Whole Class Dialogic Discussion Meets Taiwan’s Physics Teachers: Attitudes and Culture     

Haim Eshach  Hsin-Kai Wu  Fu-Kwun Hwang  Ying-Shao Hsu 《Journal of Science Education and Technology》2014,23(1):183-197

There is a distance between the power that whole class dialogic discussions (WCDD) may offer to the science class and their use in practice. Teachers’ attitudes toward WCDD are part of the problem. The aims of this study were twofold: (a) to examine Taiwanese physics teachers’ attitudes toward WCDD by considering cultural perspectives and describe how these attitudes changed as a result of a special workshop designed for this purpose, and (b) to report on how these attitudes should be taken into account in designing such workshops in the future. Nine experienced physics teachers participated in the WCDD workshop. The workshop was based on the WCDD model developed by Eshach (2010). Inductive analyses were performed on interviews with the teachers and their students, which were composed of 36 questions and developed specially for the purpose of this study, yielded the following categories: (1) In-school reasons for opposing WCDD—reasons belonging to school ways/tradition of teaching that may cause barriers to WCDD implementation; (2) External Factors—cultural reasons relating to Taiwanese views concerning education in general, which cause barriers to WCDD implementation; and (3) Cognitive aspect—refers to what teachers know about WCDD. The paper concludes with a discussion on what should be done in order to successfully bring WCDD to the Taiwanese physics class.  相似文献   

Blocking in autoshaped lever-pressing procedures with rats     

Peter C. Holland  Judith S. A. Asem  Connor P. Galvin  Caitlin Hepps Keeney  Melanie Hsu  Alexandra Miller  Vivian Zhou 《Learning & behavior》2014,42(1):1-21

Rats will approach and contact a lever whose insertion into the chamber signals response-independent food delivery. This “autoshaping” or “sign-tracking” phenomenon has recently attracted considerable attention as a platform for studying individual differences in impulsivity, drug sensitization, and other traits associated with vulnerability to drug addiction. Here, we examined two basic stimulus selection phenomena—blocking and overshadowing—in the autoshaped lever pressing of rats. Blocking and overshadowing were decidedly asymmetrical. Previously reinforced lever-extension conditioned stimuli (CSs) completely blocked conditioning to auditory cues (Exps. 1 and 2), and previously nonreinforced lever-extension CSs overshadowed conditioning to auditory cues. By contrast, conditioning to lever-extension CSs was not blocked by either auditory (Exp. 3) or lever-insertion (Exp. 4) cues, and was not overshadowed by auditory cues. Conditioning to a lever-insertion cue was somewhat overshadowed by the presence of another lever, especially in terms of food cup behavior displayed after lever withdrawal. We discuss several frameworks in which the apparent immunity of autoshaped lever pressing to blocking might be understood. Given evidence that different brain systems are engaged when different kinds of cues are paired with food delivery, it is worth considering the possibility that interactions among them in learning and performance may follow different rules. In particular, it is intriguing to speculate that the roles of simple cue–reinforcer contiguity, as well as of individual and aggregate reinforcer prediction errors, may differ across stimulus classes.  相似文献   

Impact of participation in extra-curricular activities during college on graduate employability: an empirical study of graduates of Taiwanese business schools     

Hsien-Hsien Lau  Sandra Acosta  Tze-Li Hsu 《Educational studies》2014,40(1):26-47

This study examined college graduates’ evaluations of their employability skills associated with graduate participation in various extra-curricular activities including being a core member of: (a) student government (such as student councils), (b) service (such as scouts clubs), (c) sports, (d) music and (e) arts clubs. The final sample comprised 28,768 business school graduates who hoped to enter the workforce immediately upon graduating in the 2008 school year. Results from propensity score matching analyses demonstrated that students who had been core members of extra-curricular activities were more likely to positively evaluate their communication, leadership, creativity and self-promotion skills. Furthermore, results suggested that different types of extra-curricular activities could unequally influence the employability of graduating college students. Leadership skills benefited most from involvement in sports clubs, while creativity skills benefited most from involvement in music clubs. Communication and self-promotion skills benefited moderately from all extra-curricular activities. Unlike other employability skills, the time management skills of students hardly benefited from extra-curricular activities.  相似文献   

Addressivity in cogenerative dialogues     

Pei-Ling Hsu 《Cultural Studies of Science Education》2014,9(1):63-75

Ashraf Shady’s paper provides a first-hand reflection on how a foreign teacher used cogens as culturally adaptive pedagogy to address cultural misalignments with students. In this paper, Shady drew on several cogen sessions to showcase his journey of using different forms of cogens with his students. To improve the quality of cogens, one strategy he used was to adjust the number of participants in cogens. As a result, some cogens worked and others did not. During the course of reading his paper, I was impressed by his creative and flexible use of cogens and at the same time was intrigued by the question of why some cogens work and not others. In searching for an answer, I found that Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism, especially the concept of addressivity, provides a comprehensive framework to address this question. In this commentary, I reanalyze the cogen episodes described in Shady’s paper in the light of dialogism. My analysis suggests that addressivity plays an important role in mediating the success of cogens. Cogens with high addressivity function as internally persuasive discourse that allows diverse consciousnesses to coexist and so likely affords productive dialogues. The implications of addressivity in teaching and learning are further discussed.  相似文献   

Examining the impact of educational technology courses on pre-service teachers’ development of technological pedagogical content knowledge     

