The purpose of this study was to examine the longitudinal impacts of the Science Writing Heuristic (SWH) approach on student science achievement measured by the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS). A number of studies have reported positive impact of an inquiry-based instruction on student achievement, critical thinking skills, reasoning skills, attitude toward science, etc. So far, studies have focused on exploring how an intervention affects student achievement using teacher/researcher-generated measurement. Only a few studies have attempted to explore the long-term impacts of an intervention on student science achievement measured by standardized tests. The students' science and reading ITBS data was collected from 2000 to 2011 from a school district which had adopted the SWH approach as the main approach in science classrooms since 2002. The data consisted of 12,350 data points from 3,039 students. The multilevel model for change with discontinuity in elevation and slope technique was used to analyze changes in student science achievement growth trajectories prior and after adopting the SWH approach. The results showed that the SWH approach positively impacted students by initially raising science achievement scores. The initial impact was maintained and gradually increased when students were continuously exposed to the SWH approach. Disadvantaged students who were at risk of having low science achievement had bigger benefits from experience with the SWH approach. As a result, existing problematic achievement gaps were narrowed down. Moreover, students who started experience with the SWH approach as early as elementary school seemed to have better science achievement growth compared to students who started experiencing with the SWH approach only in high school. The results found in this study not only confirmed the positive impacts of the SWH approach on student achievement, but also demonstrated additive impacts found when students had longitudinal experiences with the approach. By engaging in the argument-based classrooms where teachers value students' prior knowledge, encourage students to take control of their learning, and provide non-threatening environment for students to developing big ideas through negotiation, student's achievement can be enhanced. The results also started to shed some light on sustainability of the SWH approach within the school district.

This essay discusses and criticizes Richard Swinburne's inductive argument for the existence of God. In his The Existence of God, Swinburne aims at showing that the existence of God is more probable than not. This is an argument taking into consideration the premises of all traditional arguments for the existence of God. Swinburne uses the phenomena and events that constitute the premises of these arguments as evidence in an attempt to show that his hypothesis is more probably true than nor. Swinburne pursues this task by way of applying Bayes' theorem. The aim of this essay is normative - to judge the strength of Swinburne's argument for the existence of God. My primary objections towards Swinburne is that he professes a subjective concept of probability, that he relies too heavily on simplicity as a virtue of plausible and probable hypotheses and that his concept of God involves an incoherent picture of God's nature. I question not only the actual success of Swinburne's project but what his argument, if it had been successful, would have been able to establish. / Denna uppsats diskuterar och kritiserar Richard Swinburne's induktiva argument för Guds existens. I sin The Existence of God, försöker Swinburne visa att Guds existens är mer trolig än inte. Detta argument tar alla traditionella argument för Guds existens i beräknande.. Swinburne  använder de fenomen och händelser som utgör premisser för dessa argument som bevis i ett försök att visa att hans hypotes är mer trolig än inte.  Han genomför detta genom att använda sig av Bayes teorem. Syftet med denna uppsats är normativt - att bedöma styrkan I Swinburnes argument för Guds existens.  Mina primära invändningar mot Swinburne är att han  använder sig av ett subjektivt sannolikhetsbegrepp, att han förlitar sig allt för starkt på enkelhet som en förklaringsmässig dygd och att hans Gudsbegrepp inbegriper en inkoherent bild av Guds natur. Jag ifrågasätter den faktiska framgången i Swinburnes  projekt, och även vad Swinburne hade kunnat fastställa om hans projekt hade varit framgångsrikt.

Dizertační práce se věnuje funkcionálním diferenciálním rovnicím smíšeného typu. Poskytuje kritéria pro existenci globálních a semi-globálních řešení diferenciálních systémů smíšeného typu. Metody použité v teto práci spočívají v sestavení vhodných operátorů pro diferenciální rovnice a prokázání existence jejich pevných bodů. Tyto pevné body jsou potom použity ke konstrukci řešení rovnic s předcházením a zpožděním. V důkazech tvrzení jsou použity monotónní iterační metoda a Schauderovy-Tychonovovy věty o existenci pevného bodu. V obou případech jsou uvedeny také odhady řešení. Pokud je použita iterační metoda, lze tyto odhady zlepšit iterováním. Kromě toho jsou odvozena kritéria pro lineární rovnice a systémy a je uvedena řada přikladů. Dosažené výsledky lze aplikovat také pro obyčejné diferenciální rovnice nebo diferenciální rovnice se zpožděním či s předcházením argumentu.

