The Power of Giving Feedback and Receiving Feedback in Peer Assessment

Despite well-documented promises of peer assessment, it is still unclear how peer as-sessment works and what contributes to students\u2019 learning gains. In order to identify cognitive processes that lead to learning enhancement, this study examined 41 stu-dents\u2019 responses to online surveys and also their online written interactions when they participated in a peer assessment activity. Data analysis revealed that students were en-gaged in various learning processes in the phases of giving and receiving feedback. While students acknowledged that both phases contributed to their learning, a greater number of students indicated that they perceived more learning benefits from giving feedback rather than receiving feedback. Interpretations and implications were dis-cussed

EDITORIAL.TECHNOLOGY AS A SUPPORT TO TRADITIONAL ASSESSMENT PRACTICES

Assessment in education is under pressure to change. Some drivers for change result from new ways of thinking about assessment and its educational purposes. Other drivers are external and are the result of wider changes in society. Technology falls into this second category. This special issue is concerned with change at the intersection of assessment and technology in education

La sfida postumanista. Colloqui sul significato della tecnica

Gli antichi consideravano la fragilit\ue0 e il limite come tratti costitutivi dell\u2019essere umano. La vita buona consisteva pertanto nella capacit\ue0 di vivere virtuosamente tale condizione finita. La modernit\ue0 ha cominciato invece a considerare il limite e la fragilit\ue0 come ostacoli frapposti alla conquista della felicit\ue0. Alla vita buona si oppone dunque l\u2019ideale di una vita perfetta. Oggi i progressi congiunti della genetica, delle nanotecnologie e della robotica fanno immaginare la possibilit\ue0 che quell\u2019utopia possa davvero realizzarsi conducendo, in un prossimo futuro, a una trasformazione radicale dell\u2019essere umano. Il postumanesimo \ue8 la filosofia che scommette sulla realt\ue0 di questo progetto e che individua nel potenziamento delle capacit\ue0 fisico-cognitive e nella vittoria sulla morte mete concrete a cui guardare con fiducia. Ma qual \ue8 il senso di tale direzione di marcia? L\u2019uomo, imperfetto e vulnerabile, \ue8 davvero antiquato? Questo libro si propone di rispondere a simili domande, offrendo un quadro esaustivo del ricco dibattito che contrappone il movimento postumanista ai suoi critici. Nella prima parte la riflessione postumanista viene introdotta e analizzata sia dal punto di vista storico che attraverso una presentazione dei suoi principali protagonisti; nella seconda parte, invece, si d\ue0 voce al dibattito internazionale; nell\u2019ultima parte, infine, sostenitori e critici del progetto postumanista si confrontano in una stimolante tavola rotonda virtuale.Gli antichi consideravano la fragilita\u300 e il limite come tratti costitutivi dell\u2019essere umano. La vita buona consisteva pertanto nella capacita\u300 di vivere virtuosamente tale condizione finita. La modernita\u300 ha cominciato invece a considerare il limite e la fragilita\u300 come ostacoli frapposti alla conquista della felicita\u300. Alla vita buona si oppone dunque l\u2019ideale di una vita perfetta. Oggi i progressi congiunti della gene- tica, delle nanotecnologie e della robotica fanno immaginare la possibilita\u300 che quell\u2019utopia possa davvero realizzarsi conducendo, in un prossimo futuro, a una trasformazione radicale dell\u2019essere umano. Il postumanesimo e\u300 la filosofia che scommette sulla realta\u300 di questo progetto e che individua nel potenziamento delle capacita\u300 fisico-cognitive e nella vittoria sulla morte mete concrete a cui guardare con fiducia. Ma qual e\u300 il senso di tale direzione di marcia? L\u2019uomo, imperfetto e vulnerabile, e\u300 davvero antiquato? Questo libro si propone di rispondere a simili domande, offrendo un quadro esaustivo del ricco dibattito che contrappone il movimento postumanista ai suoi critici. Nella prima parte la riflessione postuma- nista viene introdotta e analizzata sia dal punto di vista storico che attraverso una presentazione dei suoi principali protagonisti; nella seconda parte, invece, si da\u300 voce al dibattito internazionale; nell\u2019ultima parte, infine, sostenitori e critici del progetto postumanista si confrontano in una stimolante tavola rotonda virtuale

