Design and Use of Computer Tools for Interactive Mathematical Activity (TIMA)

2002 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie P. Steffe ◽  
John Olive

Our guiding principle when designing the TIMA was to create computer tools that we could use to achieve our goals when teaching children. The design of the TIMA took place in the context of a constructivist teaching experiment with 12 children that extended over a three-year period. Three different TIMA were designed and used in the teaching experiment: Toys, Sticks, and Bars. These tools were designed to provide children contexts in which they could enact their mathematical operations of unitizing, uniting, fragmenting, segmenting, partitioning, disembeding, iterating and measuring. As such, they are very different from the drill and practice or tutorial software that are prevalent in many elementary schools. We provide examples of how the TIMA were used by children to engage in cognitive play and, through interactions with a teacher/researcher and other children, transform that play into independent mathematical activity with a playful orientation. The role of the teacher in provoking perturbations that could lead eventually to accommodations in the children's mathematical schemes was critical in the use of the TIMA as learning tools.

1996 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie P. Steffe ◽  
John Olive

In the design of computer microworlds as media for children's mathematical action, our basic and guiding principle was to create possible actions children could use to enact their mental operations. These possible actions open pathways for children's mathematical activity that coemerge in the activity. We illustrate this coemergence through a constructivist teaching episode with two children working with the computer microworld TIMA: Bars. During this episode, in which the children took turns to partition a bar into fourths and thirds recursively, the symbolic nature of their partitioning operations became apparent. The children developed their own drawings and numeral systems to further symbolize their symbolic mental operations. The symbolic nature of the children's partitioning operations was crucial in their establishment of more conventional mathematical symbols.


1995 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 114-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin A. Simon

Constructivist theory has been prominent in recent research on mathematics learning and has provided a basis for recent mathematics education reform efforts. Although constructivism has the potential to inform changes in mathematics teaching, it offers no particular vision of how mathematics should be taught; models of teaching based on constructivism are needed. Data are presented from a whole-class, constructivist teaching experiment in which problems of teaching practice required the teacher/researcher to explore the pedagogical implications of his theoretical (constructivist) perspectives. The analysis of the data led to the development of a model of teacher decision making with respect to mathematical tasks. Central to this model is the creative tension between the teacher's goals with regard to student learning and his responsibility to be sensitive and responsive to the mathematical thinking of the students.


2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-202

The article advances a hypothesis about the composition of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. Specialists in the intellectual history of the Renaissance have long considered the relationship among Montaigne’s thematically heterogeneous thoughts, which unfold unpredictably and often seen to contradict each other. The waywardness of those reflections over the years was a way for Montaigne to construct a self-portrait. Spontaneity of thought is the essence of the person depicted and an experimental literary technique that was unprecedented in its time and has still not been surpassed. Montaigne often writes about freedom of reflection and regards it as an extremely important topic. There have been many attempts to interpret the haphazardness of the Essays as the guiding principle in their composition. According to one such interpretation, the spontaneous digressions and readiness to take up very different philosophical notions is a form of of varietas and distinguo, which Montaigne understood in the context of Renaissance philosophy. Another interpretation argues that the Essays employ the rhetorical techniques of Renaissance legal commentary. A third opinion regards the Essays as an example of sprezzatura, a calculated negligence that calls attention to the aesthetic character of Montaigne’s writing. The author of the article argues for a different interpretation that is based on the concept of idleness to which Montaigne assigned great significance. He had a keen appreciation of the role of otium in the culture of ancient Rome and regarded leisure as an inner spiritual quest for self-knowledge. According to Montaigne, idleness permits self-directedness, and it is an ideal form in which to practice the freedom of thought that brings about consistency in writing, living and reality, in all of which Montaigne finds one general property - complete inconstancy. Socratic self-knowledge, a skepticism derived from Pyrrho of Elis and Sextus Empiricus, and a rejection of the conventions of traditional rhetoric that was similar to Seneca’s critique of it were all brought to bear on the concept of idleness and made Montaigne’s intellectual and literary experimentation in the Essays possible.


