The goal in mathematics has shifted towards an emphasis on both procedural knowledge and conceptual understanding. The importance of gaining procedural knowledge and conceptual understanding is aligned with Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 2000), which encourages fluency, reasoning skills, and ability to justify decisions. Possession of only procedural skills will not prove useful to students in many situations other than on tests (Boaler, 2000). Teachers and researchers can benefit from this study, which examined the effects of representations, constructivist approaches, and engagement on middle school students' algebraic understanding. Data from an algebra pretest and posttest, as well as 16 algebra video lessons from an NSF-IERI funded project, were examined to determine occurrences of indicators of representations, constructivist approaches, and engagement, as well as student understanding. A mixed methods design was utilized by implementing multilevel structural equation modeling and constant comparison within the analysis. Calculation of descriptive statistics and creation of bar graphs provided more detail to add to the findings from the components of the statistical test and qualitative comparison method. The results of the final structural equation model revealed a model that fit the data, with a non-significant model, p > .01. The new collectively named latent factor of constructivist approaches with the six indicators of enactive representations, encouragement of student independent thinking, creation of problem-centered lessons, facilitation of shared meanings, justification of ideas, and receiving feedback from the teacher was shown to be a significant predictor of procedural knowledge (p < .05) and conceptual understanding (p < .10). The indicators of the original latent factor of constructivist approaches were combined with one indicator for representations and two indicators for engagement. Constant comparison revealed similar findings concerning correlations among the indicators, as well as effects on student engagement and understanding. Constructivist approaches were found to have a positive effect on both types of student learning in middle school mathematics.

The purpose of this investigation is based on the model proposed by Ferris et al. (1989) to explore the moderating effect on the relation between the perceptions of organizational politics and job performance, intention to turnover, job involvement, job stress, citizenship behavior, job satisfaction & organizational commitment. Data collected from 1653 employees of Taiwan enterprises. The data were analyzed by applying statistical methods, including factor analysis, reliability, correlation, regression and canonical correlation analysis. The major findings of this study are as fallow: Perceptions of organizational politics were found have the negative relationships with job performance, job involvement, citizenship behavior, job satisfaction and organizational commitment; and perceptions of organizational politics were found have the positive relationships with turnover intention and job stress. Understanding, control, locus of control, type A personality and tenure with supervisor as moderators of the relationships between perceptions of organizational politics and all outcome variables was examined. Results indicated that understanding, control, locus of control, type A personality can moderate the relationship between organizational politics and outcome variables. But tenure with supervisor can not moderate the relationship between organizational politics and outcome variables.

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<p>Ungdomar genomgår en mognadsprocess innehållande ett flertal viktiga faktorer i dagens samhälle. Utvecklingen består av att bli självständig, forma personligheten, hantera känslor samt hantera sexualitet. I detta ingår att skydda sig mot den sexuellt överförbara infektionen Chlamydia trachomatis (CT). Syftet med studien var att beskriva gymnasieungdomars uppfattning om infektionen. Hur är kunskapen i ämnet? På vilket sätt tror de att ungdomar skyddar sig? Hur ser de på kärlek och sexualitet? Författarna har valt en kvalitativ ansats med fokusgrupps intervjuer och analyserat resultatet enligt innehållsanalys. Fyra intervjuer har utförts där två flickgrupper respektive två pojkgrupper medverkat. Fyra teman förekommer i resultatet; Uppfattning och kunskap kring att drabbas av CT, uppfattning om sex och kärlek, attityder till skydd samt sexualundervisning. Resultatet visar likheter och skillnader hos flickor och pojkar i författarnas intervjuer. Kunskap om CT varierar, men att konsekvensen av en obehandlad CT kan leda till infertilitet hade samtliga ungdomar kunskap om. Även psykologiska aspekter framkommer. Resultatet speglar skillnader gällande sex och kärlek. Det första samlaget är en ”milstolpe” enligt pojkarna medan flickor anser att det hör ihop. Skydd förknippas med ”lathet” och skydd mot oönskad graviditet, inte skydd mot CT.</p> / <p> </p><p>Youths are going through a growing process involving many different factors.  The development consists of becoming independent, shape personality, handle feelings and sexuality.  This includes protecting yourself against the sexually transmitted disease, Chlamydia trachomatis (CT). The purpose of this study was to describe upper secondary school youths knowledge and understanding of the infection. How is the knowledge in the subject? In what way do they think youths protect themselves? What are their views about love and sexuality? The authors have chosen a qualitative approach with interviews in focus groups. The data was analyzed with content analyse. Four interviews have been done, where two groups of girls and two groups of boys participated. Four themes exist in the results; knowledge and understanding of CT, understanding of sex and love, attitudes towards protection and sexual education. The result shows similarities and differences between boys and girls in the interviews. The knowledge about CT fluctuates, but the knowledge about that a not treated CT can give rise to infertility did the group knowledge about. Even psychological aspects appear. The result reflects differences about sex and love. The first intercourse is a "milestone" according to the boys whereas the girls have the opinion that it belongs together. Protection is put together with "laziness" and unplanned pregnancy, not protection against CT.</p>

