1,720,977 research outputs found
Physics and Mathematics university students’ ideas about computer simulations
Full text linkIn an increasingly complex world, the science of complex systems is well-positioned to provide epistemological lenses and methodological tools to analyse the reality. Among the tools developed, computer simulations have a crucial role, but the ways in which they are conceptualized by graduate and undergraduate students have not been extensively explored. Framed within a wider research about the educational role of simulations of complex systems, the goal of this work is to provide insights into the understanding about simulations of university Physics and Mathematics students. For this purpose, a study has been designed with a group of bachelor and master students within a course of Physics Teaching. The object of this paper is to present the results of the data analysis of the preliminary questionnaires, where 27 students were asked to express their ideas about simulations. The bottom-up process of qualitative analysis has allowed to point out, and organize in categories, different ways in which simulations are conceptualized by the students, in terms of: i) scope for which simulations are used, ii) their relationship with experiments and models, and iii) the examples of simulations they refer to
High school students’ epistemological approaches to computer simulations of complex systems
No full textEpistemic Insights as Design Principles for a Teaching-Learning Module on Artificial Intelligence
Full text linkIn a historical moment in which Artificial Intelligence and machine learning have become within everyone’s reach, science education needs to find new ways to foster “AI literacy.” Since the AI revolution is not only a matter of having introduced extremely performant tools but has been determining a radical change in how we conceive and produce knowledge, not only technical skills are needed but instruments to engage, cognitively, and culturally, with the epistemological challenges that this revolution poses. In this paper, we argue that epistemic insights can be introduced in AI teaching to highlight the differences between three paradigms: the imperative procedural, the declarative logic, and the machine learning based on neural networks (in particular, deep learning). To do this, we analyze a teaching-learning activity designed and implemented within a module on AI for upper secondary school students in which the game of tic-tac-toe is addressed from these three alternative perspectives. We show how the epistemic issues of opacity, uncertainty, and emergence, which the philosophical literature highlights as characterizing the novelty of deep learning with respect to other approaches, allow us to build the scaffolding for establishing a dialogue between the three different paradigms
High school students’ epistemological approaches to computer simulations of complex systems
Full text linkThe science of complex systems can provide not only scientist, but also professionals, policy-makers and citizens, with thinking resources to interpret and understand most of the modern global challenges. In this field, the widespread use of computational simulations, that are neither theoretical instruments nor laboratory experiments, has been contributing to the widening of the scientific skill gap between experts and citizens. The pilot study we present in this contribution aims at investigating high school students’ approaches towards simulations of complex systems, by searching for the criteria they use to evaluate their explanatory power and the reliability of their results. Preliminary analysis of the paired interviews has shown that (1) rarely students are able to elaborate explanations of the simulated complex phenomena, and (2) their critical attitude and trust towards simulations are strongly affected by their epistemological background. We argue that these findings deserve to be furtherly investigated, to understand in more details the sources of students’ difficulties in recognizing the epistemological and methodological value of simulations for scientific research and practice
Developing future-scaffolding skills through science education
No full textCan science teaching contribute to developing skills for managing uncertainty towards the future and projecting imagination forwards? If so, how? In this paper, we outline an approach to ‘teach the future’ through science education. In the first part, we describe a framework that has been constructed to orient the design of teaching modules comprised of future-oriented educational activities. Then, a teaching module on climate change is described. The module was tested in a class of upper secondary school in Italy (grade12) and the main results are reported. They concern a change in perception of the future, as revealed by students: from far and unimaginable, the future became conceivable as a set of possibilities, addressable through concrete actions and within their reach, in the sense that they became able to view themselves as agents of their own future. The results lead us to argue that the approach appears promising in developing ‘futurescaffolding skills’, skills that enable people to construct visions of the future that support possible ways of acting in the present with one’s eye on the horizon
COMPLEXITY SCIENCE AND CITIZENSHIP SKILLS: A PILOT STUDY WITH ADULT CITIZENS
No full textThe scientific citizenship issue has been debating, in the context of science education, for over two decades. The main goal of the studies in this research field is to find approaches that, focusing on scientific contents and methods, design innovative ways to turn scientific knowledge in citizenship skills. In the talk we present a preliminary study within a project just started. The study aims to investigate, in a concrete context, if, how and why the development of hard scientific skills grounded in the discipline of complex systems can result in the development of transversal citizenship skills that can impact on people's ways of facing problems and making decisions. The pilot study has been carried out with a group of 34 volunteer adult citizens and was articulated in three phases according to three types of goals: i) to investigate what scientific competences were held by the group of citizens; ii) to investigate if and how adult people could be guided, through activities designed ad hoc, to understand basic scientific concepts typical of complex systems science; iii) to investigate if citizens were able to turn the learnt scientific concepts into competences to analyse a problem of city planning. Along the three phases of the study, several data were collected and analysed. The data we gathered, with respect to the three phases above, suggest that: i) just few participants were comfortable in dealing with scientific and epistemological concepts, while a "good sense" approach was more common; ii) activities were useful to understand the concepts involved; iii) four different attitudes can be recognized, according to the various types of alignment between scientific competences and decision-making skills
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
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