1,720,986 research outputs found
Content Analysis for Recognizing Threads in Conceptual Change Research
No full textSince its origins - the publication of the milestone paper of Posner, Strike, Hewson and Gertzog
in 1982 - conceptual change has been one of the main research issues in science education. The
literature on conceptual change is wide and some researchers have already tried to identify the
main threads in this research strand. In some review papers the main articles have been
classified according to different criteria, like “fragmentation and coherence”. Our work stems
from these overview papers and aims at contributing to the literature review on conceptual
change research. In particular, we will present and discuss a new method for identifying
research threads or currents of thought. The analysis of the collection uses both a quantitative
linguistic software and an algorithm inspired by the classical information retrieval procedure
LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing). The selection of the terms to build the reference dictionary
needed for the algorithm is semi-automatic. In the paper, we discuss the extent to which such
software and algorithm are useful for (i) aggregating and classifying similar papers in terms of
topics; and (ii) checking the coherence between the results of the automatic classification procedure and the effective differences among the papers, in order to visualize more deeply the
trends in conceptual change research
Narrativity and Climate Change Education: Design of an Operative Approach
Full text linkNarratives are intrinsic to how humans make sense of the world, helping us structure experiences, interpret complex phenomena, and construct meaning. This sensemaking capacity makes narratives particularly relevant for climate change education (CCE), where learners must navigate global challenges, engage with uncertainty and envision sustainable futures. Yet the characterisation of narratives remains conceptually ambiguous, presenting challenges for leveraging their educational potential. This study addresses this research problem by posing the question: How can we develop an operational definition of narratives for CCE that effectively unpacks the complexity of narrative as a way of thinking and enables analysis and comparison of narrative features for educational purposes? Grounded in Bruner's theory of paradigmatic and narrative modes of thought, this paper introduces a four-layer framework for categorising narratives based on their "narrativity". By demonstrating its practical application through an example, this study offers a tool for recognising, selecting, and/or designing narrative forms that align with diverse educational purposes, laying the ground for future research and practices in CCE
Developing future-scaffolding skills through science education
Full text linkCan 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
The Present Shock and Time Re-appropriation in the Pandemic Era : Missed Opportunities for Science Education
Full text linkThe crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic led most people all over the world to deal with a change in their perception and organization of time. This happened also, and mainly, within the educational institutions, where students and teachers had to rearrange their teaching/learning dynamics because of the forced education at a distance. In this paper, we present an exploratory qualitative study with secondary school students aimed to investigate how they were experiencing their learning during lockdown and how, in particular, learning of science contributed to rearranging their daily lifetime rituals. In order to design and carry out our investigation, we borrowed constructs coming from a research field rather unusual for science education: the field of sociology of time. The main result concerns the discovery of the potential of the dichotomy between alienation from time and time re-appropriation. The former is a construct elaborated by the sociologist Hartmut Rosa to describe the society of acceleration in the “era of future shock”. The latter represents an elaboration of the construct of appropriation that the authors had operationally defined, starting from Bakhtin’s original idea, to describe the nexus between physics learning and identity. Thanks to the elaboration of the notion of time re-appropriation as feature of the “era of present shock”, the study unveils how school science, instead of preparing the young to navigate our fast-changing and complex society, tends to create “bubbles of rituals” that detach learning from societal concern
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
Understanding first year university students’ curiosity and interest about physics
Full text linkThe European shortage of students pursuing further studies and careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) is particularly severe in the field of physical sciences. Many physics departments suffer from high dropout rates, partly caused by students’ decrease of interest during their studies. To address these problems and to help teachers at all educational levels improve their practices, the EU-funded HOPE (Horizons in Physics Education) project examined the views of first-year Physics students in European universities. Here we report the results of an interview study on how students perceive their reasons for choosing physics as their field of study. 94 semi-structured interviews were conducted in 16 universities and analyzed through a two-round process. The results show that the first-year students used chiefly expressions of interest and intrinsic motivation to describe factors inspiring them to study physics, while expectations of success, as well as utility and attainment values, played smaller roles
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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