Assessing Students’ Mastery and Misconceptions in the Fundamental Operations on Integers

One of the common misconceptions affecting mathematics performance of high school students involves operating integers. Evidently, students who were exposed to modular learning demonstrate poor mastery of the pre-requisite skills. This study aimed to assess the mastery level and misconceptions of the Grade 7 students involving operations on integers. A descriptive research design was used with a total of sixty-two (62) conveniently chosen Grade 7 students were twenty-nine (29) were males and thirty-three (33) were females. The Mean Percentage Scores (MPS) per operation on integers were calculated to describe the mastery level and the assessment results were analyzed to identify possible misconceptions of the students in operating integers. Similarly, data were analyzed using the Welch t-Test to determine if there is a difference in the level of mastery between the male and female students. Findings show that the overall MPS result is 50.56%, indicating that the students demonstrated Average Near Mastery (AVR) of the concepts involving operations on integers. In addition, there was no significant difference between the mastery level of male and female grade 7 students. Although the students demonstrated Average Near Mastery (AVR) in the given assessment, the item analysis showed various misconceptions and errors exhibited by the students regardless of sex and section. Students’ misconceptions include subtracting integers and dealing with negative numbers. Hence, an intervention is needed to address the misconceptions in subtracting integers and a reinforcement is proposed to enhance the students’ mastery in other operations on integers

From Horizontal to Vertical: An Intermediary Liability Earthquake in Europe

As part of its Digital Single Market Strategy, the European Commission would like to introduce vertical regulations, replacing—or better conflicting with—the well-established eCommerce Directive horizontal intermediary liability regime.An upcoming revision of the Audio-visual Media Services Directive would ask platforms to put in place measures to protect minors from harmful content and to protect everyone from incitement to hatred. Meanwhile—under the assumption of closing a ‘value gap’ between rightholders and online platforms allegedly exploiting protected content—the Draft Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market would implement filtering obligations for intermediaries. Finally, the EU Digital Single Market Strategy has also endorsed voluntary measures as a privileged tool to curb illicit and infringing activities online.Each of these actions will erode the eCommerce intermediary liability arrangement by bringing in—in a way or another—proactive monitoring obligations and causing a systemic shift from a negligence-based to a strict liability regime for hosting providers. This systemic shift would apparently occur against public consensus and absent any justification based on empirical evidence. Nonetheless, it will bring about dire consequences by pushing privatization of enforcement online through algorithmic intelligence, based on murky, privately-enforced standards, rather than transparent legal obligations. This reform might cause a policy earthquake that will shake and crack EU law’s systemic consistency, due process and fundamental rights online