Thoughts about reflection and reflective practice have evolved over many decades, through carefully constructed theory and research applications, mainly based on the work of Dewey (1933) and Schön (1983). Evidence also exists in the literature that the ability to reflect on practice is considered a necessity for effective instruction (Sowder, 2007). By reflecting critically teachers become more positive in the search for a new understanding of their teaching practice and design more ways to deal with the challenges that confront them daily. When teachers act reflectively, they consider carefully the problems in their own teaching and think about how those problems are related to their educational or social context. They are aware of the consequences of their teaching and how their own assumptions or beliefs can influence their teaching. This main purpose of my research study was to explore the nature of mathematics teachers’ reflective practice in the context of lesson study. To achieve this aim, an in-depth exploration of five mathematics teachers’ reflection before, during and after teaching a lesson was conducted. The possible relationship between these teachers’ reflection and their classroom practice was also examined. The research also aimed to explore whether and how mathematics teachers’ reflections differ from the conceptualisations of reflection in classroom practice as found in the literature. Contextual factors that might influence the nature of mathematics teachers’ reflective practice were also investigated. My findings indicate that the mathematics teachers in my sample have a limited understanding of the concept of reflection. Furthermore, based on lesson plan analysis, there was no evidence that these teachers reflect-for-action. However, they all reflected on-action verbally and in writing, and three of the five teachers reflected-in-action while teaching. They all reflected on Level R1 (recall level of reflection) and Level R2 (rationalisation level of reflection) and three teachers reflected critically on their learners’ understanding of mathematics and their own teaching of concepts towards the end of the research project (Lee, 2005). Language and the lesson study group experience emerged as contextual factors that seemed to influence the teachers’ reflection. Although the research study’s results cannot be generalised due to the small sample, I believe that through engaging in the lesson study experience the five teachers of this study improved their reflective practice, reporting an increase in self-knowledge and finding new ways of teaching mathematics to learners. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2011. / Science, Mathematics and Technology Education / unrestricted

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Static image action recognition aims at identifying the action performed in a given image. Most existing static image action recognition approaches use high-level cues present in the image such as objects, object human interaction, or human pose to better capture the action performed. Unlike images, videos have temporal information that greatly improves action recognition by resolving potential ambiguity. We propose to leverage a large amount of readily available unlabeled videos to transfer the temporal information from video domain to static image domain and hence improve static image action recognition. Specifically, We propose a video prediction model to predict the future video of a static image and use the future predicted video to improve static image action recognition. Our experimental results on four datasets validate that the idea of transferring the temporal information from videos to static images is promising, and can enhance static image action recognition performance. / Master of Science / Static image action recognition is the problem of identifying the action performed in a given image. Most existing approaches use the high-level cues present in the image like objects, object human interaction, or human pose to better capture the action performed. Unlike images, videos have temporal information that greatly improves action recognition. Looking at a static image of a man who is about to sit on a chair might be misunderstood as an image of a man who is standing from the chair. Because of the temporal information in videos, such ambiguity is not present. To transfer the temporal information and action features from video domain to static image domain and hence improve static image action recognition, we propose a model that learns a mapping from a static image to its future video by looking at a large number of existing images and their future videos. We then use this model to predict the future video of a static image to improve its action recognition. Our experimental results on four datasets show that the idea of transferring the temporal information from videos to static images is promising, and can enhance static image action recognition performance.

Thesis with the topic "Types of action in The Civil Process" The objective of the thesis with the topic "Types of action in The Civil Process" is to offer a comprehensive view of the positive treatment of various types of action in the Czech civil procedural law. The action is a significant procedural institution, which is considered a universal means of protection of rights, and in both theory and practice it is treated with due importance. The thesis is divided in eleven chapters. In the first half, I define general characteristics of the action and its legal effects; in the second, I deal with the individual types of action in detail and analyse their specifics by means of a detailed of the literature and case law review method.

