Attitudes towards science: a review of the literature and its implications

This article offers a review of the major literature about attitudes to science and its implications over the past 20 years. It argues that the continuing decline in numbers choosing to study science at the point of choice requires a research focus on students? attitudes to science if the nature of the problem is to be understood and remediated. Starting from a consideration of what is meant by attitudes to science, it considers the problems inherent to their measurement and what is known about students' attitudes towards science and the many factors of influence such as gender, teachers, curricula, cultural and other variables. The literature itself points to the crucial importance of gender and the quality of teaching. Given the importance of the latter we argue that there is a greater need for research to identify those aspects of science teaching that make school science engaging for pupils. In particular, a growing body of research on motivation offers important pointers to the kind of classroom environment and activities that might raise pupils' interest in studying school science and a focus for future research

The scattering of baby Skyrmions off potential obstructions, in a Landau-Lifshitz model

The dynamics of baby skyrmions of the (2+1) new baby Skyrme model, in a Landau - Lifshitz model, was studied in the presence of various potential obstructions of varying geometries. The potential obstructions were created by introducing a localised inhomogeneity in the new baby Skyrme model's potential coefficient. The size and shape of the potential obstruction was varied and two systems were investigated, namely the symmetric and asymmetric systems. In the symmetric system the trajectory of the baby skyrmions, as they traverse the barrier, was deformed from the normal circular trajectory, during which time the skyrmions sped up. For critical values of the barrier height, the baby skyrmions no longer formed a bound state and were free to separate. In the case of a potential hole, the baby skyrmions no longer formed a bound state and moved asymptotically along the edge of the hole. In the asymmetric barrier system the baby skyrmions behaved the same as the skyrmions of the symmetric obstructions. Away from the obstruction the baby skyrmions orbited the boundary of the system. In the potential hole system the bound skyrmions moved along the edge of the hole. For critical values of the hole depth, the bound state between the skyrmions was broken, resulting in one of the skyrmions remaining stationary and the other traversing the edge of the hole. During our investigations into this system it was found that the definition of the angular momentum must be modified to ensure overall conservation. It was shown how these modifications arise and how they are calculated

The Effect of Direct Instruction Reading Remediation for Fourth Graders

This study was to determine if below average readers in a reading remediation class receiving Direct Instruction reading would make larger gains in reading than average to above average readers who received whole language based reading instruction. These were 69 students in the study. Students were assigned to cohorts based on test performance on the Development Reading Assessment (DRA) and administrative recommendations. Instruction was provided for 5 months for the experimental group (n=36) using Scientific Research Associates Corrective Reading (a Direct Instruction reading program). The control group (n=11) received 5 months of reading instruction in a locally designed whole language reading and grammar program. The data were analyzed using a one way analysis of variance (ANOVA). The significance level used to test the hypothesis was .05. The F value was found to be 4.53 (df 1,92). Thus the null hypothesis was rejected. There is a significant difference in the reading achievement between groups. Limitations for this study concern the use of the DRA. Recommendations for this study would be using a more sensitive pre and post assessment tool to determine reading gains

Backup without redundancy: genetic interactions reveal the cost of duplicate gene loss.

Many genes can be deleted with little phenotypic consequences. By what mechanism and to what extent the presence of duplicate genes in the genome contributes to this robustness against deletions has been the subject of considerable interest. Here, we exploit the availability of high-density genetic interaction maps to provide direct support for the role of backup compensation, where functionally overlapping duplicates cover for the loss of their paralog. However, we find that the overall contribution of duplicates to robustness against null mutations is low ( approximately 25%). The ability to directly identify buffering paralogs allowed us to further study their properties, and how they differ from non-buffering duplicates. Using environmental sensitivity profiles as well as quantitative genetic interaction spectra as high-resolution phenotypes, we establish that even duplicate pairs with compensation capacity exhibit rich and typically non-overlapping deletion phenotypes, and are thus unable to comprehensively cover against loss of their paralog. Our findings reconcile the fact that duplicates can compensate for each other's loss under a limited number of conditions with the evolutionary instability of genes whose loss is not associated with a phenotypic penalty