Pi-Sui Hsu 《Teaching Education》2013,24(2):195-213

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the impact of educational technology courses on pre-service teachers’ development of knowledge of technology integration in a teacher preparation program in the USA. The present study was conducted with eight pre-service teachers enrolled in the elementary teacher education program at a large university in the mid-western USA. Data sources included interviews, documents, and observations. The findings identified knowledge of technology integration the pre-service teachers developed and identified knowledge of technology integration needed in the technology integration courses. The present study provided a number of suggestions on different activities that could be built into educational technology courses to better prepare pre-service teachers to teach with technology.  相似文献   

Examining the effects of combining self-explanation principles with an educational game on learning science concepts     

Chung-Yuan Hsu 《Interactive Learning Environments》2013,21(2):104-115

Educational researchers have indicated that although computer games have the potential to promote students’ motivation and engagement, the work on how to design effective games that fulfil educational purposes is still in its infancy. This study aimed to examine how integration of self-explanation into a computer game affected primary schoolers’ acquisition of light and shadow concepts. The participants were randomly assigned to either an experimental group or a control group and played a computer game with or without self-explanation prompts individually as a treatment. Students’ conceptual understanding was evaluated through a pretest and a posttest administered right after the treatment. The results revealed that by controlling the pretest scores, students who played the game with self-explanation features did not outperform those who played the game without any prompts in the posttest. Further analyses of the experimental group students’ responses to the self-explanation prompts also indicated that the students with more correct responses to the prompts did not perform better than those with lower accuracy rates. The deficits in the use of self-explanation prompts are identified, and possible improvements to enhance the function of self-explanation in educational games are proposed.  相似文献   

Visual behavior and self-efficacy of game playing: an eye movement analysis     

Chung-Yuan Hsu  Guo-Li Chiou 《Interactive Learning Environments》2013,21(7):942-952

ABSTRACT

This study was to investigate the role of students’ game self-efficacy in their game performance as well as in their visual behavior distributions and transfer patterns during their gameplay. A total of 48 university students were recruited for participating in a gameplaying task while wearing with an ASL Mobile Eye eye-tracker. After the gameplay, each participant was asked to report their self-efficacy of the gameplay. Based on the self-reported game self-efficacy (GSE) score, the participants were divided into the higher and lower GSE groups. Independent t tests were used to compare their game performances and eye-tracking indices for each area of interest. A lag sequential analysis was used to profile the visual transfer pattern for each group. The results showed that the higher GSE group had better performances than the lower GSE group. During the gameplay, the higher GSE students tended to pay more attention to the critical information for a successful play. In addition, the lag sequential analyses revealed different visual transfer patterns for the two GSE groups. The higher GSE group tended to show a critical-factor-centralized visual-trasfer pattern which demonstrated more planning and monitoring gameplaying strategies; while the lower GSE students, probably lacking the self-confidence of gameplaying, tended to pay more attention to the remaining time for the game.This study may provide suggestions for future game-based leraning system designs.  相似文献   

A competency-based guided-learning algorithm applied on adaptively guiding e-learning     

Wei-Chih Hsu 《Interactive Learning Environments》2013,21(1):106-125

This paper presents a new algorithm called competency-based guided-learning algorithm (CBGLA), which can be applied on adaptively guiding e-learning. Computational process analysis and mathematical derivation of competency-based learning (CBL) were used to develop the CBGLA. The proposed algorithm could generate an effective adaptively guiding learning path in order that it would guide the learners to study adaptively without requiring teacher involvement. In order to verify the effectiveness for the CBGLA, a system is implemented. Using statistical methods, the data of which are collected from the students' learning activities on the system, we have verified the efficiency of the CBGLA by the comparison of the pre-test and post-test scores of students. While the learning materials possess fixed scope and could be classified into several categories, students could even learn more effective under the guidance of CBGLA system than a teacher. Analyzing the questionnaire, it also has been shown that learners were very satisfied with the design of the system user interface and the guided-learning mechanism.  相似文献   

Master–slave chaos synchronization using adaptive TSK-type CMAC neural control     

Chia-Wen Wu  Chun-Fei Hsu  Chi-Kuang Hwang 《Journal of The Franklin Institute》2011,348(8):1847-1868

In this paper, an adaptive TSK-type CMAC neural control (ATCNC) system via sliding-mode approach is proposed for the chaotic symmetric gyro. The proposed ATCNC system is composed of a neural controller and a supervisory compensator. The neural controller uses a TSK-type CMAC neural network (TCNN) to approximate an ideal controller and the supervisory compensator is designed to guarantee system stable in the Lyapunov stability theorem. The developed TCNN provides more powerful representation than the traditional CMAC neural network. Moreover, all the control parameters of the proposed ATCNC system are evolved in the Lyapunov sense to ensure the system stability with a proportional–integral (PI) type adaptation tuning mechanism. Some simulations are presented to confirm the validity of the proposed ATCNC scheme without the occurrence of chattering phenomena. Further, the proposed PI type adaptation laws can achieve faster convergence of the tracking error than that using integral type adaptation laws in previous published papers.  相似文献   

Secrets of the Silk Road     

Florence Hsu 《中外文化交流(英文版)》2011,(6):23-25

<正>The Silk Road has always remained an exotic region for the people from around the worldThanks to its geographic location,the Silk Road provided perfect oppor...  相似文献