Vidergåendeeskole elevers opplevelser av ”Gratis skolemåltider og bærekraftige kantiner” pilot project i Viken fylkeskommune

Background: Current human diets are causing detriment to human health, the environment, and climate. Policies that support population shift towards more sustainable and healthy diets are crucial to achieve Sustainable Development Goals. Free school meals may have the potential to broadly influence dietary habits of students, from all socioeconomic backgrounds. In autumn 2020, Viken county municipality initiated a “Free school meals and sustainable canteens” pilot project in 13 upper secondary schools. The pilot project aims to gain insight to how healthy and sustainable free school meals can eventually be implemented in the rest of Viken. As the primary target group, students can offer valuable insights to current implementation and the future scaling of the initiative. Aim: This thesis aimed to explore the experiences of upper secondary school students taking part in the Viken “Free school meals and sustainable canteen pilot project”. The thesis set out to answer three research questions relating to how the students view the free school meals and canteen food, the sustainability components, and their participation in the decision-making processes of the pilot project. Method: The thesis used a qualitative approach whereby four focus group interviews were carried out with a total of 23 students at Ål school and Kalnes school. Data was thematically analysed by which initial codes were identified and subthemes and main themes formed. Findings: Many students were positive to having a free meal offer, yet several found meals to deviate from their food preferences. Students had varied levels of understanding of sustainability. They recognised food sustainability as having many benefits on a societal level but did not find sustainability to be important for their own food choices. Furthermore, students experienced their participation to be low. They had little knowledge and understanding about the pilot projects aims and conditions and they experienced that their views were often not heard or taken into account in decisions. This had several repercussions on students overall view of the pilot project. Conclusions and implications: The findings point to a need to balance healthy and sustainable meals with students' preferences. Furthermore, increasing students’ knowledge of sustainability components through connecting classroom teaching with the school meals may support the shaping of sustainable dietary behaviours. Lastly, increasing the degree of student participation in design and implementation could facilitate the successful scaling of the initiative to the rest of the schools in Viken.Baggrund: Nuværende kostvaner har negative konsekvenser for både menneskers sundhed, miljøet og klimaet. Policy der understøtter befolkningsskifte mod mere bæredygtige og sunde kostvaner, er afgørende for at nå Verdensmålene for bæredygtig udvikling. Gratis skolemåltider kan have potentialet til i vid udstrækning påvirke kostvaner hos elever fra alle socioøkonomiske baggrunde. Viken fylkeskommune igangsatte i efteråret 2020 et pilotprojekt for ”Gratis skolemåltider og bæredygtige kantiner” i 13 gymnasier. Pilotprojektet har til formål at få indsigt i hvordan sunde og bæredygtige gratis skolemåltider på sigt kan implementeres i resten af Viken. Som den primære målgruppe kan eleverne bidrage med værdifuld indsigt i den nuværende implementering og den fremtidige skalering af initiativet. Formål: Denne studie havde til formål at udforske gymnasieelevers erfaringer med deres deltagelse i Vikens "Gratis skolemåltider og bæredygtige kantiner” pilotprojekt. Studie to for sig tre forskningsspørgsmål der omhandlet hvordan eleverne ser på de gratis skolemåltider og kantinemaden, bæredygtighedskomponenterne og deres medvirkning i pilotprojektets beslutningsprocesser. Resultater: Mange elever var positive over for at have et gratis måltidstilbud, men flere fandt måltiderne til at afvige fra deres madpræferencer. Eleverne havde forskellige niveauer af forståelse af bæredygtighed. De anerkendte fødevarebæredygtighed som at have mange fordele på et samfundsniveau, men fandt ikke bæredygtighed vigtigt for deres egne madvalg. Desuden oplevede eleverne, at deres deltagelse var lav. De havde ringe viden om og forståelse for pilotprojektets mål og betingelser, og de oplevede, at deres synspunkter ofte ikke blev hørt eller taget i betragtning i beslutningsprocesser. Dette havde flere konsekvenser for elevernes syn på pilotprojektet. Konklusioner og implikationer: Resultaterne peger på et behov for at balancere sunde og bæredygtige måltider med elevernes præferencer. Samtidig kan det at øge elevernes viden om bæredygtighedskomponenter ved at forbinde klasseundervisning med skolemåltiderne understøtte udformningen af bæredygtig kostadfærd. En øget grad af elev medvirkning i design og implementering ville kunne støtte en vellykket skalering af initiativet til resten af skolerne i Viken.M-FO

A review of abstract concept learning in embodied agents and robots.

