Developing Children's Understanding of Fractions: An Intervention Study     

Florence Gabriel  Frédéric Coché  Dénes Szucs  Vincent Carette  Bernard Rey  Alain Content 《Mind, Brain, and Education》2012,6(3):137-146

Fractions constitute a stumbling block in mathematics education. To improve children's understanding of fractions, we designed an intervention based on learning‐by‐doing activities, which focused on the representation of the magnitude of fractions. Participants were 292 Grade 4 and 5 children. Half of the classes received experimental instruction, while the other half pursued their usual lessons. For 10 weeks, they played five different games using cards representing fractions (e.g., Memory and Blackjack). Wooden disks helped them represent and manipulate fractions while playing games. Our results showed an improvement in the conceptual understanding of fractions. The findings confirmed that the usual practice in teaching fractions is largely based on procedural knowledge and provides only minimal opportunities for children to conceptualize the meaning and magnitude of fractional notations. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that a short intervention inducing children to manipulate, compare, and evaluate fractions improves their ability to associate fractional notations with numerical magnitude.  相似文献   

Cumulative Advantages and the Emergence of Social and Ethnic Inequality: Matthew Effects in Reading and Mathematics Development Within Elementary Schools?     

Baumert J  Nagy G  Lehmann R 《Child development》2012,83(4):1347-1367

This article examines the development of social and ethnic disparities in academic achievement in elementary schooling. It investigated whether reading and mathematics development in 136 mixed‐ability classes shows path‐dependent processes of cumulative advantage (Matthew effects) from Grades 4 to 6 (Grade 4 mean age = 10.62, SD = 0.57) resulting in growing inequality. Status‐dependent processes of cumulative advantage, their interaction with path‐dependent processes, and consequences for the degree of social and ethnic inequality are examined. Two complementary methods for analyzing multilevel data are used: growth curve and quasi‐simplex models. No evidence for a Matthew effect was found in either domain. A compensation effect emerged for reading, to the benefit of ethnic minorities. A fan‐spread effect was found for mathematics, partly attributable to status‐dependent processes of cumulative advantage.  相似文献   

Positive Effects of Converting a Food and Bioprocessing Analysis Course to an Inquiry‐Guided Approach     

Gabriel K. Harris  Sanja Cvitkusic  Amanda S. Draut  Chelani S. Hathorn  Amanda M. Stephens  Karen E. Constanza  Michael J. Leonardelli  Ruth H. Watkins  Lisa O. Dean  Nathaniel G. Hentz 《Journal of Food Science Education》2012,11(2):23-27

Abstract: Food science laboratory courses are traditionally taught as a series of preplanned laboratories with known endpoints. In contrast, inquiry‐guided (IG) laboratories allow students to ask questions, think through problems, design experiments, then adapt and learn in response to unexpected results. This study examined the effects of converting the course, “Analytical Techniques in Food and Bioprocessing Sciences” from a traditional approach (2008 to 2010 data) to an IG approach (2011 data) by assigning teams of 2–3 students a food and a set of 5 analyses to conduct over the course of the semester. Students were required to choose and justify the use of specific methods for each analysis, as well as to develop a supply list and a budget for the semester‐long project. During the semester, students were required to post and discuss their weekly progress with the instructor, teaching assistants, and the rest of the class using an online discussion forum. At the end of the semester, students were required to present the results of their analysis in both oral and written formats. Overall course grades were significantly higher (P≤ 0.05) using IG in 2011 compared to 2010 and 2009, but not to 2008 grades. Numerical course evaluations for the instructor, overall course, and lab, as well as written course evaluations all significantly (P≤ 0.05) improved. This suggests that an IG approach may measurably improve student performance in terms of course grades and the ability to complete semester long projects. It may also increase student satisfaction with the course, as measured by numerical and written end of semester surveys.  相似文献   

“Reading and deafness”: a review     

Rachael E. Gabriel  Hannah M. Dostal 《Reading and writing》2013,26(2):317-320

  相似文献   

Communities in the making: Pedagogic explorations using oral history     

Jennifer Harding  John Gabriel 《International Studies in Sociology of Education》2013,23(3):185-202

This article discusses two projects supported by the Higher Education Active Community Fund, which involved student and staff volunteers in working with local communities and community-based organisations in two London boroughs. Oral history methods were used to investigate and represent the experiences of elderly people living in Borough A and young people who have been in foster care in Borough B and their carers. Both projects involved collecting detailed life stories on video and editing these for exhibition in the public domain. The video for Borough A was to form part of the Council's website, the older people's portal. The video for Borough B was to be used to train people providing professional services to young people in foster care and to involve the young people in filming, editing and producing a soundtrack. The article discusses the aims and context of the two projects and critically reviews the learning experiences involved. It analyses issues raised by volunteering, working with local communities, and attempting to represent marginalised experience. It reflects critically on notions of community and community development and discusses relations between oral history projects and community definition, higher education and society.  相似文献   

