aside from the financial impact on the firm. Existing studies have generally been conducted from the perspective of the firm, with less regard given to the perceptions of other stakeholders. Also, there is a dearth of empirical studies on the business case for CSR in the Nigerian context. Given these gaps, this thesis explores a stakeholder perspective of a capacity development programme adopted by Mobil Producing Nigeria Unlimited, a subsidiary of ExxonMobil. The aim is to explore the concept of strategic CSR in the context of the NDR of Nigeria, given the heterogeneity of the concept of CSR and the importance of this region to the Nigerian economy. This study employs a qualitative exploratory case study technique. In-depth interviews with two groups of host community members were conducted. They consisted of direct beneficiaries of the initiative and host community members considered to be opinion leaders. Field observations were made and other relevant documents were sourced to provide differing insights. The findings revealed that contrary to the notion of the provision of welfare as philanthropy, communities in the NDR consider the practice as an ethical obligation of the firm, alluding to cultural and environmental factors responsible for this perception. In terms of the capacity development programme, it is suggested that there are opportunities to practice strategic CSR in the NDR. The findings further suggest that there is scope to improve the effectiveness of the initiative by adopting a stakeholder engagement approach

    Critique of memory research

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    The present relation between theory and experimentation in the area of memory is discussed, and as a result it is suggested that there is a crisis in thin field of work. On the one hand, there are some theories which are supposed to be guides for research as exemplified by the theory of Shiffrin and Atkinson and on the other bond there are a great deal of problems, or phenomena, which are open to research and cannot be explained using contemporary theories. It in concluded that the lack of relation between the explanation and the phenomena is the major source of the crisis. This conclusion is supported here with on experimental analysis of the ideas of trace, flow of information and stores. One of the indications of possible solution to the crisis, is the experimental evidence in favour of the idea of memory as a reconstructive process. A conceptual structure for further work is presented, which could be considered as an intermediate step to relate in the future, in a clearer way, several phenomena and explanations. This conceptual structure suggests the use of a different interpretation of memory functions; suggest the use of the idea of processes of manipulation of information, and points out the difficulties in trying to elaborate account, of representation
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