Learning the Disciplines Through Linguistic Feedback: Contribution to the Development of a Discipline-Specific, Formative Evaluation of Students’ Assignments

Students write to learn. Besides, enculturation to the disciplinary discourse happens during writing. Feedback on the assignments from the students scaffolds students’ writing development and learning paths. However, knowledge about the relationship between language, including argumentation in the discipline, on one hand, and the content of the discipline, on the other, is needed. This article is based on a socio-cultural approach to writing in the disciplines, and theory on feedback, and focuses on the relationship between the meso-level of texts (sentences, clauses, word choice) and the content of the discipline. We discuss how insight into the meso-level of texts may be used to improve and to develop feedback and formative evaluation. Cases from an intervention project in a Danish upper secondary school are included, and indicate that teachers and students assign a lower priority to feedback on the meso-level. This article claims that providing feedback on the meso-level strengthens writing development and students’ learning processes. To illustrate how this may be accomplished two texts are analyzed: one from a history class and one from a biology class.

STATISTICAL STUDY OF SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL DEVELOPMENT OF AGRICULTURE AT THE MESO-LEVEL

Significant transformations in the Russian economy in 1990-2000 negatively affected the development of agriculture. The number of workers in the industry has declined, and the production of some types of products has dropped to catastrophic levels. In this regard, we consider it timely and necessary to conduct a statistical study of the state of the industry at the meso-level and the factors that influence it. The aim of the research is to study the development of agriculture at the meso-level in the historical aspect based on statistical methods for assessing the current and forecasting future states. The object of research is Orenburg region and its municipalities, which is due to a number of reasons: the region occupies a stable leading position in the agriculture of Volga Federal District; the industry’s contribution to GRP is about 8%; municipalities of the region are in unequal conditions that affect the development of agriculture in the region. The development of crop production in Orenburg region in 1991-2019 characterized by an increase in sunflower production and a lateral trend in gross grain harvest, while the production of silage, annual and perennial grasses significantly decreased. The lack of a forage base against the background of low early maturity led to a significant reduction in the number of cattle - this negatively affected milk production in the region. Meat production managed to keep from falling only due to the growth of poultry population. The construction of regression models based on panel data covering 35 municipalities (period 2000-2019 and 5 variables) showed that three factors influence the volume of agricultural production - the availability of acreage, investment in fixed assets and the number of cattle. The constructed statistically significant regression model with fixed effects indicates a stable structure of producers and the presence of hidden factors. This determines the direction of further research, which consists in identifying latent variables that have a significant impact on the development of the region’s industry

Biodefense and Emergency Use Authorization: Different Originations, Purposes, and Evolutionary Paths of Institutions in the United States and South Korea

Background: Historical institutionalism (HI) determines that institutions have been transformed by a pattern of punctuated evolution due to exogenous shocks. Although scholars frequently emphasize the role of agency - endogenous factors – when it comes to institutional changes, but the HI analytic narratives still remain in the meso-level analysis in the context of structure and agency. This article provides domestic and policy-level accounts of where biodefense institutions of the United States and South Korea come from, seeing through emergency-use-authorization (EUA) policy, and how the EUA policies have evolved by employing the policy-learning concepts through the Event-related Policy Change Model. Results: By employing the Birkland’s model, this article complements the limitation of the meso-level analysis in addressing that the 2001 Amerithrax and the 2015 Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) outbreak rooted originations and purposes of the biodefense respectively. Since the crisis, a new post-crisis agenda in society contributed to establishing new domestic coalition, which begin to act as endogenous driving forces that institutionalize new biodefense institutions and even reinforce them through path dependent way when the institutions evolved. Therefore, EUA policy cores (Post-Exposure Prophylaxis (PEP) in the United States and Non-Pharmaceutical Intervention (NPI) in South Korea keep strengthened during the policy revisions. Conclusions: The United States and South Korea have different originations and purposes of biodefense, which are institutions evolving through self-reinforce dependent way based on the lessons learned from past crises. In sum, under the homeland security biodefense institution, the US EUA focuses on the development of specialized, unlicensed PEP in response to public health emergencies; on the other hand, under the disease containment-centric biodefense institution, the Korean EUA is specialized to conduct NPI missions in response to public health emergencies.

Performance-Based Evaluation Metrics: Influence at the Macro, Meso, and Micro Level

This chapter aims to critically engage with the performative nature of bibliometric indicators and explores how they influence scholarly practice at the macro, meso, and individual levels. It begins with a comparison between two national performance-based funding systems in Sweden and Norway at the macro level, within universities at the meso level, down to the micro level where individual researchers must relate these incentives to knowledge building within their specialty. I argue that the common-sense “representational model of bibliometric indicators” is questionable in practice, since it cannot capture the qualities of research in any unambiguous way. Furthermore, a performative notion on scientometric indicators needs to be developed that takes into account the variability and uncertainty of the aspects of research that is to be evaluated.

Investigating disagreement in the scientific literature

Disagreement is essential to scientific progress but the extent of disagreement in science, its evolution over time, and the fields in which it happens remain poorly understood. Here we report the development of an approach based on cue phrases that can identify instances of disagreement in scientific articles. These instances are sentences in an article that cite other articles. Applying this approach to a collection of more than four million English-language articles published between 2000 and 2015 period, we determine the level of disagreement in five broad fields within the scientific literature (biomedical and health sciences; life and earth sciences; mathematics and computer science; physical sciences and engineering; and social sciences and humanities) and 817 meso-level fields. Overall, the level of disagreement is highest in the social sciences and humanities, and lowest in mathematics and computer science. However, there is considerable heterogeneity across the meso-level fields, revealing the importance of local disciplinary cultures and the epistemic characteristics of disagreement. Analysis at the level of individual articles reveals notable episodes of disagreement in science, and illustrates how methodological artifacts can confound analyses of scientific texts.