We introduce a new linear time compression algorithm, called 'Repair for Trees', which compresses ordered trees over a ranked alphabet using linear straight-line context-free tree grammars. Such grammars generalize straight-line context-free string grammars and allow basic tree operations, like traversal along edges, to be executed without prior decompression. Our algorithm can be considered as a generalization of the 'Re-pair' algorithm developed by N. Jesper Larsson and Alistair Moffat in 2000. The latter algorithm is a dictionary-based compression algorithm for strings. We also introduce a succinct coding which is specialized in further compressing the grammars generated by our algorithm. Thisis accomplished without loosing the ability do directly execute queries on this compressed representation of the input tree. Finally, we compare the grammars and output files generated by a prototype of the Re-pair for Trees algorithm with those of similar compression algorithms. The obtained results show that that our algorithm outperforms its competitors in terms of compression ratio, runtime and memory usage.

In this paper we present C. S. Peirce's take on the difference between science and practice in order to identify the role practice plays in his view of the universe. This take is based on a number of notions about the general nature of signs, inquiries, inferences and arguments, which we discuss. We then survey Peirce's classification of science, show the factors it is based on and examine the mutual relations of the various fields of scientific study. This lets us finally posit practice in the realm of qualities and reactions and show the limits of scientific inquiry into certain matters. We illustrate our findings on a number of examples.

The thesis focuses on the textual strategies of argument in the confessional polemic Ad libellum Martini Lutheri de instituendis ministris ecclesiae accepti relatio (1525) by Czech jurist and humanist Rodericus Dubravius of Dubrava. Chapters 1-4 provide a cultural and historical context of the early stage of Lutheran reformation, define main features of the polemic genre, and sketch the process of constituting of the anti-Lutheran discourse from 1510s to 1520s both in Europe and Bohemia by introducing some of its representative examples. The core of this thesis consists in Chapter 5, introducing selected examples of particular strategies of argument, such as personal invective, use of doctrinal arguments, etc. The analysis of selected textual samples is based on a particular set of methodological tools, most importantly a taxonomy of humanistic polemics by Marc Laureys, Roswitha Simons, and Arnold Becker which is presented in detail in Chapter 2.

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Public deliberations are organised by governments and other large institutions to take the views of citizens around controversial issues. Increasing public demand and the associated burden on public funding make the quality of public deliberation events and their outcomes critical to modern democracies. This paper focuses on technology developed around streams of computational argument data intended to inform and improve deliberative communication in real time. Combining state-of-the-art speech recognition, argument mining, and analytics, we produce dynamic, interactive visualisations intended for non-experts, deployed incrementally in real time to deliberation participants via large screens, hand-held and personal computing devices. The goal is to bridge the gap between theoretical criteria on deliberation quality from the political sciences and objective analytics calculated automatically from computable argument data in actual public deliberations, presented as a set of visualisations which work on stream data and are simple, yet informative enough to make a positive impact on deliberative outcomes.

Researchers writing scientific articles summarize their work in the abstracts mentioning the final outcome of their study. Argumentation mining can be used to extract the claim of the researchers as well as the evidence that could support their claim. The rapid growth of scientific articles demands automated tools that could help in the detection and evaluation of the scientific claims’ veracity. However, there are neither a lot of studies focusing on claim identification and verification neither a lot of annotated corpora available to effectively train deep learning models. For this reason, we annotated two argument mining corpora and perform several experiments with state-of-the-art BERT-based models aiming to identify and verify scientific claims. We find that using SciBERT provides optimal results regardless of the dataset. Furthermore, increasing the amount of training data can improve the performance of every model we used. These findings highlight the need for large-scale argument mining corpora, as well as domain-specific pre-trained models.

I argue in this thesis that Aristotle’s hylomorphic metaphysics, supported by his theory of causality and his theory of the soul (De Anima), holds the key to solving the problem of mental causation in contemporary philosophy of mind. A core aspect of the contemporary mind-body problem is the problem of mental causation (how does the mind interact with the body to cause actions in humans). Without mental causation, in the realist sense of the word, it is difficult to see how humans are held responsible for their actions. There have been different approaches to solving the mind-body problem, but each has met with its own set of problems, except, I argue, Aristotle’s hylomorphism. Jaegwon Kim argues that Davidson’s anomalous monism cum supervenience renders mental causation epiphenomenal, and that a mental state is causally efficacious only when reduced to the physical properties. I argue that it is the phenomenal consciousness that accounts for our actions, and while neither Davidson’s nor Kim’s accounts of action can adequately deal with phenomenal consciousness, Aristotle’s metaphysics can. I argue that the ancient and neo-Aristotelian notion of self-knowledge is akin to our contemporary notion of phenomenal consciousness and that Aristotle saves the notion of autonomous mental causation through his theory of hylomorphism that holds every substance is a composite of matter (body) and form (soul). My thesis is thus a novel invitation to rethink Aristotle’s psychology and philosophy of mind in the context of contemporary philosophy of mind. / Thesis (DPhil)--University of Pretoria 2020. / University of Pretoria(Postgraduate Bursary (2017-2018) / Philosophy / DPhil / Unrestricted