Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Stevens Point, 2009. / Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree Master of Science in Natural Resource Management, College of Natural Resources. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 167-176).

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Queensland, 2003. / Includes bibliography.

Architecture has been pushed towards the realms of theorization, conceptualization and design methodologies. It is apparent that design is becoming interrupted and more associated with the manufacturing of ideas. It has lost its essence as a phenomenon whose roots are embedded in history and man’s relationship with his specific habitat. Hence, the aim of the thesis is to redirect architectural attention to Ecology and its various implications on design. The study puts forward the notion that human achievements are an outcome of the interaction between ecology, Culture and Cognitive Structure. These relationships are thought to set the principles behind environmental qualities of stability, compatibility and fitness. Once designers arrive at an understanding of these principles, they will be able to manipulate their design ideas to accommodate ever changing circumstances of their physical and cultural environments. The title “Physical, cultural and cognitive interactions in the conception and the production of the built environment” implies a significant theme which could indicate major traits that characterize modern practices and theorisation within the area of Architectural and Environmental Design Studies. In this work, it will be seen why and how: First, a lack of consideration for the physical environment, its requirements and its role in producing diversified architectural forms. The most significant outcome of a such position lies in divorcing nature, its laws and the ecosystems on which man has spent the preceding history elaborating building patterns on the basis of utilising them for his interest free of charge and without consequences to his survival. The fact is that different cultures, ways of life and differentiated built environments, which can only be attributed to man’s adaptation to different ecological conditions, have been widely swept away under the mythical notion of “International style”. Second, because the architects and theorists of the contemporary architecture admire mental constructions and abstract philosophies of their own, they have advocated an alien and distorted meaning of the concept of culture. The most likely interpretation of this vital concept is that it is viewed as related to a kind of abstract intellectual capacity in the human brain that does not lend itself to variation in the physical setting. Tragically, the adoption of such view has resulted in sweeping away subcultures which have been developed in remote areas in accordance with their geographical setting. The most acceptable meaning of culture has been to imply the role of physical environment in shaping social relations, the modes of thought, norms, beliefs, ways of life, the ideologies and the total range of customary behaviour, all of which have been influenced by people’s adaptation to their environment. Therefore, building forms, patterns of growth, town morphology, in short, architectural phenomenon, has, like culture, evolved characteristics from its natural habitat. We now often observe that such an argument is totally diminishing in the present architecture and in the environmental activities of those in charge. Third, the interruption of continuity and flow of human cognitive knowledge by introducing techniques and thoughts whose practical values, aesthetical capacities and meanings do not correspond with people’s knowledge of the environment, building behaviour or activities associated with the history of people’s relation to their own habitat. This work is structured in two main parts; the first one will deal with the contribution of the different disciplines such as Ecology, Culture, Economy, Psychology, Architecture and Urban Design from the theoretical point of view in the development of the different concepts. In the second part, we will discuss the impact of these disciplines on the production of our built environment and we will end up by suggesting a model highlighting the interactions of these disciplines in the evaluation and the production of our built environment through a chosen case study which is Algiers. The main methods used in this study are: Descriptive for the first part which is dealing with the review of the current literature on Ecology, Culture and Cognition; Analytic for the proposed model and the case study; the third method is predictive and concerns the last part of this work.

Sensitive and responsive parenting during early infancy is highly understudied, particularly in families with a low socioeconomic status. Longitudinal data from 41 mothers and their 4 to 16 week old infants found that accurate maternal knowledge of infant development positively affected parenting contemporaneously and over time while depression did not affect parenting in this sample. Implications for intervention and research are discussed.