Fire Service commanders work in a very dynamic environment. This research investigated the process they use to make sense and thereby develop understanding of situations during the response to a large-scale emergency. In previous research that investigated decision-making and situation awareness in real-life environments, the need for commanders to understand an incident is emphasised. This research aimed to generate new insights into the process individuals follow to build and improve situational understanding. An exploratory project phase was used to focus the research. Data from emergency exercises and interviews resulted in the design for the main study regarding application domain, data sources and methodological issues. For the main study, records of publicly available interviews with senior officers of the New York Fire Department on their experience of the response to the events at the World Trade Center on September, 11 2001 were analysed. Findings include six variations of the sensemaking process structure, which is characterised by distinct stages. A following investigation into why these stages occur took a theory-building approach and revealed two insights. First, process stages are tied to seven hierarchical but interlinked levels of understanding. Second, three groups of underlying mechanisms trigger process stages: four cognitive factors, eight needs to understand and three situational factors. The mechanisms occur in different combinations across process variations and have varying explanatory power. This study contributes to knowledge on the process of building and improving situational understanding and its link to understanding. A micro-level view of the sensemaking process is provided, showing the specific understanding that is gained and evolves along its stages. The view of sensemaking is extended from understanding what is going on and what can be done to include understanding performance of action. A review with experts revealed that findings adequately reflect the thinking of commanders during incident response and might have practical relevance for training and command support.

Despite science education reform efforts stressing the importance of understanding evolution, many students receive little to no exposure to the most important unifying concept in biology. Since evolution is basic to the study of biology, its study should begin with the introduction of the life sciences to students in elementary school. However, many teachers lack sufficient evolutionary content knowledge, have limited acceptance of evolution, and have little confidence to effectively teach it. Better teacher preparation is needed to meet the challenges of ensuring students develop conceptual understanding of evolution. While research shows the general public typically accepts microevolution while rejecting macroevolution, few studies have focused on peoples’ understanding of macroevolution. Additionally, little research exists examining the effects of an intervention on elementary and middle school teachers’ acceptance, understanding, and teaching of macroevolution. Using a conceptual framework based on the Cognitive Reconstruction of Knowledge Model, this study reports the effects of a sustained professional development program on 4th through 8th grade teachers’ acceptance of evolution; understanding of macroevolution; and approach to teaching evolution in schools, awareness of challenges to teaching evolution, and pedagogical content knowledge about teaching macroevolution. This study also explores the relationship between teachers’ understanding of macroevolution and acceptance of evolution. Various data sources, including the Measurement of the Understanding of Macroevolution (Nadelson & Southerland, 2010), the Measure of the Acceptance of the Theory of Evolution (Rutledge & Warden, 1999), teacher interviews, and teacher workshop reflections, were used to answer the research questions. Results from the study revealed that after attending the professional development series, teachers’ understanding of macroevolution and acceptance of evolution significantly increased. Acceptance of evolution was positively correlated to understanding of macroevolution. Teachers’ prior understanding of macroevolution was a significant positive predictor of their subsequent acceptance of evolution. Teachers’ prior acceptance of evolution was a significant predictor of their understanding of macroevolution, but only after teachers participated in at least half of the sustained professional development. Finally, teachers demonstrated having increased macroevolutionary pedagogical content knowledge. This effect was strong in those teachers who were initially low acceptors of evolution. The significance of these findings is discussed. / text

