In the 2010/11 academic year, more than one fifth of international students in the American higher education institutions were from Mainland China. However, these Chinese students were often addressed by American professors as "passive listeners" or "inactive learners": they were quiet in the classroom and seldom asked question. In this paper, the investigator examined five Chinese graduate students in an American university on their experiences and perceptions on asking question in the American classrooms. A qualitative multiple case study was conducted with individual face-to-face interview as the major data collection instrument. The two research questions are: 1) What are the experiences of Chinese international students about asking questions in graduate level classes in the United States? 2) How do Chinese international graduate students feel about asking questions in the American classroom? It was found that the major issues influenced the participants' question-asking behavior were: 1) English deficiency, 2) cultural differences between China and America, and 3) the different educational environment between these two countries. Specifically, the participants' motivation and opportunity to ask question in the classroom was influenced by their belief that teacher should be respected, the value of question, and the Chinese concepts of thinking and speaking. The classroom environment in terms of the classroom behavior of American professors and other students also had impacts on the participants' question-asking behavior as an external contextual factor. Based on the findings of this study, recommendations were offered for American faculty members and staffs working with international students and incoming Chinese students. This study might help American professors better understand the unique learning styles of their Chinese students and inform institution administrators to improve the services for international students. The results may also help Chinese students adapt to the American educational community smoothly. Suggestions for further study were also provided for researchers who were interested to increase international/ Chinese students' classroom participation.

This paper studied whether threats to self-esteem and goal orientation affected an individual?s propensity to ask for help. Eighty-two undergraduate students from the University of Waterloo completed a self-esteem and goal orientation questionnaire in addition to completing two tests. One test was designed to be more self-relevant than the other, making that test more potentially threatening to an individual?s self-esteem. In each test, subjects were given the opportunity to ask for help on each question. The results show that the use of social comparison motivates individuals to engage in self-protection by reducing their willingness to ask for help. In situations where many others had asked for help, help seeking behavior increased. These results extend other research in showing the impact of social comparison on individual behaviour.

This paper studied whether threats to self-esteem and goal orientation affected an individual?s propensity to ask for help. Eighty-two undergraduate students from the University of Waterloo completed a self-esteem and goal orientation questionnaire in addition to completing two tests. One test was designed to be more self-relevant than the other, making that test more potentially threatening to an individual?s self-esteem. In each test, subjects were given the opportunity to ask for help on each question. The results show that the use of social comparison motivates individuals to engage in self-protection by reducing their willingness to ask for help. In situations where many others had asked for help, help seeking behavior increased. These results extend other research in showing the impact of social comparison on individual behaviour.

Domestic violence is the act of violence from a family member or partner. Domestic violence counts as a social issue that one of three women globally and one of four women in Sweden has experienced. Violence can be expressed in different ways and science has revealed that women have a higher risk than men of being victims of domestic violence. Women who endure violence usually do not show any obvious signs and therefore it is of importance to ask the question about domestic violence to all female patients. Nurses need knowledge about symptoms and signs of violence in order be able to detect these women. Even though the nurses carry the responsibility of asking female patients about domestic violence, most of the time nurses do not ask. The aim of this study was to shed light on the nurse's experience of asking female patients about domestic violence. This qualitative based literary study includes eleven articles. The results of this study show that nurses want to help women who live with domestic violence, but the subject is perceived as uncomfortable which makes asking the question more difficult. Nurses experience the heavy workload and the hospital environment as barriers to asking the question during the right conditions. Nurses expressed feelings of ambiguity as to who was responsible for handling the issue and saw that as a barrier to asking the question. For more women to have the opportunity to get adequate help, nurses need to receive further training and knowledge about domestic violence.

In many ways, higher educational systems in the United States are the most extraordinary in the world. Students come from all over to study in our institutes of higher learning. As our search for an explanation of how to facilitate student learning continues, the goal of this dissertation was to examine the heavily under-researched area of teacherstudent relationships as they relate to student understanding. Using the existing body of instructional communication research, the Student Understanding Model (SUM) is proposed and tested. Data collected from 302 undergraduate students was used to test the SUM. Results provide empirical support that relational messages account for approximately 26% of the variance in student understanding. Conclusions and implications from the current study were discussed.

Children with autism often exhibit deficits in question-asking. This study replicated and extended Williams, Donley, and Keller.s (2000) training package: a modeling and reinforcement procedure to teach the use of 3 different questions about hidden objects. Two boys, aged 13 and 12, with primary diagnoses of autism, participated. A multiple baseline design across questions was used. Both children learned to ask all three questions: .What.s that?. .Can I see (item name)?. and .Can I have (item name)?. Question-asking generalized to novel locations, people, and stimulus materials with minimal additional training. These results support the efficacy of this training package as an efficient way to teach children with autism to ask questions about objects in their environment.