Contending with a changing climate presents a necessary push for planning. Although climate change is considered a global environmental problem requiring a global commitment and trans-national action, more and more, policymakers are recognizing the vital need for action at the local level. In the US, especially in the absence of national climate legislation, many local governments have begun developing strategic plans, or climate action plans (CAPs), to address adapting to impacts of climate change and mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. This thesis involves case studies of Portland, OR and Chicago, IL, cities with recently adopted CAPs and with considerable recognition in the field. The analysis involves an evaluation each city’s CAP and an evaluation of its implementation. The studies help elicit an understanding of the measures cites are employing to mitigate climate change and determine ways the planning profession can better assist communities in climate policy development and its prompt implementation.

The perception of an action and its production are inextricably linked. This entails that, during development, the skills that children are able to perform influence their perception of others\\\' actions. The present dissertation aimed to investigate the role of children’s experience on the perception of actions in three distinctive areas: manual actions performed by one person (individual action), manual actions performed by two people (joint action), and a conversation between two people. In order to succeed in each of the three areas, children have to acquire new skills and do so successively during their first three years of life. The methodological approach of this work was to measure the gaze behaviour of children, aged 6 months to 3 years, and adults during the observation of visually presented actions, which provided information on whether they were able to anticipate action goals. The findings obtained generally show an influence of experience on the anticipation of action goals in each of the three areas. First, a link between action and perception is not established as soon as an action emerges. There is at least some experience necessary for its development. Second, infants with no coordinated joint-action skills themselves anticipate the goals of joint action less well than those of individual action. Adults with considerable joint-action skills anticipate both equally well. And third, the course of a conversation can only be reliably anticipated by children aged 3 years and adults, whereas younger children shift their gaze between speakers randomly. Furthermore, only at the age of 3 years, did intonation support children’s anticipation of conversations.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Miami University, Dept. of Psychology, 2007. / Title from second page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 155-160).

La perception visuelle de l’espace est largement déterminée par les capacités visuelles des individus. Cependant, la recherche sur l’influence de variables dites non visuelles semble indiquer une importance déterminante des dimensions corporelle et émotionnelle sur la perception visuelle. Dans cette thèse, nous nous sommes intéressés à la perception des distances et avons tenté de comprendre en quoi nos perceptions pouvaient refléter la nature de nos interactions sensorimotrices avec notre environnement. Dans une première étude nous avons montré que des contraintes d’actions, tel que le coût énergétique, générées par les dispositions de l’environnement, pouvaient avoir une influence sur la perception de distances allocentriques. Dans une seconde étude, nous avons tenté de mettre en évidence le rôle du processus d’intégration sensorimotrice dans des tâches d’évaluation de distances, ainsi que de comprendre l’influence des modalités non visuelles, telles que l’audition et la motricité, dans ce même type de tâche. Enfin, dans une troisième étude, nous nous sommes intéressés au concept de fluence – i.e., information métacognitive renseignant le système sur la qualité de ses interactions dans son environnement – et proposons l’idée selon laquelle ce signal contenu dans le flux perceptif permettrait d’expliquer différentes variations perceptives liées aux contraintes de nos actions. Finalement, cette thèse défend une approche unifiée de la perception, selon laquelle la limite entre les concepts d’action et de perception devrait être repensée afin de rendre compte de la nature sensorimotrice de nos connaissances. / Visual perception of space is mainly known as depending upon one’s vision capacity. However, research about the influence of non-visual variables seems to indicate that the body also plays an important role in visual perception. In this Ph.D. thesis, we support the idea that distance perception has to be studied as a function of the sensorimotor interactions between the individuals and their environment. In the first study, we showed that action constraints in the environment such as energetic cost could influence allocentric distance perception. In the second study, we focused on the role of the sensorimotor integration process in distance perception tasks, as well as the influence of non-visual variables such as audition and motor activity. In the third study, we investigated the phenomenology of perception, and more precisely in the relative fluency of motor activity. In other words, we focused here on the metacognitive feedback that emerges from the quality of the interactions with the environment. We highlighted that such a metacognitive signal could explain the influence of action constraints on distance perception. Finally, this work provides strong supports to the idea of an integrative approach of perception according to which the theoretical boundary between perception and action is questioned by the sensorimotor nature of our knowledge.

