Initial teacher education guideline for teacher educators in inquiry‐based science teaching

This guideline comprises a set of arguments in support of Inquiry‐based Science Teaching, supported by a number of references, apposite quotes and exploratory small‐scale research. The intention is that the guideline will serve as a realistic pedagogy for beginning teachers of science in courses of Initial Teacher Education that, with some experience of teaching and support from tutors at school and university, it can help them to develop a disposition that favours opportunities for pupils to engage in inquiry in one way or another. The text of the guideline will also form the basis of a website that will have a range of links to, for example, video examples of inquiry in action, published papers from research, policy and practice and other sources of advice and ideas

Becoming an effective science teacher at the Department of Curricular Studies, University of Strathclyde

In an article for the International section, Allan Blake, Colin Smith and Jim McNally from Strathclyde report on the start of a very important EU-funded project, involving 15 countries, which looks at how ‘inquiry-based science’ can be promoted in science teaching and the significance for teacher education. In their view, inquiry-based science is more about open-endedness and uncertainty of outcome than routine (prescribed) practical work. STE will keep track of this important project and we will report on its progress and outcomes in future issues

The indicators of pupil opinion and teacher interactivity for inquiry-based science teaching

In order to establish those practices which underpin a science teaching performance that combines pupil enthusiasm and creative classrooms, it will be necessary to uncover evidence of inquiry-based learning experiences in science that can provide a warrant for theory and practice that will assist new science teachers in recognising and developing opportunities for investigative activity. Remaining aware, however, of the recurring theme in contemporary educational research which suggests that learning to teach has an important affective dimension associated with developing relationships and the formation of a teaching identity – a model of development which thus transcends atheoretical checklists of professional standards or pedagogical steps – the nature of that evidence will necessarily be in the area of the formative development of new teachers’ professional knowledge and understanding

Entity Query Feature Expansion Using Knowledge Base Links

Recent advances in automatic entity linking and knowledge base construction have resulted in entity annotations for document and query collections. For example, annotations of entities from large general purpose knowledge bases, such as Freebase and the Google Knowledge Graph. Understanding how to leverage these entity annotations of text to improve ad hoc document retrieval is an open research area. Query expansion is a commonly used technique to improve retrieval effectiveness. Most previous query expansion approaches focus on text, mainly using unigram concepts. In this paper, we propose a new technique, called entity query feature expansion (EQFE) which enriches the query with features from entities and their links to knowledge bases, including structured attributes and text. We experiment using both explicit query entity annotations and latent entities. We evaluate our technique on TREC text collections automatically annotated with knowledge base entity links, including the Google Freebase Annotations (FACC1) data. We find that entity-based feature expansion results in significant improvements in retrieval effectiveness over state-of-the-art text expansion approaches

The simultaneous multi-element analysis of forensic samples by atomic absorption spectrometry

Imperial Users onl

Stresses arising during growth of oxides on metals

Imperial Users onl

Measuring Societal Biases in Text Corpora via First-Order Co-occurrence

Text corpora are used to study societal biases, typically through statistical models such as word embeddings. The bias of a word towards a concept is typically estimated using vectors similarity, measuring whether the word and concept words share other words in their contexts. We argue that this second-order relationship introduces unrelated concepts into the measure, which causes an imprecise measurement of the bias. We propose instead to measure bias using the direct normalized co-occurrence associations between the word and the representative concept words, a first-order measure, by reconstructing the co-occurrence estimates inherent in the word embedding models. To study our novel corpus bias measurement method, we calculate the correlation of the gender bias values estimated from the text to the actual gender bias statistics of the U.S. job market, provided by two recent collections. The results show a consistently higher correlation when using the proposed first-order measure with a variety of word embedding models, as well as a more severe degree of bias, especially to female in a few specific occupations

A distinctive energy policy for Scotland?

This paper explores the emergence of a distinctive energy policy for Scotland and raises the issue of the desirability of any differentiation from UK energy policy. This requires an examination of both UK and Scottish energy policies, although we adopt a rather broad-brush overview rather than a very detailed analysis