Concepciones Sobre Curriculum, El Contenido Escolar y El Profesor En Los Procesos De ElaboraciónDe Textos Curriculares En Argentina

This work analyzes curriculum development processes that have taken place in Argentina during the period 1980-2000. The purpose of this article is to identify the main trends in the conceptions used by the key actors/designers of curriculum for school content, curricular texts and teachers place as interpreters of curricular texts. Three lines of thought are distinguished that have impacted curricular decision making processes carried out at the central levels of the system: the tradition of the General Didactics, the tradition of the Special Didactics, and the disciplinary tradition. Finally, this article concludes that a view of curriculum development as a social process needs to incorporate how cultural and political elements are articulated with technical decisions in the particular spaces and agencies where curricular texts are produced.Este trabajo plantea una reflexión acerca de los procesos de diseño curricular que han tenido lugar en la Argentina en las dos últimas décadas. Su propósito es identificar las principales tendencias en las concepciones de los actores/diseñadores del curriculum acerca del contenido escolar, el texto curricular y el lugar del profesor como intérprete de ese texto. Se distinguen tres vertientes de pensamiento que han tenido impacto en los procesos de decisión curricular llevados a cabo en las instancias centrales del sistema: la tradición de la Didáctica General, la tradición de las Didácticas Especiales y la tradición disciplinar. Finalmente, se señala que una lectura del diseño curricular como proceso social requiere incorporar perspectivas que analicen el modo en que los aspectos culturales y políticos se articulan con decisiones correspondientes a la esfera técnica en los espacios y agencias de producción del texto curricular en contextos particulares

Where words meet numbers:Comprehension of measurement unit terms in posterior cortical atrophy

Units of measurement (e.g., metre, week, gram) are critically important concepts in everyday life. Little is known about how knowledge of units is represented in the brain or how this relates to other forms of semantic knowledge. As unit terms are intimately connected with numerical quantity, we might expect knowledge for these concepts to be supported by parietally-mediated representations of space, time and magnitude. We investigated knowledge for measurement units in patients with posterior cortical atrophy (PCA), who display profound impairments of spatial and numerical cognition associated with occipital and parietal lobe atrophy. Relative to healthy controls, PCA patients displayed impairments for a range of unit-based knowledge, including the ability to specify the dimension which a unit refers to (e.g., grams measure mass), to select the appropriate units to measure everyday quantities (grams for sugar) and to determine the relative magnitudes of different unit terms (gram is smaller than kilogram). In most cases, their performance was also significantly poorer than a patient control group diagnosed with typical Alzheimer's disease. Our results suggest that impairment to systems that code numerical and spatial magnitudes has an effect on non-numerical verbal knowledge for measurement units. Units of measurement appear to lie at the intersection of the brain's verbal and numerical semantic systems, making them a critical class of concepts in which to investigate how magnitude-based codes contribute to verbal semantic representation

The Role of the Right and Left Parietal Lobes in the Conceptual Processing of Numbers

While much evidence has linked injury to the prefrontal cortex (PFC) to impairments in planning, much less is known about the underlying cognitive processes that are compromised as a consequence of PFC damage. In addition, the differential contributions of left and right PFC to planning remain controversial. To address these issues, we administered a real-world travel planning task to thirty participants comprised of six patients with focal frontal lesions to left PFC, six patients with focal frontal lesions to right PFC, six patients with posterior lesions, and twelve normal controls. Furthermore, we employed the methodology of verbal protocol analysis, enabling us to go beyond simple task performance and to analyze the underlying cognitive processes and strategies that underlie plan formulation. The results revealed that patients with right PFC lesions formulated significantly worse plans than patients with left PFC lesions and normal controls. No other comparison reached significance. To explore the underlying reasons for the planning impairment exhibited by right PFC patients, we computed the ratio of concrete to abstract problem-solving statements between the groups. The results demonstrated that right PFC patients had a significantly higher concrete-to-abstract ratio of problem-solving statements than left PFC patients and normal controls. No other comparison reached significance. We conclude that the role of right PFC in real-world planning involves the formulation and maintenance of abstract ideas as a function of task demands