Science¦Environment¦Health – Towards a reconceptualization of three critical and inter-linked areas of education     

Albert Zeyer  Justin Dillon 《International Journal of Science Education》2013,35(2):327-328

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Effectiveness of a Short,Intense Bridging Course for Scaffolding Students Commencing University-level Study of Chemistry     

Siegbert Schmid  David J. Youl  Adrian V. George  Justin R. Read 《International Journal of Science Education》2013,35(8):1211-1234

Bridging courses designed to support students commencing tertiary education are widespread, and some evidence for the value of semester-length courses has been reported; however, little attention has been paid to short-but-intense bridging courses, and empirical evidence of their effectiveness is particularly sparse. The current study followed the academic performance of a cohort of students enrolled in a first-year chemistry unit of study designed for those with little or no background knowledge of chemistry. The aims of this study are two-fold: first to determine the strength of the linkage between prior knowledge in chemistry and performance on the end of semester exam, and secondly, to explore the reasons for any differences observed. In particular, the value of the week-long intensive-mode bridging course offered by the University of Sydney was analysed. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected. The research has shown that participation in the chemistry bridging course is associated with ‘bridging the gap’ in academic performance between students with No Prior Chemistry background and those with a Strong Background. While the content of the bridging course is a significant contributor to academic success, so too is the confidence in their own learning that the course engenders among participants.  相似文献   

Scale and the evolutionarily based approximate number system: an exploratory study     

Cesar Delgado  M. Gail Jones  Hye Sun You  Laura Robertson  Katherine Chesnutt  Justin Halberda 《International Journal of Science Education》2013,35(8):1008-1024

ABSTRACT

Crosscutting concepts such as scale, proportion, and quantity are recognised by U.S. science standards as a potential vehicle for students to integrate their scientific and mathematical knowledge; yet, U.S. students and adults trail their international peers in scale and measurement estimation. Culturally based knowledge of scale such as measurement units may be built on evolutionarily-based systems of number such as the approximate number system (ANS), which processes approximate representations of numerical magnitude. ANS is related to mathematical achievement in pre-school and early elementary students, but there is little research on ANS among older students or in science-related areas such as scale. Here, we investigate the relationship between ANS precision in public school U.S. seventh graders and their accuracy estimating the length of standard units of measurement in SI and U.S. customary units. We also explored the relationship between ANS and science and mathematics achievement. Accuracy estimating the metre was positively and significantly related to ANS precision. Mathematics achievement, science achievement, and accuracy estimating other units were not significantly related to ANS. We thus suggest that ANS precision may be related to mathematics understanding beyond arithmetic, beyond the early school years, and to the crosscutting concepts of scale, proportion, and quantity.  相似文献   

English,French and German summaries of major articles in this issue     

Chris Oulton  Justin Dillon  Marcus M. Grace 《International Journal of Science Education》2013,35(4):411-417

Science has a role to play in the resolution of many of the issues deemed controversial in all societies. However, evidence of a lack of public confidence in science and scientists as effective problem‐solvers continues to accumulate. This paper speculates that this lack of confidence might in part be due to the way in which science educators present controversial issues. In particular, we argue that current approaches to teaching about controversy do not sufficiently acknowledge the nature of the issues themselves. The paper proposes a set of principles as the basis for a reconceptualization of the teaching of controversial issues and gives an example of how they might be applied.  相似文献   

Learning design in diverse institutional and cultural contexts: suggestions from a participatory workshop with higher education professionals in Africa     

Jenna Mittelmeier  Dianne Long  Firdevs Melis Cin  Katharine Reedy  Ashley Gunter  Parvati Raghuram 《Open Learning》2013,28(3):250-266

Learning design approaches, such as those adopted by the Open University, provide a set of tools and resources for purposefully-designing modules with a focus on student experiences. However, many of the current learning design strategies have been situated within specific institutions in Europe and North America. This means that there are several issues worth considering around if and how established learning design approaches make sense in diverse institutional and cultural contexts. To critically assess the relevance and appropriateness of learning design strategies in new contexts, this article describes an in-depth participatory workshop with 34 education professionals from five African countries. Altogether, 10 suggestions for learning design practices were derived from the consensus of workshop participants, which provide a foundation for the development of learning design practices moving forward.  相似文献   

University vs. Research Institute? The Dual Pillars of German Science Production, 1950–2010     

Dusdal  Jennifer  Powell  Justin J. W.  Baker  David P.  Fu  Yuan Chih  Shamekhi  Yahya  Stock  Manfred 《Minerva》2020,58(3):319-342

