Concepciones sobre algunas especies animales : ejemplificaciones del razonamiento por categorías. Dificultades de aprendizaje asociadas

In this paper we have studied the student's and the teacher's misconceptions and attitudes about several animals. The results show that students and teachers use a reasoning that divides the animals into categories and often in double classes: bad animalsJgood animals, strong animalsJweak animals, carnivores/herbivores, and others. We analyze the influence of fables and children tales on these misconceptions, the epistemological component of these ideas and the possible real obstacle. The implications in order to overcome the obstacle are discussed and the strategies wich may be more effective are suggested

Ranking Alternatives on the Basis of the Intensity of Dominance and Fuzzy Logic within MAUT

We introduce dominance measuring methods to derive a ranking of alternatives to deal with incomplete information in multi-criteria decision making problems on the basis of Multi-Attribute Utility Theory (MAUT). We consider the situation where the alternative performances are represented by uniformly distributed intervals, and there exists imprecision concerning the decision-makers¿ preferences, by means of classes of individual utility functions and imprecise weights represented by weight intervals or fuzzy weights, respectively. An additive multi-attribute utility model is used to evaluate the alternatives under consideration, which is considered a valid approach in most practical cases. The approaches we propose are based on the dominance values between pairs of alternatives that can be computed by linear programming, which are then transformed into dominance intensities from which a dominance intensity measure is derived. The methods proposed are compared with other existing dominance measuring methods and other methodologies by Monte Carlo simulation techniques. The performance is analyzed in terms of two measures of efficacy: hit ratio, the proportion of all cases in which the method selects the same best alternative as in the TRUE ranking, and the Rank-order correlation, which represents how similar the overall rank structures of alternatives are in the TRUE ranking and in the ranking derived from the method. The approaches are illustrated with an example consisting on the selection of intervention strategies to restore an aquatic ecosystem contaminated by radionuclides

A proposal of collaborative work in groups made up by students of the Faculty of the University of Castilla - La Mancha and the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile : A proposal using collaborative publishing tools.

De la experiencia del trabajo con herramientas de publicación colaborativas - wikis - de uno de los autores en la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, nace el planteamiento de actividades en las que los alumnos de la Facultad de Educación de esta Universidad trabajen de manera colaborativa con alumnos de las Facultades de Educación de la Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha en el ámbito de la Didáctica de las Ciencias Experimentales. El hecho de trabajar en la misma área de conocimiento, desde una perspectiva diferente, amplía la capacidad de los futuros maestros para trabajar en contextos internacionales. Utilizar wikis en la Educación Superior como instrumento de trabajo colaborativo permite además trabajar competencias transversales como la multiculturalidad, el uso de las tecnologías de la información y la comunicación, las habilidades interpersonales, el trabajo en equipo y la eliminación de barreras espacio-temporales. El trabajo colaborativo en contextos internacionales permite a los alumnos trabajar sobre la adaptación de los contenidos de la Didáctica de las Ciencias Experimentales al aula, contextualizándola en otro sistema educativo diferente y no limitándose a la legislación vigente en España y en Castilla-La Mancha. Por otro lado, en la Didáctica de las Ciencias Experimentales, los ecosistemas constituyen un interesante recurso de trabajo, vertebrador que relaciona las diferentes disciplinas. Los trabajos colaborativos centrados en ecosistemas de ambos países suponen trasladar aquellos conocimientos relacionados con procesos observados en ecosistemas cercanos a otros estudiantes que no los conocen desde su experiencia directa. La importancia de estos aspectos en la formación de un futuro maestro es especialmente interesante actualmente cuando la capacidad de ejercer la profesión docente en el extranjero puede suponer una interesante salida laboral.Based on the work of one of the authors in the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile with collaborative publishing tools – wikis – there is a proposal for activities in which students of both universities, Castilla-La Mancha and Pontifical Catholic of Chile, can work collaboratively in the area of Didactics of Experimental Sciences. The fact of working in the same knowledge area, but from a different perspective, enhances the ability of the future teachers to work in international contexts. Using wikis in Universities as a tool for collaborative publishing, allows to develop transversal competences like multiculturality, the use of information and communication technologies (ICT), interpersonal abilities, the group work and the removal of time and space barriers. Collaborative work in an international context allow students to work on the adaptation of the Didactics of Experimental Sciences contents to schools, making them sensitive to another educative system and not only applying these contents to the current legislation in Spain and in Castilla-La Mancha. Besides, ecosystems are a powerful tool that vertebrate the relationship between the Didactics of Experimental Sciences and other disciplines. Collaborative works focused on Spanish and Chilean ecosystems implies the transfer of knowledge related to processes observed in these nearby ecosystems to other students that don't know them from their direct experience. The importance of all these aspects in the education of future teachers is especially interesting nowadays, when the ability to work as a teacher in a foreign country may constitute a significant opportunit

