Personal Bests and Gender

We connect two large bodies of scientific inquiry. First, important theories in the social sciences establish that human preferences are reference-dependent. Second, a separate field of research documents substantial differences in preferences and attitudes across genders. Specifically, we examine the universe of official classic chess games (more than 250,000 subjects and 22 million games). This allows us to study differences across genders both in cognitive performance (intensive margin) and in competitive participation (extensive margin), using the fact that personal bests act as reference points. We find that males and females behave very differently around their personal bests in both margins.

THE ORGANISATION OF RESEARCH IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHER PREPARATION IN THE US UNIVERSITIES

Although research has been shown to expedite the professional growth and development of prospective specialists, less is known about the effective world practices in undergraduate and graduate research that could be applied in Ukrainian language teacher education. The present article explores the characteristics of student resear ch in US foreign language teacher education. The study focused on the analysis of academic literature, normative resources and the practical experience of language teacher preparation with the aim of extrapolating good practices into the Ukrainian system of language teacher education. It was shown that student research integrates didactic approaches with elements of creative activity, individual research projects, culminating projects, the study of specialised disciplines, individual and group scientific inquiry, not included in the curricula of educational programmes. The organisational forms of the latter are research symposia, seminars, workshops, conferences, preparation of scientific publications and some others. Among the central tasks of undergraduate and graduate research is the preparation of highly qualified, autonomous specialists, who are capable of accumulating and generating scientific knowledge, skillful application of professional knowledge in approaching the task of teaching; familiarising students with the methodology for organising and conducting research in the field of foreign language education; increasing motivation for scientific inquiry and professional development, intensification of learning; promotion of critical and reflective thinking, professional self-identification and self-realisation; stimulating the need for continuous self-development; implementation of individualisation and differentiation principles in language teacher education; replenishment of the cohort of scientific and pedagogical staff. The research competence is developed through diverse didactic forms and approaches; it is characterised mainly by electiveness at the undergraduate level and is a mandatory component of the graduate programmes’ curricula in foreign language teacher education.

Application of Scientific Guided Inquiry Assisted Video Analysis Tracker to Improve Science Generic Skills

The study was done to identify the generic science skill improvement through guided scientific inquiry method video tracker analysis based. The method used in this study was quantitative pretest-posttest control group design. The samples of this were 52 students of the Physics Education Program of STKIP SoE. The instrument used in this study was a generic science skill test instrument on kinetic learning materials. The data analysis technique used was a t-test independent sample. The result of the study showed that students who learned guided scientific inquiry method video tracker analysis based were better than those who learned using the conventional method. This happened because the students were allowed to do the experiment that make the student freely understands generic science skill, thus making the learning process more interesting and meaningful. Therefore, it was suggested to use this method (guided scientific Inquiry method video tracker analysis based) in the process of learning in the classroom.

“How will you construct a pathway system?”: Microanalysis of teacher-child scientific conversations

During the preschool years, children’s question-explanation exchanges with teachers serve as a powerful mechanism for their early STEM knowledge acquisition. Utilizing naturalistic longitudinal classroom data, we examined how such conversations in an inquiry-based preschool classroom change during an extended scientific inquiry unit. We were particularly interested in information-seeking questions (causal, e.g. “How will you construct a pathway?”; fact-based, e.g., “Where’s the marble?”). Videos (n = 18; 14 hours) were collected during a three-week inquiry unit on forces and motion and transcribed in CLAN-CHILDES software at the utterance level. Utterances were coded for delivery (question vs. statement) and content (e.g., fact-based, causal). Although teachers ask more questions than children, we found a significant increase in information-seeking questions during Weeks 2 and 3. We explored the content of information-seeking questions and found that the majority of these questions were asked by teachers, and focused on facts. However, the timing of fact-based and causal questions varied. Whereas more causal questions occurred in earlier weeks, more fact-based questions were asked towards the end of the inquiry. These findings provide insight into how children’s and teacher’s questions develop during an inquiry, informing our understanding of early science learning. Even in an inquiry-learning environment, teachers guide interactions, asking questions to support children’s learning. Children’s information-seeking questions increase during certain weeks, suggesting that providing opportunities to ask questions may allow children to be more active in constructing knowledge. Such findings are important for considering how science questions are naturally embedded in an inquiry-based learning classroom.

Reconciliation of evidence for the Portulacineae “backbone” phylogeny

Portulacineae comprise a clade of eight ostensibly monophyletic families, four of which (Anacampserotaceae, Montiaceae, Portulacaceae s. str., and Talinaceae) and part of a fifth (Didiereaceae) had been classified traditionally in Portulacaceae s. lato. The clade also includes Basellaceae, Cactaceae, and Halophytaceae. While available evidence strongly supports recognition of major clades within Portulacineae, current analyses disagree with respect to relations among them, such that the Portulacineae “backbone” phylogeny remains “unresolved.” The disagreements might owe in part to incongruent data and/or poor analysis and/or known theoretical shortcomings of the analytical methods. But I argue here that it reflects mostly the failure to appreciate the fundamental property of living organisms, viz. their inherent determinism consequent to autopoiesis. This property renders the evolutionary process as idiosyncratic. This, in turn, renders phylogeny inherently unpredictable and, strictly speaking, unrecoverable. I also emphasize that the hierarchical organization of organisms predicts that phylogeny should not be strictly tree-like. Nonetheless, evolutionary history is materially tangible, hence is within the realm of scientific inquiry. I make two proposals here. One is that (often futile) efforts to resolve phylogeny as a tree reflect a constitutive cognitive proclivity to resolve trees even when phylogeny is not tree-like and/or otherwise “resolvable.” To mitigate this tendency, I propose that the objective of phylogenetic study should be reconciliation rather than resolution. In this way, the lack of tree-like phylogenetic resolution becomes useful knowledge. In this theoretical framework, I evaluate what can be considered tentatively known about the Portulacineae backbone phylogeny.