The world’s third largest producer of scientific research, Germany, is the origin of the research university and the independent, extra-university research institute. Its dual-pillar research policy differentiates these organizational forms functionally: universities specialize in advanced research-based teaching; institutes specialize intensely on research. Over the past decades this policy affected each sector differently: while universities suffered a lingering “legitimation crisis,” institutes enjoyed deepening “favored sponsorship”—financial and reputational advantages. Universities led the nation’s reestablishment of scientific prominence among the highly competitive European and global science systems after WWII. But sectoral analysis of contributions to science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medical and health journal publications (1950–2010) finds that Germany’s small to medium-sized independent research institutes have made significant, growing contributions, particularly in publishing in higher impact journals proportionally more than their size. Simultaneously—despite dual-pillar policy implications—the university sector continues to be absolutely and relatively successful; not eclipsed by the institutes. Universities have consistently produced two-thirds of the nation’s publications in the highest quality journals since at least 1980 and have increased publications at a logarithmic rate; higher than the international mean. Indeed, they led Germany into the global mega-science style of production. Contrary to assumed benefits of functional differentiation, our results indicate that relative to their size, each sector has produced approximately similar publication records. While institutes have succeeded, the larger university sector, despite much less funding growth, has remained fundamental to German science production. Considering these findings, we discuss the future utility of the dual-pillar policy.

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Doing justice to the informal science education community     

Justin Dillon 《Studies in Science Education》2013,49(1):131-136

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A Simple Unifying Measure of State Support for Postsecondary Education     

Philip A. Trostel  Justin M. Ronca 《Research in higher education》2009,50(3):215-247

Conflicting measures of state support for postsecondary education create confusion and misunderstanding that convolute debates about states’ postsecondary education funding. The use of multiple measures is largely unnecessary, though. A simple single measure is constructed that adequately quantifies both states’ postsecondary need and states’ ability to pay. Specifically, this study proposes measuring state support for postsecondary education as state postsecondary funding per high school graduate over the previous four years per dollar of per capita income.

Justin M. RoncaEmail:

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The validity and intra-tester reliability of markerless motion capture to analyse kinematics of the BMX Supercross gate start     

Josephine Grigg  Eric Haakonssen  Evelyne Rathbone  Robin Orr  Justin W. L. Keogh 《Sports biomechanics / International Society of Biomechanics in Sports》2018,17(3):383-401

The aim of this study was to quantify the validity and intra-tester reliability of a novel method of kinematic measurement. The measurement target was the joint angles of an athlete performing a BMX Supercross (SX) gate start action through the first 1.2 s of movement in situ on a BMX SX ramp using a standard gate start procedure. The method employed GoPro® Hero 4 Silver (GoPro Inc., USA) cameras capturing data at 120 fps 720 p on a ‘normal’ lens setting. Kinovea 0.8.15 (Kinovea.org, France) was used for analysis. Tracking data was exported and angles computed in Matlab (Mathworks®, USA). The gold standard 3D method for joint angle measurement could not safely be employed in this environment, so a rigid angle was used. Validity was measured to be within 2°. Intra-tester reliability was measured by the same tester performing the analysis twice with an average of 55 days between analyses. Intra-tester reliability was high, with an absolute error <6° and <9 frames (0.075 s) across all angles and time points for key positions, respectively. The methodology is valid within 2° and reliable within 6° for the calculation of joint angles in the first ~1.25 s.  相似文献   

Exploring criteria for successful query expansion in the genomic domain   总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1  

Nicola Stokes  Yi Li  Lawrence Cavedon  Justin Zobel 《Information Retrieval》2009,12(1):17-50

Query Expansion is commonly used in Information Retrieval to overcome vocabulary mismatch issues, such as synonymy between the original query terms and a relevant document. In general, query expansion experiments exhibit mixed results. Overall TREC Genomics Track results are also mixed; however, results from the top performing systems provide strong evidence supporting the need for expansion. In this paper, we examine the conditions necessary for optimal query expansion performance with respect to two system design issues: IR framework and knowledge source used for expansion. We present a query expansion framework that improves Okapi baseline passage MAP performance by 185%. Using this framework, we compare and contrast the effectiveness of a variety of biomedical knowledge sources used by TREC 2006 Genomics Track participants for expansion. Based on the outcome of these experiments, we discuss the success factors required for effective query expansion with respect to various sources of term expansion, such as corpus-based cooccurrence statistics, pseudo-relevance feedback methods, and domain-specific and domain-independent ontologies and databases. Our results show that choice of document ranking algorithm is the most important factor affecting retrieval performance on this dataset. In addition, when an appropriate ranking algorithm is used, we find that query expansion with domain-specific knowledge sources provides an equally substantive gain in performance over a baseline system.

Nicola StokesEmail: Email:

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