1,720,985 research outputs found
How standardised tests impact on teacher practice: an exploratory study on teachers’ beliefs
No full textOur study aims at contributing to the increasingly expanding international research
on the extent to which teachers' views of mathematics and mathematics teaching affect
the actual learning and teaching processes. In particular, we investigate possible
changes in the way of teaching mathematics which teachers perceive as influenced by
Italian national standardised assessment. An exploratory study was carried out, by
means of an open-ended questionnaire given to primary and middle school
mathematics teachers. Through qualitative analysis of collected data, we identified
different types of changes and some aspects that could reveal teachers’ beliefs about
the impact of standardised assessment tests on their own teaching practices
Misconceptions in Physics at Politecnico di Milano: Preliminary Results
No full textOur research aims at verifying if the background knowledge in Physics of Politecnico di Milano learners highlights the presence of some misconceptions which have already been described in scientific literature and tries to identify novel ones. To investigate these possible undergraduates’ incorrect viewpoints an authentic ad hoc multiple-choice test was administered to both 619 freshmen and 370 second-year university students involved in our research. In accord with the significant bulk of data collected one can argue that misconceptions are broadly disseminated among freshmen as well as second-year university students. Moreover, to attend university for six months or one year probably contributes to the development of learners’ general process of growth, but it does not appear to change their misconceptions, independently of taking or not an academic Physics course
Issues About Culture, Affect and Standardized Assessment
No full textIn this chapter we introduce some literature on the influence of culture on mathematics education, specifying the reasons why the cultural aspects are important in research on educational issues. We use this introduction to address the issue of the lack of studies regarding the cultural beliefs underlying national standardized assessment. A comparison among some features of standardized assessment in different European countries is carried out in order to highlight aspects that could be related to such beliefs, and that we hope will be better investigated in further studies
A longitudinal analysis of the Italian national standardized mathematics test
No full textThis paper presents a longitudinal analysis of the outcomes of the Italian national standardized mathematics tests. By intertwining quantitative and qualitative methods, we selected and analysed a set of linked questions among the tests administered to the same cohort of students first in grade 6 and then in grade 8. In particular, we focus on poor knowledge students and we argue an example of the analysis of two linked questions about graphical representation of fractions. The comparison between the two questions allows us to interpret some difficulties of students and to expect possible future behaviours
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
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
- …
