Teachers’ beliefs about improving transfer of algebraic skills from mathematics into physics in senior pre-university education     

Süleyman Turşucu  Jeroen Spandaw  Steven Flipse  Marc J. de Vries 《International Journal of Science Education》2013,35(5):587-604

ABSTRACT

Students in senior pre-university education encounter difficulties in the application of mathematics into physics. This paper presents the outcome of an explorative qualitative study of teachers’ beliefs about improving the transfer of algebraic skills from mathematics into physics. We interviewed 10 mathematics and 10 physics teachers using a semi-structured questionnaire that was based on an algebraic transfer problem. Almost all teachers acknowledged this transfer problem and considered it to be important. We found a continuum of teachers’ beliefs about aspects influencing transfer, including beliefs on improving this transfer. Together with identified improvement aspects about coherent mathematics education, these may help reduce physics teachers’ frustrations who spend extra time on re-teaching mathematics. Teachers think that transfer does not happen, because students see both subjects as separate disciplines. Contrary to most physics teachers, most mathematics teachers do not feel the need to collaborate with physics teachers. We found two extreme, opposite beliefs about the transfer of algebraic skills into physics. An intermediate group believes that only an integrated approach can solve the transfer problem. Some of the teachers’ beliefs could be organised into a beliefs system. Further research could investigate to which extent such beliefs systems exist and which beliefs these contain.  相似文献   

School Students’ Conceptions about Biodiversity Loss: Definitions, Reasons, Results and Solutions     

Ahmet Kilinc  Namik Kemal Yeşiltaş  Tezcan Kartal  Ümit Demiral  Baris Eroğlu 《Research in Science Education》2013,43(6):2277-2307

Environmental degradation stemming from anthropocentric causes threatens the biodiversity more than ever before, leading scholars to warn governments about the impending consequences of biodiversity loss (BL). At this point, it is of great importance to study the public’s conceptions of BL in order to identify significant educational implications. However, a review of the literature reveals a relatively small body of research about the public understanding of BL. In this qualitative study, we thus strived to elicit Turkish school students’ conceptions about BL using a written questionnaire including open-ended questions with respect to the definition of biodiversity as well as reasons for, results of and solutions to BL. The sample consisted of 245 school students in a relatively small city. A two-staged content analysis was run on the responses. The results showed that school students most commonly preferred species-focused definitions of biodiversity and understood BL through such various conceptual patterns as, ‘balance of nature’, ‘forest’, ‘global warming’, ‘hunting’ and ‘indirect conservation’. At the end of the paper, the possible educational implications and future perspectives were discussed.  相似文献   

Visiting Shrines: A Turkish Religious Practice and Its Mental Health Implications     

Deniz Canel-Çınarbaş  Ayşe Çiftçi  Gökçe Bulgan 《International journal for the advancement of counseling》2013,35(1):16-32

The purpose of the present study was to explore through qualitative methodology the practice of visiting shrines, a religious practice indigenous to Turkish Muslims, and its potential mental health benefits. Thirteen individuals were interviewed at two shrines in Istanbul, Turkey. The researchers focused on visitors’ presenting issues, beliefs regarding the practice, the mental health benefits of the visit, and the behaviors that the visitors engaged in during their visit. The data were analyzed using the Consensual Qualitative Research method. Five domains emerged from the data: (i) degree of religiosity and duties, (ii) knowledge and beliefs about shrines, (iii) purpose of visits, (iv) activities during the visit, and (v) experience and impact of the visit. The findings were discussed based on the mental health benefits of visiting shrines and the counseling and cultural implications.  相似文献   

Analogical reasoning for understanding solution rates: students’ conceptual change and chemical explanations     

Muammer Çalık  Alipaşa Ayas  Jazlin V. Ebenezer 《Research in Science & Technological Education》2013,31(3):283-308

The study aims to demonstrate evidence of (a) students’ conceptual change on solution rates; (b) students’ sub‐microscopic explanations of dissolution; and (c) retention of the concepts of solution rates. The sample consists of 44 Grade 9 students (18 boys and 26 girls) drawn purposively from two different classes (22 each) in the city of Trabzon, Turkey. The current study incorporates multiple methods of data collection: items from a solution concept test, clinical interviews and examination of students’ self‐assessment tasks. The results reveal that there is a statistically significant difference between scores in pre‐test and post‐test and between pre‐test and delayed test (p < 0.05). This research indicates that the intervention has improved students’ understanding of the conceptual relationship between solution rates and the sub‐microscopic explanation of dissolution. It has also helped in overcoming students’ alternative conceptions to some extent. However, alternative conceptions have not been eliminated completely. In the light of the results, this current study suggests that a simple model such as the four‐step constructivist teaching (4E) is efficient.  相似文献   

Negotiating differences: cosmopolitan experiences of international doctoral students     

Başak Bilecen 《Compare》2013,43(5):667-688

Drawing on the literature on international student experiences and identities, this study discusses theories of identity from a social constructionist perspective. ‘Identification’ is the preferred term to describe a dynamic process through which students negotiate the meaning of their identities in different societies and communities. Based on interviews with 35 international doctoral students from two graduate schools in Germany, the article illustrates the significance of international mobility for education when external ‘differences’ are appreciated and contribute to cosmopolitan imaginations and when internal differences are created in relation to ‘Others’ in the host society. The article contributes to the literature on international student mobility by providing a fine-grained analysis of student identification, showing how the discourse of difference is used as a double strategy.  相似文献   