Terrorism in the Modern World-System: Towards the Problem of Prospects for Interdisciplinary Research

Introduction. The variety of approaches and topics in the study of terrorism, as well as the obvious difference in axiological grounds for assessing terrorist activity, allows the authors to raise the question of an interdisciplinary study of this problem. The authors understand terrorism as an illegal political confrontation in the struggle for power with the use of violence in order to intimidate or physically eliminate the enemy.Methodology and sources. The methodological basis of the work is the world-system concept of I. Wallerstein. The authors reveal the advantages of the world-system approach by comparing it with the paradigm of political realism in the theory of international relations. They indicate the boundaries of the paradigm of political realism, which operates at the level of the concepts of “States” and “International Coalitions”, while the phenomenon of terrorism includes structures at the level of groups and organizations. The world-systems approach allows researchers to see terrorism as an anti-system movement generated by the contradictions in the development of the system itself, to distinguish between pro-system and anti-system terrorism, to analyze this phenomenon at all societal levels. One of the essential advantages of the world-systems approach is its ability to accumulate different approaches and related disciplines in order to describe the dynamics of modern societies. In their theoretical constructions, the authors rely on the typology of terrorist organizations by O. Lizardo and A. Bergesen, as well as on the concept of waves of terrorism by D. Rapport. The authors conduct a critical analysis of the typology of terrorism by O. Lizardo, A. Bergesen and note that this typology helps to see the structural source (core, semi-periphery, periphery) and the main structural goal of terrorist organizations, but leaves behind such a phenomenon as state terrorism.Results and discussion. The authors describe terrorism in its interrelation with processes in the world system at different societal levels. At the super-macro level, the world-systems conditions for the emergence of waves of terrorist activity are described, and the links between terrorism and the struggle to establish a global order are indicated. At the macro level (the level of political confrontation for the establishment of some form of order within the state), the authors investigate the differences between terrorism in “closed” and “open” societies. They note the connection between bursts of terrorist activity and the transition from a “closed” to an “open” state and vice versa. The authors consider the connection of terrorism with the processes of the peripheralization of societies as a meso-level phenomenon. Such terrorism, as a rule, is local and is inspired by the national liberation slogans of the societies of the internal periphery, the authors note that the struggle with the state here can go for both sovereignty and disputed territories. The authors refer to the meso-level the activities of terrorist organizations aimed at migrants who come from the outer periphery. The authors note that the subject of terrorism research at the micro level is, as a rule, the personality of the terrorist.Conclusion. The use of a world-systems approach to consider terrorism seems promising, and allows researchers to consider structural relations that are not available to other approaches. The authors express the hope that the interdisciplinary capabilities of the world-systems approach, its methodological potential woul be able to form a reliable basis for subsequent studies of terrorism as one of the means of illegitimate political violence in the modern world.

Russian language maintenance among multilingual teachers in Israeli educational settings

The present paper focuses on language maintenance among multilingual teachers and presents a research project with Russian-Hebrew speakers on their ideas of language-related normality in educational settings. The main objective is to investigate the role of migration-related multilingual teachers within the multilingual turn. The project approached the topic from three perspectives: the macro level of educational policies, the meso level of educational institutions, and the micro level of linguistic development. Data were collected through biographical interviews with 17 teachers and interpreted within the theoretical framework of language beliefs using the concepts of linguistic market, language awareness and language education policy as well as pedagogical competence. The results show the close interconnectedness of language beliefs on all the three levels. They also show that beliefs can experience a reconstruction. In order to challenge the monolingual idea of normality among teachers, an interwoven intervention on all the three levels is necessary: there is a need for education policy measures (macro level) that would anchor training on dealing with multilingualism (meso level) in regular teacher training and, in doing so, would draw on the existing migration-related multilingual practices of prospective teachers (micro level). This interaction between top-down (professionalization in dealing with multilingualism anchored in educational policy) and bottom-up (migration-related multilingual practices among prospective teachers) measures can enable a shift toward multilingualism as an idea of normality in educational contexts. This paper contributes to a better understanding of the formation, development and reconstruction of language-related idea of normality among teachers and discusses its methodological and theoretical implications.

Two Sides of the Coin: The Link Between Relational Exclusion and Socioeconomic Exclusion

Social capital, derived from the individual embeddedness in a net of personal relationships that gives access to a pool of potential resources, is crucial in understanding how some people experience a higher risk of falling into social exclusion. In this article, we related some compositional and structural factors of egocentered networks to various measures on economic deprivation and social exclusion. We considered different explanatory dimensions: ego’s sociodemographic characteristics and ego’s social capital. Social capital was measured both in terms of expressive and instrumental support, and took into account network size, strong ties density, and alters’ average job prestige, differentiating between inherited and achieved capital, a distinction that has deserved little attention so far. We used data from the Spanish General Social Survey 2013 (N = 5,094), a nationally representative database not applied for similar purposes up to the present. Results show how economic deprivation and social exclusion are associated with ascribed and achieved characteristics, both at the micro level (individual) and the meso level (network). At the micro level, women, immigrants, young people, less‐educated people, the unemployed, and those who do not trust others have higher estimated values on the variables with regards to social disadvantage. At the meso level, social exclusion is associated with lower occupational prestige of achieved relationships, fewer contacts for obtaining economic or medical help (but more contacts for childcare) and smaller non‐kin core discussion networks. In a familistic society with a limited welfare system, results help to disentangle the level of dependence people have on their own social resources.