Although an increasing number of research studies in mathematics education have begun focusing their efforts on mathematical modeling as a need for change to convey mathematical ideas beyond schools, there is not enough information about the nature of the teacher knowledge for effective use of modeling in mathematics teaching and how this knowledge evolves. The goal of this study is to investigate teachers&rsquo / evolving knowledge when they engage in professional development activities based on lesson study cycle from modeling perspective. Professional development program of this study included a cyclical process. Lasting a month, each cycle consisted of meeting before the implementation of the model eliciting activity, implementation of the activity and meeting after the implementation. The study took five months and was conducted in two public schools. The participants were four in-service mathematics teachers where two teachers were selected from each school by purposive sampling. The study was designed as case study. Data analyses were conducted during and after data collection and with two approaches as with-in case and cross-case analysis. As the professional development activities created learning environments for the teachers to develop their models for teaching mathematics from a modeling perspective, the results of this study showed that the professional development program used in the study had a positive effect on teachers&rsquo / evolving pedagogical content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge based on the theoretical and empirical backgrounds in the literature. Besides, implications, suggestions for professional development, for teachers and for further research are provided.

Record keeping is not a static way to document history but rather a way for people in the present to engage with, and be affected by, the past. This is especially true in the case of online databases. Databases store information but their use also encourages the adoption of specific methodologies for apprehending reality because it is through those methodological agreements that the information in the database becomes relevant. In the summer of 2012 I spent four months observing and interviewing wheat researchers and database developers at a major agricultural research center in Mexico as part of my M.A. thesis project. This paper argues that people using the International Wheat Information System (IWIS) database at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) are involved in a process that documents wheat pedigree information while also enacting a reality based on assumptions about the value of certain types of human pedigree.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Science and Mathematics Education Centre, Curtin University of Technology, 2001. / Title from PDF title screen (viewed Oct. 7, 2004).

As a concept that represents teacher professionalism and expertise, pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) has received extensive research attention since the mid-1980s. PCK refers to the blending of content and pedagogy into an understanding of how particular aspects of subject matter are organized, adapted, and represented for instruction (Shulman, 1987). Recent studies have shown that PCK impacts instruction quality and student learning (Beyer & Davis, 2012). Nevertheless, in the field of English language teaching (ELT), PCK remains unnoticed by many language teachers (Kind & Chan, 2019). PCK pertaining to speaking instruction is even more underrepresented. Meanwhile, English teaching in mainland China has undergone reforms aimed at promoting students' oral proficiency, but many problems still exist. Most studies have explored teaching methodologies, learning strategies, and the assessment of speaking. However, there is not much research on improving teaching effectiveness from the perspective of teachers' PCK. This qualitative multiple case study examines teachers' PCK from the perspective of teaching English speaking over a two-year period. Purposeful sampling was employed, and five EFL instructors were the key informants. The instructors worked in different universities in mainland China and taught various levels of speaking courses. The data include classroom observations, teacher interviews, student interviews, reflection journals from the teachers, and various course syllabuses. The study findings emphasize the contents and features of EFL teachers' PCK in a more systematic way and show that teachers' PCK comprises six components: knowledge of features of curriculum, pedagogy, learners' challenges, language enhancement, course evaluation, and the educational context. Each category contains a variety of subcategories. Two paths are revealed for the development of PCK: one path is for teachers to develop their PCK by studying the relevant literature and then transform that knowledge into students' comprehensible knowledge based on students' understanding; another path is for teachers to transfer or adjust PCK from other courses or people to their own instruction and then develop PCK through evaluation and reflection. The study also shows that based on three developmental models (the trial-based approach, top-down approach, and inquiry-based approach), the teacher participants advanced in three aspects: spiritual enrichment, renewed teacher roles, and philosophical inquiry. In addition, in this study, PCK is proven to be dynamic, personal, and transformative rather than static, canonical, and integrative. Theoretically, this study proposes a comprehensive framework of PCK components and development for speaking instructors and underscores the concept of meta-representations. It adds to the literature on EFL teachers' cognition in the Chinese context, thus broadening and enriching the research on EFL teachers' PCK in the educational field. Practically, the study highlights the importance of appropriating the educational context, establishing teacher beliefs and philosophy, and improving teachers' critical literacy as well as their language competency. The findings can also enhance teacher educators' and policy-makers'awareness of specific subject matter and deepen their understanding of speaking instruction. The findings shed light on how to improve overall EFL speaking pedagogy, empower EFL teachers, and facilitate their professional development within the context of English curriculum reform. Limitations of the study lie in its restricted timeframe, limited resources, and sampling size. Future research directions could be to conduct a longitudinal study with more participants or to develop and quantify PCK measurements.