This paper reviews computational modelling approaches to the learning of abstract concepts and words in embodied agents such as humanoid robots. This will include a discussion of the learning of abstract words such as 'use' and 'make' in humanoid robot experiments, and the acquisition of numerical concepts via gesture and finger counting strategies. The current approaches share a strong emphasis on embodied cognition aspects for the grounding of abstract concepts, and a continuum, rather than dichotomy, view of concrete/abstract concepts differences.This article is part of the theme issue 'Varieties of abstract concepts: development, use and representation in the brain'

Promoción del alfabetismo inicial y prevención de las dificultades en la lectura: una experiencia pedagógica en el aula de preescolar

In this study we compared three intervention strategies to promote initial literacy in preschool classrooms. Strategies included techniques that are recognized universally to increase emergent literacy skills and experimental strategies that have been demonstrated to improve these skills. Such study was developed from a study at the University of Georgia called PAVED for success. There were 126 participants –57 girls and 69 boys– between the ages of 4 years and 4 years 9 months attending 4 preschool program in Bogotá. One class from each program was selected and each class was assigned one of four interventions designed to improve initial literacy. To evaluate the intervention, emergent literacy measures were given to the children and the teachers. The instruments evaluate phonological awareness, linguistic development, letter knowledge and affective relations between the children and the teachers (PLS-3, test of phonological awareness, name of the letter, among others). The results indicate that the group with the most interventions, universal practices and experimental, had the highest scores in measures of initial literacy when compared with other groups at the end of the study.En esta investigación se comparó la efi cacia de tres estrategias de intervención en el aula que combinan la implementación de prácticas evolutivamente apropiadas y reconocidas universalmente por su capacidad para promover el alfabetismo, y otras que aún están en etapa experimental pero que, a pesar de la controversia que puedan generar, han demostrado ser muy útiles para favorecer el alfabetismo emergente y prevenir difi cultades en la lectura. Dicha indagación se inspira en un estudio realizado por la Universidad de Georgia (Estados Unidos de Norteamérica) denominada PAVED for success. Participaron ciento veintiséis niños –cincuenta y siete niñas y sesenta y nueve niños– con edades comprendidas entre cuatro y cuatro años nueve meses pertenecientes a cuatro jardines infantiles sociales de la ciudad de Bogotá. En cada jardín se seleccionó un aula de clase y se le asignó una de cuatro intervenciones disponibles encaminadas a la promoción del alfabetismo inicial. Para evaluar las habilidades relacionadas con el alfabetismo emergente –al inicio y al fi nal del programa de intervención, y seis meses después de fi nalizado el programa de intervención–, en cada uno de los grupos seleccionados se aplicaron instrumentos individuales a los niños, y algunos a sus maestros, sobre el desarrollo lingüístico, de la conciencia fonológica, del conocimiento del nombre de las letras y del vínculo afectivo entre los niños y sus maestros (PLS-3, prueba de conciencia fonológica, conocimiento del nombre de las letras, entre otros). Los resultados muestran que el grupo que tiene la intervención con mayor número de prácticas, tanto universales como en investigación, ostenta los mejores puntajes en las áreas relacionadas con el alfabetismo inicial, en comparación con los otros tres grupos al término de la experiencia

Marking Stress ExPLICitly in Written English Fosters Rhythm in the Reader’s Inner Voice

Spoken English has a stress-alternating rhythm that is not marked in its orthography. In two experiments, the authors evaluated whether stylistic alterations to print that marked stress pulses fostered the rendering of rhythm (experiment 1) and stress (experiment 2) during silent reading. In experiment 1, silent readers rated the helpfulness of the stylistic alterations appearing in the last line of poems. In experiment 2, silent readers rated the helpfulness of the stylistic alterations appearing in heteronyms embedded in prose. As predicted by linguistic theories, when the stylistic alterations mapped onto the rhythmic pulses of the poems, and the lexically stressed syllables of the heteronyms, silent readers rated these alterations as more helpful compared with the incongruous conditions. In experiment 2, readers’ inner voices were more tuned to the prosodic nuances of the first syllable than the second in the bisyllabic heteronyms. This prosodic tuning for the first syllable in a word was likely afforded by the strong tendency for stress to appear word-initially. In addition, the stylistically marked stress was viewed as more helpful in the early half of the sentence, when readers likely recruited more bottom-up processes. In both experiments, prior exposure to poetry was related to a refined prosodic awareness. In experiment 2, exposure to poetry predicted participants’ prosody sensitivity, after controlling for the other predictors of academic achievement. The authors’ ongoing studies are evaluating whether marking stress explicitly in written English might aid struggling readers and late speakers of English

Abstract Concepts and Pictures of Real-World Situations Activate One Another.