Privacy-preserving multi-criteria collaborative filtering     

Alper Yargic  Alper Bilge 《Information processing & management》2019,56(3):994-1009

Privacy-preserving collaborative filtering schemes focus on eliminating the privacy threats inherent in single preference values, and the privacy risks in the multi-criteria preference domain are disregarded. In this work, we introduce randomized perturbation-based privacy-preserving approaches for multi-criteria collaborative filtering systems. Initially, the privacy protection methods efficiently used in traditional single-criterion systems are adapted onto multi-criteria ratings. However, these systems require intelligent protection mechanisms that are flexible and adapting to the structure of each sub-criterion. To achieve such a goal, we introduce a novel privacy-preserving protocol by adapting an entropy-based randomness determination procedure that can recover accuracy losses. The proposed protocol adjusts privacy-controlling parameters concerning the information inherent in each criterion. We experimentally evaluate the proposed schemes on three subsets of Yahoo!Movies multi-criteria preference dataset to demonstrate the effects of the proposed privacy-preserving schemes on both user privacy levels and prediction accuracy for differing sparsity rates. According to the obtained experimental outcomes, the proposed entropy-based privacy-preserving scheme can produce significantly more accurate predictions while maintaining an identical level of privacy provided by the traditional privacy protection scenario. The experimental results also confirm that the novel entropy-based privacy-preserving scheme maintains the confidentiality of personal preferences without severely compromising prediction accuracy.  相似文献   

The Changing Roles and Needs of Students in Higher Education     

Nicu Ceauşescu 《Higher Education in Europe》1985,10(1):6-9

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Effectiveness of Conceptual Change Text-oriented Instruction on Students’ Understanding of Energy in Chemical Reactions     

Özgecan Taştan  Eylem Yalçınkaya  Yezdan Boz 《Journal of Science Education and Technology》2008,17(5):444-453

The aim of this study is to compare the effectiveness of conceptual change text instruction (CCT) in the context of energy in chemical reactions. The subjects of the study were 60, 10th grade students at a high school, who were in two different classes and taught by the same teacher. One of the classes was randomly selected as the experimental group in which CCT instruction was applied, and the other as the control group in which traditional teaching method was used. The data were obtained through the use of Energy Concept Test (ECT), the Attitude Scale towards Chemistry (ASC) and Science Process Skill Test (SPST). In order to find out the effect of the conceptual change text on students’ learning of energy concept, independent sample t-tests, ANCOVA (analysis of covariance) and ANOVA (analysis of variance) were used. Results revealed that there was a statistically significant mean difference between the experimental and control group in terms of students’ ECT total mean scores; however, there was no statistically significant difference between the experimental and control group in terms of students’ attitude towards chemistry. These findings suggest that conceptual change text instruction enhances the understanding and achievement.  相似文献   

Investigating and counteracting popularity bias in group recommendations     

Emre Yalcin  Alper Bilge 《Information processing & management》2021,58(5):102608

Popularity bias is an undesirable phenomenon associated with recommendation algorithms where popular items tend to be suggested over long-tail ones, even if the latter would be of reasonable interest for individuals. Such intrinsic tendencies of the recommenders may lead to producing ranked lists, in which items are not equally covered along the popularity tail. Although some recent studies aim to detect such biases of traditional algorithms and treat their effects on recommendations, the concept of popularity bias remains elusive for group recommender systems. Therefore, in this study, we focus on investigating popularity bias from the view of group recommender systems, which aggregate individual preferences to achieve recommendations for groups of users. We analyze various state-of-the-art aggregation techniques utilized in group recommender systems regarding their bias towards popular items. To counteract possible popularity issues in group recommendations, we adapt a traditional re-ranking approach that weighs items inversely proportional to their popularity within a group. Also, we propose a novel popularity bias mitigation procedure that re-ranks items by incorporating their popularity level and estimated group ratings in two distinct strategies. The first one aims to penalize popular items during the aggregation process highly and avoids bias better, while the second one puts more emphasis on group ratings than popularity and achieves a more balanced performance regarding conflicting goals of mitigating bias and boosting accuracy. Experiments performed on four real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that both strategies are more efficient than the adapted approach, and empowering aggregation techniques with one of these strategies significantly decreases their bias towards popular items while maintaining reasonable ranking accuracy.  相似文献   

An architectural assessment method for new exterior additions to historic buildings     

Hülya Yüceer  Başak İpekoğlu 《Journal of Cultural Heritage》2012,13(4):419-425

The design approaches of new exterior additions to historic buildings have been among the ongoing debates in the field of architectural conservation. The aim of this study is to develop an assessment method, which can be used to determine the compatibility in architectural expression of the new addition in relation to the characteristics of a historic building. This method is based on the architectural analysis, which includes environmental relations, building-lot relations, mass relations and the facade composition of the historic building both before and after the new addition in relation to the value of a historical building. In this study, a selected group of historic buildings in ?zmir, Turkey with new exterior additions was analysed with regard to their exterior architectural characteristics in order to evaluate the compatibility of the new addition, by employing the use of contemporary conservation principles. The importance of this study is to guide architects to form the basis of a decision for developing an integrated approach in designing new additions in the course of the actual design process. On the other hand, the proposed method can be evaluated as a contribution to the emerging field of heritage impact assessments as well as scientific assistance to local governments to criticize specific projects of cultural heritage assets submitted for appraisal. Analysis results showed that the value of the historic building should first clearly be identified and a new addition should bear the identity of its own period. However, instead of altering the scale or form of the historic building, a new addition should complement and contribute to the sense of proportion, disposition and historical pattern.  相似文献