Établir une théorie de gravité quantique qui décrit de manière cohérente les propriétés quantiques de la matière et de l'espace-temps est l'un des défis majeurs de la physique théorique. Malgré plusieurs décennies de recherches, de nombreux problèmes conceptuels et techniques doivent encore être résolus. L'étude de modèles simplifiés donne des idées de résolution. La première partie de la thèse traite de la gravité quantique bidimensionnelle. À deux dimensions, la gravité quantique est beaucoup mieux comprise et de nombreux calculs peuvent être faits exactement. Si la gravité quantique bidimensionnelle a été largement étudiée quand elle est couplée à de la matière conforme, le cas de la matière non-conforme était très peu connu jusque récemment. Nous calculons d'abord l'action gravitationnelle pour un champ scalaire massif sur une surface de Riemann avec bords puis pour un fermion de Majorana massif sur une variété compacte. Ce dernier cas correspond à une CFT perturbée par une perturbation conforme et est d'ordinaire étudié grâce à l'ansatz de DDK, mais les résultats sont différents. Finalement, on calcule le spectre de l'action de Mabuchi dans l'approximation du minisuperespace. La seconde partie étudie les propriétés thermales des trous noirs dans le contexte de la correspondance AdS/CFT. On construit un modèle de mécanique quantique fondé sur les principes holographiques pour simuler la dynamique des trous noirs quantiques. Ce modèle permet d'obtenir des résultats numériques exacts. / Finding a theory of quantum gravity describing in a consistent way the quantum properties of matter and spacetime geometry is one of the greatest challenges of modern theoretical physics. However after several decades of research, many conceptual and technical issues are still to be resolved. Insights on these questions can be given by simplified toy models that allow for exact computations. The first part of the thesis deals with two-dimensional quantum gravity. In two dimensions quantum gravity is much better understood and many computations can be carried out exactly. Whereas two-dimensional quantum gravity coupled to conformal matter has been widely studied and is now well understood, much less was known until recently when matter is non-conformal. First we compute the gravitational action for a massive scalar field on a Riemann surface with boundaries and then for a massive Majorana fermion on a manifold without boundary. The latter case corresponds to a CFT perturbed by a conformal perturbation and is usually tackled through the DDK ansatz, but the results do not seem to match. Finally we give a minisuperspace computation of the spectrum of the Mabuchi action, a functional that appears in the gravitational action for a massive scalar field. In the second part we focus on black hole thermal behaviour which provides a lot of insight of how a theory of quantum gravity should look like. In the context of string theory the AdS/CFT correspondence provides powerful tools for understanding the microscopic origin of black holes thermodynamics. We construct a quantum mechanical toy model based on holographic principles to study the dynamics of quantum black holes.

This thesis examines how communication technology is used for creating a democratic and committed participation within collective action organizations (CAOs). This is achieved by illuminating how organizations' structure and culture relate to their communication. It’s done by in-depth interviews with network-based movements and association-based organizations, and analyses of their digital newsletters. The analysis is based on affordance-driven theory, capturing the interaction between organizations and their digital platforms. The focus lies on how internal democracy and collective action are afforded or constrained to some degrees. Degrees of deliberation for creating common ground and active participation are made visible by using the concept of communicative action. Theories within social movement studies, such as collective action, broaden the understanding of how the perception of digital tools shapes and is shaped by their structure and culture. The results show that the usage and coordination of communication channels is essential for the practice of internal democracy in everyday work, beyond annual meetings and board meetings. Independent chat-based platforms enable an increased control of conversations, cooperation and coordination, while information overload and effective decision- making processes can hinder democratic participation. Commercial social media platforms such as Facebook enables new flows of engagement and connectivity but constrains coordination and control of the framing process within Facebook groups. Additionally, unpredictable algorithms and advertising policy on Facebook makes it difficult to reach out. Overall, the study suggests a broadened view of communication, where communication and usage of digital media should not be considered as instrumental entities. Rather, it is strongly related to how channels are being coordinated, how organizations are organized and the view of participation. Formal structures can both hinder and enable increased communicative action that contributes to democratic participation.