As a concept that represents teacher professionalism and expertise, pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) has received extensive research attention since the mid-1980s. PCK refers to the blending of content and pedagogy into an understanding of how particular aspects of subject matter are organized, adapted, and represented for instruction (Shulman, 1987). Recent studies have shown that PCK impacts instruction quality and student learning (Beyer & Davis, 2012). Nevertheless, in the field of English language teaching (ELT), PCK remains unnoticed by many language teachers (Kind & Chan, 2019). PCK pertaining to speaking instruction is even more underrepresented. Meanwhile, English teaching in mainland China has undergone reforms aimed at promoting students' oral proficiency, but many problems still exist. Most studies have explored teaching methodologies, learning strategies, and the assessment of speaking. However, there is not much research on improving teaching effectiveness from the perspective of teachers' PCK. This qualitative multiple case study examines teachers' PCK from the perspective of teaching English speaking over a two-year period. Purposeful sampling was employed, and five EFL instructors were the key informants. The instructors worked in different universities in mainland China and taught various levels of speaking courses. The data include classroom observations, teacher interviews, student interviews, reflection journals from the teachers, and various course syllabuses. The study findings emphasize the contents and features of EFL teachers' PCK in a more systematic way and show that teachers' PCK comprises six components: knowledge of features of curriculum, pedagogy, learners' challenges, language enhancement, course evaluation, and the educational context. Each category contains a variety of subcategories. Two paths are revealed for the development of PCK: one path is for teachers to develop their PCK by studying the relevant literature and then transform that knowledge into students' comprehensible knowledge based on students' understanding; another path is for teachers to transfer or adjust PCK from other courses or people to their own instruction and then develop PCK through evaluation and reflection. The study also shows that based on three developmental models (the trial-based approach, top-down approach, and inquiry-based approach), the teacher participants advanced in three aspects: spiritual enrichment, renewed teacher roles, and philosophical inquiry. In addition, in this study, PCK is proven to be dynamic, personal, and transformative rather than static, canonical, and integrative. Theoretically, this study proposes a comprehensive framework of PCK components and development for speaking instructors and underscores the concept of meta-representations. It adds to the literature on EFL teachers' cognition in the Chinese context, thus broadening and enriching the research on EFL teachers' PCK in the educational field. Practically, the study highlights the importance of appropriating the educational context, establishing teacher beliefs and philosophy, and improving teachers' critical literacy as well as their language competency. The findings can also enhance teacher educators' and policy-makers'awareness of specific subject matter and deepen their understanding of speaking instruction. The findings shed light on how to improve overall EFL speaking pedagogy, empower EFL teachers, and facilitate their professional development within the context of English curriculum reform. Limitations of the study lie in its restricted timeframe, limited resources, and sampling size. Future research directions could be to conduct a longitudinal study with more participants or to develop and quantify PCK measurements.

Knowledge graphs have emerged as a sophisticated advancement and refinement of semantic networks, and their deployment is one of the critical methodologies in contemporary artificial intelligence. The construction of knowledge graphs is a multifaceted process involving various techniques, where researchers aim to extract the knowledge from existing resources for the construction since building from scratch entails significant labor and time costs. However, due to the pervasive issue of heterogeneity, the description diversity across different knowledge graphs can lead to mismatches between concepts, thereby impacting the efficacy of knowledge extraction. This Ph.D. study focuses on automatic knowledge graph extension, i.e., properly extending the reference knowledge graph by extracting and integrating concepts from one or more candidate knowledge graphs. We propose a novel knowledge graph extension framework based on entity type recognition. The framework aims to achieve high-quality knowledge extraction by aligning the schemas and entities across different knowledge graphs, thereby enhancing the performance of the extension. This paper elucidates three major contributions: (i) we propose an entity type recognition method exploiting machine learning and property-based similarities to enhance knowledge extraction; (ii) we introduce a set of assessment metrics to validate the quality of the extended knowledge graphs; (iii) we develop a platform for knowledge graph acquisition, management, and extension to benefit knowledge engineers practically. Our evaluation comprehensively demonstrated the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed extension framework and its functionalities through quantitative experiments and case studies.