Dominance Measuring Method Performance under Incomplete Information about Weights.

In multi-attribute utility theory, it is often not easy to elicit precise values for the scaling weights representing the relative importance of criteria. A very widespread approach is to gather incomplete information. A recent approach for dealing with such situations is to use information about each alternative?s intensity of dominance, known as dominance measuring methods. Different dominancemeasuring methods have been proposed, and simulation studies have been carried out to compare these methods with each other and with other approaches but only when ordinal information about weights is available. In this paper, we useMonte Carlo simulation techniques to analyse the performance of and adapt such methods to deal with weight intervals, weights fitting independent normal probability distributions orweights represented by fuzzy numbers.Moreover, dominance measuringmethod performance is also compared with a widely used methodology dealing with incomplete information on weights, the stochastic multicriteria acceptability analysis (SMAA). SMAA is based on exploring the weight space to describe the evaluations that would make each alternative the preferred one

Comparison between the creation of models and visualization to enhance visual literacy in human anatomy in preservice teachers

La alfabetización visual es esencial para la formación docente en ciencias, especialmente en anatomía humana, cuya enseñanza y aprendizaje están apoyados en el uso de gráficos y requiere la adquisición de una visión espacial del cuerpo humano. Sin embargo, ha sido poco estudiada en maestros de Primaria y no existen investigaciones que evalúen la efectividad de métodos que permitan mejorarla. El presente trabajo, llevado a cabo con 194 maestros en su último año de formación, además de hacer un diagnóstico inicial de su nivel de alfabetización visual en anatomía humana, contrasta el impacto de la visualización frente a la realización de maquetas para mejorarla. Para ello se realizó un pretest y un postest consistentes en la representación de una sección transversal humana. Los resultados ponen de manifiesto una limitada alfabetización visual inicial vinculada a la producción de este tipo de secciones, y evidencian un mayor aprendizaje asociado a la realización de maquetas.Visual literacy is essential in science teacher training, especially in human anatomy. The teaching and learning processes of human anatomy are based on the use of graphics, and a spacial perception of the human body is required. Nevertheless, it has been little addressed, and there are no works of assessment of methodologies to improve it in Primary teacher training. This work has been carried out with 194 preservice teachers, and besides an initial diagnosis of the visual literacy skills in human anatomy, the impact of visualization and modelization of the human body to improve it are contrasted. The production of a cross section human diagram has been used as pre and post test. The results show limited skills in visual literacy related to the production of this type of sections, and a higher impact of producing scaled models on learning

Dominance Measuring Approach using Stochastic Weights

In this paper we propose an approach to obtain a ranking of alternatives in multicriteria decision-making problems when there is imprecision concerning the alternative performances, component utility functions and weights. We assume decision maker's preferences are represented by an additive multi-attribute utility function, in which weights are modeled by independent normal variables, the performance in each attribute for each alternative is an interval value and classes of utility functions are available for each attribute. The approach we propose is based on dominance measures, which are computed in a similar way that when the imprecision concerning weights is modeled by uniform distributions or by an ordinal relation. In this paper we will show how the approach can be applied when the imprecision concerning weights are represented by normal distributions. Extensions to other distributions, such as truncated normal or beta, can be feasible using Monte Carlo simulation techniques