Thinking about Thinking: An Exploration of Preservice Teachers' Views about Higher Order Thinking Skills

Abstract Thinking skills have long been regarded as an essential outcome of the educational process. Yet, research shows that the teaching of thinking skills in K-12 education does not follow a coherent path. Several factors affect the teaching and use of thinking skills in the classroom, with teacher knowledge and beliefs about thinking skills among the strongest influences (Snyder & Snyder, 2008; Torff, 2006). Research addresses the beliefs that practicing educators hold about thinking skills, yet little investigation has been done on the knowledge of thinking skills and the factors which influence their understanding at the preservice teacher level. This study examined the knowledge preservice teachers, at a large midwestern university, hold about thinking skills, specifically Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: Book 1 Cognitive Domain (Bloom, 1984), and their stated perceptions of the factors influencing those beliefs. Bloom's Taxonomy was chosen as the basis for describing thinking skills as this Taxonomy is frequently used in K-12 classrooms. Using mixed methods, this study gathered data from preservice teachers in a teacher education program. Data were gathered from the entire sample through a survey and an instrument using instructional vignettes to determine the thinking skill level of K-12 classroom activities, as well as through interviews with a small sample of the participants. Results showed no significant differences in determining the level of Bloom's Taxonomy on the survey vignettes for participant year in school. A difference was found among participants who expressed less comfort in thinking about teaching Higher Order Thinking Skills when choosing the correct thinking level on the vignettes, than the participants who expressed being somewhat comfortable or very comfortable about teaching higher order thinking skills. Interview participants identified influences on their thinking skills, which included challenging high school courses, some college courses, interactions with peers, and student teaching experiences involving Bloom's Taxonomy. More research is needed to determine if expressed comfort level with teaching thinking skills is a predictor of preservice teachers' ability to differentiate levels of thinking of Bloom's Taxonomy. In addition, research is needed to discover the ways preservice teachers implement higher order thinking skills in their practica

Intersection tests for single marker QTL analysis can be more powerful than two marker QTL analysis

BACKGROUND: It has been reported in the quantitative trait locus (QTL) literature that when testing for QTL location and effect, the statistical power supporting methodologies based on two markers and their estimated genetic map is higher than for the genetic map independent methodologies known as single marker analyses. Close examination of these reports reveals that the two marker approaches are more powerful than single marker analyses only in certain cases. Simulation studies are a commonly used tool to determine the behavior of test statistics under known conditions. We conducted a simulation study to assess the general behavior of an intersection test and a two marker test under a variety of conditions. The study was designed to reveal whether two marker tests are always more powerful than intersection tests, or whether there are cases when an intersection test may outperform the two marker approach. We present a reanalysis of a data set from a QTL study of ovariole number in Drosophila melanogaster. RESULTS: Our simulation study results show that there are situations where the single marker intersection test equals or outperforms the two marker test. The intersection test and the two marker test identify overlapping regions in the reanalysis of the Drosophila melanogaster data. The region identified is consistent with a regression based interval mapping analysis. CONCLUSION: We find that the intersection test is appropriate for analysis of QTL data. This approach has the advantage of simplicity and for certain situations supplies equivalent or more powerful results than a comparable two marker test

Effect of far-red induced shade-avoidance responses on carbon allocation in arabidopsis thaliana

Plants are a very dominant form of life on earth and a large part of human society is based on growing plants. Plants use photosynthesis to turn sunlight and carbon dioxide in the air into sugar. This sugar is used to grow and make all the parts of the plants we're interested in using. Roots, flowers, fruits, and seeds can't make the sugar they need from light, and young growing leaves can't make enough sugar on their own to support their growth. The plant's decisions about where to put the sugar it makes is important to determining how the plant will grow. Since plants spend their lives rooted in a single location, they must be able to cope with whatever challenge comes their way. Since plants need light to grow, one challenge plants face is competition with other plants for light. Plants can sense they are growing in competition with other plants by the change in the color of light when it is reflected off other nearby plants. When they sense this change in light they alter how they grow to attempt to avoid being shaded. Usually this involved trying to grow taller to avoid being shaded by their neighbors. Putting their limited resources into growing taller comes at the expense of growing the fruits and seeds we need from them, as well as making the toxic chemicals plants use to defend themselves against insect pests. I was interested in how the light signals which trigger this change in growth affect where plants put the sugar they make from photosynthesis. I hypothesized that treating plants with light which could trigger this change in growth would affect how sugar moved through the plant. Using a radioactive form of sugar which I could follow as it moved through the plant, I found that in response to light signals which trigger this change in growth causes young, growing leaves to export less of the sugar they make (keeping more for themselves), but fully mature leaves did not change how much sugar they exported. Agriculture is all about getting plants to turn sunlight into products we need and understanding how plants make decisions about where to put their resources will help us develop crops and other plants which can more efficiently make the food and other plant products we depend on