Culture and equality in education     

Gabriel Chanan 《Educational research; a review for teachers and all concerned with progress in education》2013,55(2):108-116

The advent of comprehensive education implies a search for a common culture, or a common treatment of culture, across the whole school population. This article reviews the present stage in this search, attempting to define a suitable treatment of culture by secondary schools. The history of schools’ treatment of cultural sources is briefly invoked, particularly the differences in treatment found in grammar and secondary modern schools. Purportedly progressive attitudes to ‘formal’ or ‘high’ culture are analysed and found to be too simplistic. Traditional education is shown not to have genuinely served its own’ supposed cultural aims, whilst progressives’ rejection to those aims is shown to be inadequate as a reaction to what traditional education actually did rather than claimed to do. It is proposed that a more engaged approach to formal culture, involving critical receptivity, is appropriate for all pupils, and would also require the nourishment of a more receptive attitude to pupils’ own creativity.

Since we have liberated the term ‘culture’ from meaning merely a rarified level of works of art, it has become so all‐embracing as to be almost unmanageable. Influenced by anthropology, we now tend to think of culture as extending to the most casual level of value and idea by which we live our daily lives. It even includes our most informal language habits.

The difficulty, of course, with such an all‐embracing notion is that it makes the subject almost impossible to talk about. Criteria of quality , and currency are blurred. Part of the same confusion is that the education system, formerly seen as the custodian of ‘culture’, now has no name for the special resources of knowledge which are ‐‐ or used to be ‐‐ its particular responsibility.

I will use culture here to mean those public works or activities which represent man to himself and are value laden. Thus literature, psychology, history, philosophy, politics, law, economics and sociology would all be included. They might have scientific elements but they still convey normative images of man.

If the concept of culture itself, even as so defined, has a blunt edge, we must discriminate elements within it in order to make the area susceptible to discussion. To get a picture of how schools, traditionally, have mediated culture, we must distinguish at least five broad elements:

1. formal, by which is meant that part in which academic and professional institutions specialize;

2. informal, meaning relatively spontaneous and non‐centralized activities, including ordinary conversation;

3. mass culture, such as films, television, popular music, advertising;

4. avant‐garde culture, arising out of a sense of crisis in the formal culture; and

5. ethnic, other than that which coincides with the content of previous categories.

These are pretty crude categories, but they are a little better than such common divisions as ‘high/low’, ‘popular/serious’ and ‘traditional/contemporary’, and they permit some analysis of relationships between different elements within our culture as a whole.  相似文献   

Differences in the utilisation of active power in squat and countermovement jumps     

Damián Ferraro  Gabriel Fábrica 《European Journal of Sport Science》2017,17(6):673-680

The aim of this article was to understand how active power is used in squat and countermovement jumps. A simple empirical model comprising a mass, a spring, an active element and a damper, together with an optimisation principle, was used to identify the mechanical factors that maximise performance of jumps without countermovement (squat jumps, SJ) and with countermovement (CMJ). Twelve amateur volleyball players performed SJ from two initial positions and CMJ with two degrees of counterbalancing, while kinematic data were collected (jump height, push-off duration and position of the centre of mass). The model adjusted well to real data of SJ through all the impulse phase, and slightly less adequately at the end of this phase for CMJ. Nevertheless, it provides a satisfactory explanation for the generation and utilisation of active power for both type of jumps. On average, the estimated power of the active elements, the spring, and the damper were greater in the SJ. Based upon the result obtained with this model, we suggest that active power is best evaluated with SJ. The reason for this is that, during this kind of jump, the elements associated with the damper consume much of the energy produced by the active elements. The participation of the elements that consume the energy generated by the active elements is less in CMJ than in SJ, allowing for a better utilisation of this energy. In this way it is possible to achieve a better performance in CMJ with less active power.  相似文献   

ISDN: the distance-learning solution?     

Dr Gabriel Jacobs 《British journal of educational technology : journal of the Council for Educational Technology》1996,27(1):65-67

  相似文献   

意大利实心粉年(节选)     

万学  村上春树  菲利浦·加布里埃尔 《海外英语》2006,(4):32-34

村上春树的作品总是承载着幽幽的孤独、脉脉的温情和淡淡的忧伤,流淌着一种孤独之美。该文亦如是。女主人翁与男朋友分手后,一个人孤独地怀念,孤独地怨恨,孤独地冥想,孤独地和自己的心灵对话。那日复一日吃意大利实心粉的执著,那大得可以装下德国牧羊人的铝锅以及捏成德国牧羊人的实心粉,那如零碎的记忆般的拜访者,那印象模糊的电话那端的女孩……这一切都将女主人翁的内心世界展露无遗。村上春树笔端细腻,刻画人物内心情感丝丝入扣,震撼人心。  相似文献   

Ideology,political education and teacher education: matching paradigms and models   总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1  

Sharon Feiman‐Nemser  Margret Buchmann 《课程研究杂志》2013,45(3):239-256

  相似文献