Machine reading is the artificial-intelligence task of automatically reading a corpus of texts and, from the contents, building a knowledge base that supports automated reasoning and question answering. Success at this task could fundamentally solve the knowledge acquisition bottleneck – the widely recognized problem that knowledge-based AI systems are difficult and expensive to build because of the difficulty of acquiring knowledge from authoritative sources and building useful knowledge bases. One challenge inherent in machine reading is knowledge integration – the task of correctly and coherently combining knowledge snippets extracted from texts. This dissertation shows that knowledge integration can be automated and that it can significantly improve the performance of machine reading. We specifically focus on two contributions of knowledge integration. The first contribution is for improving the coherence of learned knowledge bases to better support automated reasoning and question answering. Knowledge integration achieves this benefit by aligning knowledge snippets that contain overlapping content. The alignment is difficult because the snippets can use significantly different surface forms. In one common type of variation, two snippets might contain overlapping content that is expressed at different levels of granularity or detail. Our matcher can “see past” this difference to align knowledge snippets drawn from a single document, from multiple documents, or from a document and a background knowledge base. The second contribution is for improving text interpretation. Our approach is to delay ambiguity resolution to enable a machine-reading system to maintain multiple candidate interpretations. This is useful because typically, as the system reads through texts, evidence accumulates to help the knowledge integration system resolve ambiguities correctly. To avoid a combinatorial explosion in the number of candidate interpretations, we propose the packed representation to compactly encode all the candidates. Also, we present an algorithm that prunes interpretations from the packed representation as evidence accumulates. We evaluate our work by building and testing two prototype machine reading systems and measuring the quality of the knowledge bases they construct. The evaluation shows that our knowledge integration algorithms improve the cohesiveness of the knowledge bases, indicating their improved ability to support automated reasoning and question answering. The evaluation also shows that our approach to postponing ambiguity resolution improves the system’s accuracy at text interpretation. / text

The English language can be seen as a lingua franca of contemporary times. Its spread and use in the globalized world has affected most levels of society and it can be argued that, in current times, English is synonymous with communication. This need for communication has shaped the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) syllabus, which is evident in the Swedish national steering documents for the educational system. For the upper secondary school these documents show an emphasis on communication, on cultural understanding, and also on the use of literature within the EFL classroom. The need to possess communicative abilities and cultural understanding, in connection with the use of literature, has sparked an interest to investigate if and how literature itself can be used as a tool to develop and improve EFL students’ communicative skills and cultural understanding. This literature review thesis analyzes five international research articles from different geographical parts of the Globe. The findings are categorized, compared, synthesized, and finally discussed in order to answer the research questions asked, and also compared with the English subject syllabus for the Swedish upper secondary school. The findings indicate that the analyzed articles share a consensus, to a varied degree, regarding the positive aspects of literature use in the EFL setting. The arguments are that communicative skills and cultural understanding are intertwined - enabling each other to exist, develop, and improve. One cannot exist fully without the other, and literature is a good tool to use to develop and improve these abilities. Literature can help develop all skills needed to acquire and produce both written and spoken English, and it also enables cultural understanding and a broadening of the mind. Where the articles differ somewhat is in the ideas of why literature is a good tool, how to implement literature in the classrooms, and what some of the negative aspects might be. The thesis also brings the lack of Swedish studies within EFL to the readers’ attention, as well as the need to do more research focusing on the students’ perspectives towards literature use in the EFL setting.

After years of education, many people enter the workforce without the team-working skills fundamental in today's innovation economy. As one of the primary goals of education is to prepare students for the workforce, a shift from individual learning to collaborative learning is recommended. One way to incorporate collaborative learning in formal education is through students' engagement in the collaborative development of plays. When understanding of collaboration is achieved, according the theories of Teaching for Understanding, the learner can apply knowledge outside of the domain in which it was learned. Team-based management in business and collaborative playbuilding in theatre share congruent structural principles, therefore, the application of knowledge from one domain to the other is natural. This study investigated how university students came to understand collaboration through involvement in a Collaborative Play Development course. Findings support the recognition of collaborative theatre as an opportunity to develop marketable skills for the learners.