The Stability of an Isotropic Cosmological Singularity in Higher-Order Gravity

We study the stability of the isotropic vacuum Friedmann universe in gravity theories with higher-order curvature terms of the form $(R_{ab}R^{ab})^{n}$ added to the Einstein-Hilbert Lagrangian of general relativity on approach to an initial cosmological singularity. Earlier, we had shown that, when $$, a special isotropic vacuum solution exists which behaves like the radiation-dominated Friedmann universe and is stable to anisotropic and small inhomogeneous perturbations of scalar, vector and tensor type. This is completely different to the situation that holds in general relativity, where an isotropic initial cosmological singularity is unstable in vacuum and under a wide range of non-vacuum conditions. We show that when $n\neq 1$, although a special isotropic vacuum solution found by Clifton and Barrow always exists, it is no longer stable when the initial singularity is approached. We find the particular stability conditions under the influence of tensor, vector, and scalar perturbations for general $n$ for both solution branches. On approach to the initial singularity, the isotropic vacuum solution with scale factor $a(t)=t^{P_{-}/3}$ is found to be stable to tensor perturbations for $0.5<n< 1.1309$ and stable to vector perturbations for $0.861425 < n \leq 1$, but is unstable as $t \to 0$ otherwise. The solution with scale factor $a(t)=t^{P_{+}/3}$ is not relevant to the case of an initial singularity for $n>1$ and is unstable as $t \to 0$ for all $n$ for each type of perturbation.Comment: 25 page

Spatially Adaptive Computation Time for Residual Networks

This paper proposes a deep learning architecture based on Residual Network that dynamically adjusts the number of executed layers for the regions of the image. This architecture is end-to-end trainable, deterministic and problem-agnostic. It is therefore applicable without any modifications to a wide range of computer vision problems such as image classification, object detection and image segmentation. We present experimental results showing that this model improves the computational efficiency of Residual Networks on the challenging ImageNet classification and COCO object detection datasets. Additionally, we evaluate the computation time maps on the visual saliency dataset cat2000 and find that they correlate surprisingly well with human eye fixation positions.Comment: CVPR 201

Shakespeare 400 Pilot : Addressing the Attainment Gap in Scotland Using Textlab and the Classics

The attainment gap is a key concern in current Scottish education policy. It is envisaged that the learning outcomes of an innovative collaborative project between the Department of English and School of Education at the University of Strathclyde may help redress some of the underlying concern associated with this phenomenon. The Shakespeare 400 project was designed to assist in addressing this gap, and through enhancements to pupil engagement in classic literacy, is aimed at contributing to a reversal of the substantial drop in Reading, Listening & Talking figures across transition stages (P7 – S2). Using known best practice regarding interdisciplinary approach and collaborative group work, its transformative and genre-based pedagogical approach in project activity begins with a fictitious ‘crime’ committed by one of Shakespeare’s famous characters. Using their skills in literacy and technologies, pupils then must read, analyse and evaluate an anonymous confession note in order to identify the guilty party from amongst a bank of ‘suspects’. This computer-based activity meets several Curriculum for Excellence learning outcomes in Literacy and Technologies, and can also encourage students to engage with their lessons outside of class. This paper will first locate the Shakespeare 400 project within current education policy and the curriculum, and then discuss the nature of the project itself and the feedback from its pilot study at a primary school in Glasgow

Indoor Air Quality Through the Lens of Outdoor Atmospheric Chemistry

Outdoor atmospheric chemistry and air quality have been the topic of research that intensified in earnest around the mid-20th century, while indoor air quality research has only been a key focus of chemical researchers over the last 30 years. Examining practices and approaches employed in the outdoor atmospheric chemistry research enterprise provides an additional viewpoint from which we can chart new paths to increase scientific understanding of indoor chemistry. This chapter explores our understanding of primary chemical sources, homogeneous and multiphase reactivity, gas-surface partitioning, and the coupling between the chemistry and dynamics of indoor air through the lens of outdoor atmospheric chemistry. The means to mitigate degraded air quality outdoors are heavily rooted in public policy actions, while the commercial sector mainly promulgates solutions for indoor air quality, making practical and actionable outcomes to research essential for prompt improvements to indoor environments. Indoor and outdoor environments have many important scientific distinctions, but a shared vision for healthy environments motivates both research communities in the same way