An unpublished interview with Paulo Freire: radical pedagogy & social transformation

Pulling together the inedited works by Paulo Freire in the XXI century shows us how his works are up-to-date with current issues in the field. Most of his works have been disseminated all over the World, as those of the greatest educator of all times; however, his simplicity and outspoken voice is unique and cannot be reproduce in a simple manner. This is possibly why many writers use his citations, instead of paraphrasing his writings. Therefore, this paper represents another attempt to focus on his own voice and perspective on some of the questions raised by students three decades ago, that had never reach a broad audience but are nevertheless still in the minds of many students who are today interested in his work. The paper presents a short unpublished interview with Freire in 1988, when he talks about theoretical affiliation, critiques and the objectives of his works. In a conversation format the interview is a re-encounter between Paulo Freire and his former student Carmen de Mattos

Dynamic coupling between whisking, barrel cortex, and hippocampus during texture discrimination: A role for slow rhythms

Increasing amounts of work have demonstrated that brain rhythms might constitute clocking mechanisms against which to coordinate sequences of neural firing; such rhythms may be essential to the coding operations performed by the local networks. The sequence of operations underlying a tactile discrimination task in rats requires the animal to integrate two streams of information, those coming from the environment and, from reference memory the rules that dictate the correct response. The current study is a follow up on the work which has described the hippocampal representation of the tactile guided task. We have used a well-established texture discrimination task, in which rats have to associate two stimuli with two different reward locations. We placed microelectrodes in primary somatosensory cortex and the CA1 region of hippocampus to perform recordings of spiking activity and local field potentials when the animal touched the discriminandum as well as when he was in a resting state. We also performed recording on an arena in which the animal moved freely and did not perform any task. Earlier work has demonstrated that tactile signals reach the hippocampus during texture discrimination, presumably through the somatosensory cortex. We predicted that neurons in the primary somatosensory cortex (S1) are entrained to the oscillatory theta rhythm that permeates the hippocampus. Our expectation is that such coherence could serve to increase the reliability of synaptic transmission, linking the acquisition of new sensory information with associative processes. We addressed the following issues: Is the timing of action potentials in S1 modulated by the ongoing hippocampal theta rhythm? If so, is the occurrence of this modulation aligned in time to the period in which the hippocampus acquires tactile signals? We also predicted that the 10-Hz whisking that characterizes the acquisition of texture information would be more strongly phase locked to theta rhythm than the whisking in the air that is not accompanied by any explicit tactile task. We speculate that such phase locking could be a means to synchronize sensory and hippocampal processing. The notion that the coordination between brain areas might be related to the rhythmic of sensorimotor cycles is particularly appealing. We have found that the firing of 18% of barrel cells was significantly modulated by hippocampal theta during the half-second period of active tactile discrimination. Importantly, we found that during periods of rest interleaved in the session, neurons significantly decreased the degree of phase-locking with respect to touch. We hypothesize that areas involved with motivational processes as basal ganglia could gate the entrainment during task related epochs. S1 neurons were classified as those excited by contact with the discriminandum, and those not excited by contact. The firing of both sorts of neurons was modulated by CA1 theta rhythm during exploration of the texture. However the theta phase to which they fired preferentially was opposite; contact-responsive neurons tended to fire in the upward phases of the cycle whereas contact non-responsive neurons tended to fire in the downward phase of the cycle suggesting that theta rhythm might have the function of temporally separating sensory cortical neurons according to their functional properties and the information they carry. By clustering touch-sensitive neurons to a certain time window and separating them from \u2018non-informative\u2019 neurons, theta rhythm could increase the efficiency not only of information tranfer to hippocampus but also the efficiency of information encoding/decoding. We also found phase and amplitude relationships between whisking and hippocampal theta during the goal-directed tactile task; the relationships disappear when the animal moves along an open arena, still actively whisking but not engaged in the texture discrimination task. We were able to show, for the first time to our knowledge, that CA1 theta rhythm can exert a behavioral state-dependent modulatory effect on sensory cortex. S1 neuron firing and whisking activity are entrained to hippocampal theta rhythm when the animal collects meaningful tactile information from the environment