1,460 research outputs found

    The transition from school to university in mathematics education research: new trends and ideas from a systematic literature review

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    Investigating the transition between educational levels is one of the main themes for the future of mathematics education. In particular, the transition from secondary school to STEM degrees is problematic for the widespread students' difficulties and significant for the implications that it has on students' futures. Knowing and understanding the past is key to imagine the future of a research field. For this reason, this paper reports a systematic review of the literature on the secondary-tertiary transition in Mathematics Education from 2008 to 2021. We constructed two corpuses: one from the proceedings of three international conferences in mathematics education (PME, ICME, and INDRUM) and the other from peer reviewed research papers and book chapters returned by the databases ERIC and Google Scholar. A clear evolution in perspectives since 2008 emerges from the analysis of the two corpuses: the research focus changed from a purely cognitive to a more holistic one, including socio-cultural and - to a lesser extent - affective issues. To this end, a variety of research methods were used, and specific theoretical models were developed in the considered papers. The analysis also highlights a worrisome trend of underrepresentation: very little research comes from large geographical areas such as South America or Africa. We argue that this gap in representation is problematic as research on secondary tertiary transition concerns also consideration of socio-cultural and contextual factors

    The frustrated Brownian motion of nonlocal solitary waves

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    We investigate the evolution of solitary waves in a nonlocal medium in the presence of disorder. By using a perturbational approach, we show that an increasing degree of nonlocality may largely hamper the Brownian motion of self-trapped wave-packets. The result is valid for any kind of nonlocality and in the presence of non-paraxial effects. Analytical predictions are compared with numerical simulations based on stochastic partial differential equationComment: 4 pages, 3 figures

    Evaluation of flow dependent external costs in freight logistics networks

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    In this paper we face a distribution problem arising in a freight logistics context. More precisely, we are involved with the containerized flow originating from maritime terminals and going to inland destinations using the road transportation network. The goal is the minimization of the total shipping costs, given by the travelled distance, vehicles and external cost components. In particular, we consider accidental and polluting costs as external negative costs. Note that the proposed externality costs depend on the amount of flow through the selected arcs in the route and their capacity; therefore, a novel stepwise function is proposed and analyzed. A deep analysis is performed for evaluating the impact of environmental externalities on the choice of the route in terms of costs and distances depending on the density of the traffic. Results of an extensive computational experimentation performed with randomly generated instances of different size and capacity values of the arcs are reported. A real case instance related to the logistics network connecting the main ports of the Liguria County (Italy) to the main inland destinations is finally proposed and analyzed

    Coexistence of coarsening and mean field relaxation in the long-range Ising chain

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    We study the kinetics after a low temperature quench of the one-dimensional Ising model with long range interactions between spins at distance r decaying as r-α. For α = 0, i.e. mean field, all spins evolve coherently quickly driving the system towards a magnetised state. In the weak long range regime with α > 1 there is a coarsening behaviour with competing domains of opposite sign without development of magnetisation. For strong long range, i.e. 0 < α < 1, we show that the system shows both features, with probability Pα(N) of having the latter one, with the different limiting behaviours limN→∞ Pα(N) = 0 (at fixed α < 1) and limα→1 Pα(N) = 1 (at fixed finite N). We discuss how this behaviour is a manifestation of an underlying dynamical scaling symmetry due to the presence of a single characteristic time τα(N) ∌ Nα
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