Decremental All-Pairs ALL Shortest Paths and Betweenness Centrality

We consider the all pairs all shortest paths (APASP) problem, which maintains the shortest path dag rooted at every vertex in a directed graph G=(V,E) with positive edge weights. For this problem we present a decremental algorithm (that supports the deletion of a vertex, or weight increases on edges incident to a vertex). Our algorithm runs in amortized O(\vstar^2 \cdot \log n) time per update, where n=|V|, and \vstar bounds the number of edges that lie on shortest paths through any given vertex. Our APASP algorithm can be used for the decremental computation of betweenness centrality (BC), a graph parameter that is widely used in the analysis of large complex networks. No nontrivial decremental algorithm for either problem was known prior to our work. Our method is a generalization of the decremental algorithm of Demetrescu and Italiano [DI04] for unique shortest paths, and for graphs with \vstar =O(n), we match the bound in [DI04]. Thus for graphs with a constant number of shortest paths between any pair of vertices, our algorithm maintains APASP and BC scores in amortized time O(n^2 \log n) under decremental updates, regardless of the number of edges in the graph.Comment: An extended abstract of this paper will appear in Proc. ISAAC 201

New Algorithms for Position Heaps

We present several results about position heaps, a relatively new alternative to suffix trees and suffix arrays. First, we show that, if we limit the maximum length of patterns to be sought, then we can also limit the height of the heap and reduce the worst-case cost of insertions and deletions. Second, we show how to build a position heap in linear time independent of the size of the alphabet. Third, we show how to augment a position heap such that it supports access to the corresponding suffix array, and vice versa. Fourth, we introduce a variant of a position heap that can be simulated efficiently by a compressed suffix array with a linear number of extra bits

On local invariants of pure three-qubit states

We study invariants of three-qubit states under local unitary transformations, i.e. functions on the space of entanglement types, which is known to have dimension 6. We show that there is no set of six independent polynomial invariants of degree less than or equal to 6, and find such a set with maximum degree 8. We describe an intrinsic definition of a canonical state on each orbit, and discuss the (non-polynomial) invariants associated with it.Comment: LateX, 13 pages. Minor typoes corrected. Published versio

Local symmetry properties of pure 3-qubit states

Entanglement types of pure states of 3 qubits are classified by means of their stabilisers in the group of local unitary operations. It is shown that the stabiliser is generically discrete, and that a larger stabiliser indicates a stationary value for some local invariant. We describe all the exceptional states with enlarged stabilisers.Comment: 32 pages, 5 encapsulated PostScript files for 3 figures. Published version, with minor correction

Ketamine coadministration attenuates morphine tolerance and leads to increased brain concentrations of both drugs in the rat

Background and Purpose The effects of ketamine in attenuating morphine tolerance have been suggested to result from a pharmacodynamic interaction. We studied whether ketamine might increase brain morphine concentrations in acute coadministration, in morphine tolerance and morphine withdrawal. Experimental Approach Morphine minipumps (6mg center dot day(-1)) induced tolerance during 5 days in Sprague-Dawley rats, after which s.c. ketamine (10mg center dot kg(-1)) was administered. Tail flick, hot plate and rotarod tests were used for behavioural testing. Serum levels and whole tissue brain and liver concentrations of morphine, morphine-3-glucuronide, ketamine and norketamine were measured using HPLC-tandem mass spectrometry. Key Results In morphine-naive rats, ketamine caused no antinociception whereas in morphine-tolerant rats there was significant antinociception (57% maximum possible effect in the tail flick test 90min after administration) lasting up to 150min. In the brain of morphine-tolerant ketamine-treated rats, the morphine, ketamine and norketamine concentrations were 2.1-, 1.4- and 3.4-fold, respectively, compared with the rats treated with morphine or ketamine only. In the liver of morphine-tolerant ketamine-treated rats, ketamine concentration was sixfold compared with morphine-naive rats. After a 2 day morphine withdrawal period, smaller but parallel concentration changes were observed. In acute coadministration, ketamine increased the brain morphine concentration by 20%, but no increase in ketamine concentrations or increased antinociception was observed. Conclusions and Implications The ability of ketamine to induce antinociception in rats made tolerant to morphine may also be due to increased brain concentrations of morphine, ketamine and norketamine. The relevance of these findings needs to be assessed in humans.Peer reviewe