Master's thesis "Philosophy and community" looks into the origin of ancient greek term "polis" and inception of its citizen. It looks into it as specifical means of being of world and human. The correlation of polis and citizen is most apparent in philosophy of Plato. With an emphasis on his privilegy of spoken word over written one, he shows possible sources of philosophical hermeneutics. By understanding the situation, which leads to the decline of the reciprocal relationship between human and world, author would like to express that in Platos way of thinking are still unreflected possibilities of solution for the present day. Intention of this work is to contribute - by sketching and explication of the principles of political thinking - to the discussion - and not only to that of the political philosophy and political science.

Este estudo se fundamenta na construção de um modelo didático de formulação de perguntas que atenda às demandas educativas dos alunos nas aulas de Ciências e Biologia. Esse modelo didático tem como unidade central o discurso interativo entre professor e alunos para atribuição de significados compartilhados, que denominamos de discurso reflexivo. Consideramos que uma perspectiva de formação continuada reflexiva, investigativa e crítica possibilita que o professor implemente o modelo didático de formulação de perguntas provocando efeitos significativos nos processos cognitivos e interativos em sala de aula. Adotando o modelo didático de formulação de perguntas, os professores promovem modificações na sua postura pedagógica frente ao processo de ensino e aprendizagem das ciências, bem como re-significam as suas concepções sobre o currículo e seus elementos: conteúdos, objetivos educacionais, atividades de aprendizagem e avaliação. / This study is based upon the construction of a didactic model of questions formulation to meet the educational demands of students during the classes of Sciences and Biology. This didactic model has as its core unit the interactive discourse between the teacher and the students for the attribution of shared meanings, that we call reflexive discourse. We consider that the perspective of a reflexive, investigatory and critical continuing educational enables the teacher to implement the didactic model of questions formulation which will provoke meaningful effects in the cognitive and interactive process in the classroom. By adopting a didactic model of questions formulation, the teachers promote changes in their pedagogical attitude toward the teaching and learning sciences, and give new meaning to the their conceptions of the curriculum and its elements: contents, educational objectives, learning activities and evaluation.

Question-asking has long been an integral part of human learning. In scholarly investigations over the past several decades, questions have been studied in terms of the answers they generate, their grammatical structure, their cognitive functions, their logical content, and their social dynamics. Studies of student classroom questioning have focused on science education and reading instruction particularly; they detail the reasons why students don't ask questions and explore a plethora of recommendations about teaching students how to question. This qualitative study addressed question-asking from a hermeneutic moral realist perspective, studying question-asking as it unfolded in the everyday practice of learning in a graduate seminar on design thinking. Findings of the study included seven themes that fit within three broader metathemes about the complexities and virtues of classroom questioning, the sociality of question-asking, and the temporality of questions in practice. Specific themes of the study concerned the complexity of overlapping practices within the classroom, ways in which students evaluated the quality and virtue of their questioning interactions, the moral reference points that guided student participation in various kinds of questioning (i.e., convergent questions, divergent questions, challenges to others), and the temporality of question-asking that reflected the way questions mattered to the students and how different aspects of the subject matter were disclosed and concealed in the process of learning. Findings from this study suggest that a moral realist-oriented inquiry can provide a wide-ranging and nuanced set of insights regarding question-asking as a part of student learning.

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) are problem-solving environments that provide individualised instruction and are able to adapt to the abilities and needs of each individual student in order to maximise effective learning. They provide feedback on students' actions, but a problem arises when students do not always understand the feedback they receive. Therefore, it would be beneficial for students to be able to ask for additional clarifications at any time, and to receive feedback customised to their individual differences. This research focuses on providing an additional help channel in ITSs where students are able to ask free-form questions, as well as accounting for the students' psychometric measure of spatial ability. We describe ERM-Tutor, the test-bed ITS chosen for implementing our research framework. ERM-Tutor is a constraint-based tutoring system for teaching logical database design. Students practise this procedural task in ERM-Tutor by solving each step and receiving feedback on their solutions. We also present our approach to addressing the meta-cognitive skill of question-asking in ERM-Tutor. We added a question-asking module that enables students to ask free-form questions and receive the most appropriate answers stored in the system. In addition, we investigated the potential of tailoring the feedback messages towards the learners' psychometric measure of spatial ability. We modified ERM-Tutor to provide not only textual feedback messages, but also multimedia messages, containing a combination of text and pictures. We performed a series of evaluation studies in order to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed solutions. All our studies were conducted with tertiary students enrolled in an introductory database course. The students had attended lectures on logical database design and were asked to use ERM-Tutor to develop and practise their mapping skills. The results show an overall improvement in performance and learning gain for all students using ERM-Tutor. Interactions with the question-asking module show that most questions asked by students were task-focused, directly requesting help on specific errors. The results confirm the need for addressing students' questions inside an ITS environment. Furthermore, there were no conclusive results to support a difference in effectiveness of the textual versus multimedia feedback presentation modes with respect to the students' spatial ability. However, we observed a number of trends indicating that matching the instruction presentation mode towards the students spatial ability influences their perception of the system and motivation to use it, more than their learning gain. Our results show promising indications for further explorations. We present our approaches, full analyses of the collected data from our evaluation studies, as well as our research contributions to the ITSs field. We also portray a number of future directions that will contribute towards maximising the effectiveness of learning in ITSs.