1,721,005 research outputs found
Children’s ethical thinking: project MelArete, an educational challenge
No full textIn this article we present MelArete, a research project on ethical education carried out in six Italian kindergartens (116 children) and four primary schools (106 children) during the scholastic year 2016- 2017. Its aims are to encourage children’s ethical thinking (educational aim) and to explore the children’s ideas and experiences of good, care, virtue, justice, respect, courage and generosity (research aim). MelArete is a “service research”, i.e. a research whose methods and findings represent an answer to school’s request to be helped in improving practices but it is also a “research for children”, and not merely a research “with” children, as it is guided by the purpose to offer significant and positive experiences to children. At the base of this project is the following pedagogical question: How can we orient the person to pay attention to virtues and to reflect about them in order to realize a good quality of life? Furthermore, the research question is the following: Which is the essential meaning of children’s ethical concepts and experiences? We involved children in Socratic conversations starting from stories, in inventing narratives about virtues, in discussing vignettes on ethical dilemma and in games to explore different interpretation of virtues; furthermore, we required participants to present in a “diary of virtues” virtuous actions carried out in first person or seen carried out by others. This instrument is important to involve children in reflecting on their everyday ethical experience. We collected audio registrations of the conversations carried out in class, and children's writings and drawings. Data have been analyzed following a methodological crossbreeding (Mortari, 2007; Mortari and Silva, 2018) between some aspects of the phenomenological-eidetic method and the grounded theory. The purpose of the analysis was to labelling and categorizing the data, in order to understand the essence of the ethical concepts and experiences according to children. The results show the richness of children’s ethical thinking: their narratives demonstrate not only their ability to recognize different declinations of the same virtue in different experiences but also the ability to recognize the complexity of ethical experience. The research confirms the opportunity to involve children in activities which encourage them to examine the essential meanings of ethical concepts and experiences in order to improve their ability to cope with difficult situations that involve ethical aspects
ANALYSING THE CONTEXTS' NEEDS IN ORDER TO OPTIMIZE THE PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS' TRAINING PROGRAM: A RESEARCH CONDUCTED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF VERONA
No full textPre-service teacher training should support future teacher in the development of the skills needed to deal with the complexity of the contemporary education landscape, In order to achieve this goal it is essential to promote a professional growth that establishes meaningful relationships between the academic research and the needs emerging by the real contexts (in-service teachers, school communities, etc.) in order to support the practitioners in their work (Lagemann, 1999, Pring, 2000; Levine, 2006; Epstein, 2013). The aim of the empirical inquiry here presented is to understand the real needs of schools, in order to calibrate the pre-service teacher training in the light of the issues and challenges the world of education is facing today. This research follows a ecological framework according to the idea that it is important to study the world of meanings in which a person moves (Merriam, 2002; Mortari, 2007) and it adheres to a phenomenological method, because it is particularly suitable to explore people’s lived experience (Lincoln & Guba 1985). The tool of collecting data is a semi-structured interview, aimed to investigate what are the most important problems emerging from schools and also the way the university can support them in these challenges. The analysis was conducted using content analysis, because it allows to define and organize the meaning of a text to discover the core elements without losings its undertones (Elo & Kyngas, 2008; Hsieh & Shannon, 2005). Our analysis allow us to define macro categories in which the teacher’s problems and needs are organized: characteristics of the context, teaching aspects, relationship with the children and transversal elements, relationship between school and parents, relationship within the teachers and between teachers and other professional roles, teachers’ learning needs. The paper will present the results of a study that involves 813 in-service teachers working in school connected to the University of Verona, during the academic year 2018/2019
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Optical dating of quartz from young deposits: From single-aliquot to single-grain
No full textOptically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) dating is a tool used in Quaternary Geology for assessing ages of depositional mineral grains such as quartz, feldspars and zircons. In particular, OSL showed to be exceptionally robust and reliable for dating quartz samples. Such a technique has been successfully applied in the age range of 1.000 up to 150.000 years, but optical dating below and beyond these limits remains a challenge. OSL dating relies on the assumption that the luminescence signal of grains is fully reset to zero by sunlight exposure before deposition. If this requirement is not fulfilled (i.e. grains were "poorly-bleached"), ages may be grossly overestimated. In particular, poor-bleaching can significantly affect age estimations of young sediments, for which the remnant signal may be large relative to the signal built up during burial. Standard procedures for estimating the burial dose of a sediment make use of a large number of grains (aliquot) that is measured simultaneously. This approach has been shown to work well on homogeneously bleached sediments, but to fail if heterogeneous bleaching occurred. An alternative way to investigate poor-bleaching within a sample is to measure the OSL signal from individual grains rather than from aliquots made up of several thousands of grains. The advantage is that individual grains with large doses (possibly due to poorbleaching) can be identified and dealt with. However, the single grain approach is not without problems. Drawbacks are that only a small percentage of the measured grains produce detectable signals and luminescence responses are weak. The aim of this thesis it to determine the feasibility of applying dating techniques to individual grains of quartz from deposits formed within the last 300 years.IR
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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