Mathematic & mathematics education: searching for common ground, edited by M. Fried and T. Dreyfus, New York, Springer, 2014, 402 pp., £90, ISBN 978-94-007-7472-8

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Research in Mathematics Education on 22nd Aug 2014, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14794802.2014.93735

Evidence-Based Dialogue Maps as a research tool to evaluate the quality of school pupils’ scientific argumentation

This pilot study focuses on the potential of Evidence-based Dialogue Mapping as a participatory action research tool to investigate young teenagers’ scientific argumentation. Evidence-based Dialogue Mapping is a technique for representing graphically an argumentative dialogue through Questions, Ideas, Pros, Cons and Data. Our research objective is to better understand the usage of Compendium, a Dialogue Mapping software tool, as both (1) a learning strategy to scaffold school pupils’ argumentation and (2) as a method to investigate the quality of their argumentative essays. The participants were a science teacher-researcher, a knowledge mapping researcher and 20 pupils, 12-13 years old, in a summer science course for “gifted and talented” children in the UK. This study draws on multiple data sources: discussion forum, science teacher-researcher’s and pupils’ Dialogue Maps, pupil essays, and reflective comments about the uses of mapping for writing. Through qualitative analysis of two case studies, we examine the role of Evidence-based Dialogue Maps as a mediating tool in scientific reasoning: as conceptual bridges for linking and making knowledge intelligible; as support for the linearisation task of generating a coherent document outline; as a reflective aid to rethinking reasoning in response to teacher feedback; and as a visual language for making arguments tangible via cartographic conventions

Media literacy at all levels: making the humanities more inclusive

The decline of the humanities, combined with the arrival of students focused on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), represent an opportunity for the development of innovative approaches to teaching languages and literatures. Expanding the instructional focus from traditional humanities students, who are naturally more text-focused, to address the needs of more application-oriented STEM learners ensures that language instructors prepare all students to become analytical and critical consumers and producers of digital media. Training students to question motives both in their own and authentic media messages and to justify their own interpretations results in more sophisticated second language (L2) communication. Even where institutional structures impede comprehensive curriculum reform, individual instructors can integrate media literacy training into their own classes. Tis article demonstrates ways of reaching and retaining larger numbers of students at all levels—if necessary, one course at a time.Published versio

A Review of Verbal and Non-Verbal Human-Robot Interactive Communication

In this paper, an overview of human-robot interactive communication is presented, covering verbal as well as non-verbal aspects of human-robot interaction. Following a historical introduction, and motivation towards fluid human-robot communication, ten desiderata are proposed, which provide an organizational axis both of recent as well as of future research on human-robot communication. Then, the ten desiderata are examined in detail, culminating to a unifying discussion, and a forward-looking conclusion

Beyond ‘Interaction’: How to Understand Social Effects on Social Cognition

In recent years, a number of philosophers and cognitive scientists have advocated for an ‘interactive turn’ in the methodology of social-cognition research: to become more ecologically valid, we must design experiments that are interactive, rather than merely observational. While the practical aim of improving ecological validity in the study of social cognition is laudable, we think that the notion of ‘interaction’ is not suitable for this task: as it is currently deployed in the social cognition literature, this notion leads to serious conceptual and methodological confusion. In this paper, we tackle this confusion on three fronts: 1) we revise the ‘interactionist’ definition of interaction; 2) we demonstrate a number of potential methodological confounds that arise in interactive experimental designs; and 3) we show that ersatz interactivity works just as well as the real thing. We conclude that the notion of ‘interaction’, as it is currently being deployed in this literature, obscures an accurate understanding of human social cognition

Child development and the aims of road safety education

Pedestrian accidents are one of the most prominent causes of premature injury, handicap and death in the modern world. In children, the problem is so severe that pedestrian accidents are widely regarded as the most serious of all health risks facing children in developed countries. Not surprisingly, educational measures have long been advocated as a means of teaching children how to cope with traffic and substantial resources have been devoted to their development and provision. Unfortunately, there seems to be a widespread view at the present time that education has not achieved as much as had been hoped and that there may even be quite strict limits to what can be achieved through education. This would, of course, shift the emphasis away from education altogether towards engineering or urban planning measures aimed at creating an intrinsically safer environment in which the need for education might be reduced or even eliminated. However, whilst engineering measures undoubtedly have a major role to play in the effort to reduce accidents, this outlook is both overly optimistic about the benefits of engineering and overly pessimistic about the limitations of education. At the same time, a fresh analysis is clearly required both of the aims and methods of contemporary road safety education. The present report is designed to provide such an analysis and to establish a framework within which further debate and research can take place

Embodied conversations: Performance and the design of a robotic dancing partner

This paper reports insights gained from an exploration of performance-based techniques to improve the design of relationships between people and responsive machines. It draws on the Emergent Objects project and specifically addresses notions of embodiment as employed in the field of performance as a means to prototype and develop a robotic agent, SpiderCrab, designed to promote expressive interaction of device and human dancer, in order to achieve ‘performative merging’. The significance of the work is to bring further knowledge of embodiment to bear on the development of human-technological interaction in general. In doing so, it draws on discursive and interpretive methods of research widely used in the field of performance but not yet obviously aligned with some orthodox paradigms and practices within design research. It also posits the design outcome as an ‘objectile’ in the sense that a continuous and potentially divergent iteration of prototypes is envisaged, rather than a singular final product. The focus on performative merging draws in notions of complexity and user experience. Keywords: Embodiment; Performance; Tacit Knowledge; Practice-As-Research; Habitus.</p

Do (and say) as I say: Linguistic adaptation in human-computer dialogs

© Theodora Koulouri, Stanislao Lauria, and Robert D. Macredie. This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.There is strong research evidence showing that people naturally align to each other’s vocabulary, sentence structure, and acoustic features in dialog, yet little is known about how the alignment mechanism operates in the interaction between users and computer systems let alone how it may be exploited to improve the efficiency of the interaction. This article provides an account of lexical alignment in human–computer dialogs, based on empirical data collected in a simulated human–computer interaction scenario. The results indicate that alignment is present, resulting in the gradual reduction and stabilization of the vocabulary-in-use, and that it is also reciprocal. Further, the results suggest that when system and user errors occur, the development of alignment is temporarily disrupted and users tend to introduce novel words to the dialog. The results also indicate that alignment in human–computer interaction may have a strong strategic component and is used as a resource to compensate for less optimal (visually impoverished) interaction conditions. Moreover, lower alignment is associated with less successful interaction, as measured by user perceptions. The article distills the results of the study into design recommendations for human–computer dialog systems and uses them to outline a model of dialog management that supports and exploits alignment through mechanisms for in-use adaptation of the system’s grammar and lexicon