Author(s):  
Mekala Sethuraman ◽  
Geetha Radhakrishnan

Writing is a cardinal skill for effective communication practised extensively from primary education, but the students are not exhibiting adequate writing proficiency in their higher education and at their workplace. This experimental study focuses on enhancing the students’ writing skills by promoting metacognitive strategies in the classroom. The participants of this study are 51 pre-final year Diploma students belonging to the Department of Instrumentation and Control Engineering of an autonomous polytechnic institute in Tamil Nadu. The teacher-researcher has facilitated students’ cognizance with metacognitive strategies employed in the writing tasks administered during the course. The results have exhibited improvement apropos of coherence and unity in the students’ writing skill. It implies the indispensable role of metacognitive strategies in developing the capacity of the learners’ strategic thinking and guiding them to plan, progress, and process their writing into a coherent text.


Transport ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 148-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
József Rohács ◽  
Győző Simongáti

Sustainable development has become a guiding principle of human activities nowadays. Sustainable transport can take a great part in future development. Today this is not the case, and road transport contributes to this above all. For sustainable transport development the necessity of modal shift is inevitable and the inland waterway navigation should get the higher share of the total transport where there is an alternative. This presentation shows the reasons why the inland waterway navigation can increase the level of sustainability.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Danko ◽  
Zhong Wang ◽  
Alexandra Chivu ◽  
Lauren Choate ◽  
Edward Rice ◽  
...  

Abstract The role of histone modifications in transcription remains incompletely understood. Here we used experimental perturbations combined with sensitive machine learning tools that infer the distribution of histone marks using maps of nascent transcription. Transcription predicted the variation in active histone marks and complex chromatin states, like bivalent promoters, down to single-nucleosome resolution and at an accuracy that rivaled the correspondence between independent ChIP-seq experiments. Blocking transcription rapidly removed two punctate marks, H3K4me3 and H3K27ac, from chromatin indicating that transcription is required for active histone modifications. Transcription was also required for maintenance of H3K27me3 consistent with a role for RNA in recruiting PRC2. A subset of DNase-I hypersensitive sites were refractory to prediction, precluding models where transcription initiates pervasively at any open chromatin. Our results, in combination with past literature, support a model in which active histone modifications serve a supportive, rather than a regulatory, role in transcription.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ika Berdiati

The supervisor’s role is quite essential to support developing teacher competencies, and also to improve their professionalism. In this article, the author formulates the problem: what is the role of supervisors in continuing professionalism development for teachers?. The purpose of this article is to describe strategies executed by supervisor on carrying out the academic task related to improving teacher’s pedagogical and professional competence. The results appertained to their role of improving teacher’s competence both pedagogically and professionally can be accomplished through academic supervision competencies. Other observable strategies are developing scientific publication, creating learning tools or teaching aids (innovative works); modifying practicum and self-development tools came under education and training, and KKG.


2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-166
Author(s):  
Indriði H. Indriðason ◽  
Gunnar Helgi Kristinsson

The present paper is concerned with the preconditions for ministerial government in Iceland and the role of parliament in sustaining it. Ministerial government is a form of coalition governance where the division of portfolios between parties functions as the basic mechanism of managing coalitions. Ministers are policy dictators in the sense that they control their ministries without interference from their coalition partners. Ministerial government is considered a weak form of coalition governance in the literature on account of its susceptibility to principal-agent problems, i.e., the temptation of ministers to adopt policies which are beneficial to their own party, or themselves, even if they are harmful to the coalition as a whole. We argue that ministerial government was the guiding principle of coalition governance in Iceland prior to the crash of 2008. We demonstrate that given a number of conditions, ministerial government can in fact function effectively in the sense of providing the necessary minimum of inter-coalition checks. Instead of the cabinet providing oversight, however, the parties and committees in parliament play a key role in controlling policy drift. For a number of reasons, the financial crash in Iceland undermined some of the features on which ministerial government rested and coalition co-ordination after the crash has diverged significantly from the preceding period. It is too early, however, to tell whether these represent a permanent shift in coalition management in Iceland.


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