concepts typically are defined in terms of lacking physical or perceptual referents. We argue instead that they are not devoid of perceptual information because knowledge of real-world situations is an important component of learning and using many abstract concepts. Although the relationship between perceptual information and abstract concepts is less straightforward than for concrete concepts, situation-based perceptual knowledge is part of many abstract concepts. In Experiment 1, participants made lexical decisions to abstract words that were preceded by related and unrelated pictures of situations. For example, share was preceded by a picture of two girls sharing a cob of corn. When pictures were presented for 500 ms, latencies did not differ. However, when pictures were presented for 1,000 ms, decision latencies were significantly shorter for abstract words preceded by related versus unrelated pictures. Because the abstract concepts corresponded to the pictured situation as a whole, rather than a single concrete object or entity, the necessary relational processing takes time. In Experiment 2, on each trial, an abstract word was presented for 250 ms, immediately followed by a picture. Participants indicated whether or not the picture showed a normal situation. Decision latencies were significantly shorter for pictures preceded by related versus unrelated abstract words. Our experiments provide evidence that knowledge of events and situations is important for learning and using at least some types of abstract concepts. That is, abstract concepts are grounded in situations, but in a more complex manner than for concrete concepts. Although people\u27s understanding of abstract concepts certainly includes knowledge gained from language describing situations and events for which those concepts are relevant, sensory and motor information experienced during real-life events is important as well

Moving beyond the distinction between concrete and abstract concepts

From the perspective of the situated conceptualization framework, the primary purpose of concepts is for categorizing and integrating elements of situations to support goal-directed action (including communication and social interaction). To the extent that important situational elements are categorized and integrated properly, effective goal-directed action follows. Over time, frequent patterns of co-occurring concepts within situations become established in memory as situated conceptualizations, conditioning the conceptual system and producing habitual patterns of conceptual processing. As a consequence, individual concepts are most basically represented within patterns of concepts that become entrained with specific kinds of physical situations. In this framework, the concrete versus abstract distinction between concepts is no longer useful, with two other distinctions becoming important instead: (i) external versus internal situational elements, (ii) situational elements versus situational integrations. Whereas concepts for situational elements originate in distributed neural networks that provide continual feeds about components of situations, concepts for situational integrations originate in association areas that establish temporal co-occurrence relations between situational elements, both external and internal. We propose that studying concepts in the context of situated action is necessary for establishing complete accounts of them, and that continuing to study concepts in isolation is likely to provide relatively incomplete and distorted accounts. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Varieties of abstract concepts: development, use and representation in the brain’

What's in a name? Brain activity reveals categorization processes differ across languages

The linguistic relativity hypothesis proposes that speakers of different languages perceive and conceptualize the world differently, but do their brains reflect these differences? In English, most nouns do not provide linguistic clues to their categories, whereas most Mandarin Chinese nouns provide explicit category information, either morphologically (e.g., the morpheme “vehicle” che1 in the noun “train” huo3che1 ) or orthographically (e.g., the radical “bug” chong2 in the character for the noun “butterfly” hu2die2 ). When asked to judge the membership of atypical (e.g., train) vs. typical (e.g., car) pictorial exemplars of a category (e.g., vehicle), English speakers ( N = 26) showed larger N300 and N400 event-related potential (ERP) component differences, whereas Mandarin speakers ( N = 27) showed no such differences. Further investigation with Mandarin speakers only ( N = 22) found that it was the morphologically transparent items that did not show a typicality effect, whereas orthographically transparent items elicited moderate N300 and N400 effects. In a follow-up study with English speakers only ( N = 25), morphologically transparent items also showed different patterns of N300 and N400 activation than nontransparent items even for English speakers. Together, these results demonstrate that even for pictorial stimuli, how and whether category information is embedded in object names affects the extent to which typicality is used in category judgments, as shown in N300 and N400 responses. Hum Brain Mapp, 2010. © 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78215/1/20974_ftp.pd

On staying grounded and avoiding Quixotic dead ends

The 15 articles in this special issue on The Representation of Concepts illustrate the rich variety of theoretical positions and supporting research that characterize the area. Although much agreement exists among contributors, much disagreement exists as well, especially about the roles of grounding and abstraction in conceptual processing. I first review theoretical approaches raised in these articles that I believe are Quixotic dead ends, namely, approaches that are principled and inspired but likely to fail. In the process, I review various theories of amodal symbols, their distortions of grounded theories, and fallacies in the evidence used to support them. Incorporating further contributions across articles, I then sketch a theoretical approach that I believe is likely to be successful, which includes grounding, abstraction, flexibility, explaining classic conceptual phenomena, and making contact with real-world situations. This account further proposes that (1) a key element of grounding is neural reuse, (2) abstraction takes the forms of multimodal compression, distilled abstraction, and distributed linguistic representation (but not amodal symbols), and (3) flexible context-dependent representations are a hallmark of conceptual processing