Digital and Scientific Literacy with Games: A Pedagogical Process Based on System Engineering

This study presents a Brazilian teaching-learning experience in basic education where game development is used to promote both digital and scientific literacy throughout the National Common Curricular Base (BNCC). Focused on students’ cognitive aspects, the approach presents a pedagogical architecture based on systems development. Thus, it was possible to catalyze convergence between interest in the Science curricular program and the result of knowledge acquisition - such as skills development - by its means. The experiment was carried out centered on genetics studies where students collaboratively produced a digital game, improving in school assessment performance as an outcome. Therefore, we corroborate the effectiveness of creating games as an educational strategy able to optimize aspects of creativity, communication, collaboration, logical reasoning, problem-solving, abstract thinking and resilience.

Analytic Engagement and the Perils of Reframing the Dual- and Single-Process Models Debate

In a previous article published in Perspectives, I questioned whether the debate between dual- and single-process models of thinking is empirically tractable and argued that psychological scientists should leave it behind. Dewey (this issue) suggests that by reframing the debate in cognitive-modeling terms, it might become tractable and consequential. More specifically, he proposes that focusing on the question of whether analytic engagement (i.e., the process by which additional resources are allocated to a reasoning problem) is discrete or continuous might allow us to settle the debate. Here I illustrate how this suggestion is likely to face the same tractability problems as the original defining-features approach that it is supposed to replace.

Relational Gating for ''What If'' Reasoning

This paper addresses the challenge of learning to do procedural reasoning over text to answer "What if..." questions. We propose a novel relational gating network that learns to filter the key entities and relationships and learns contextual and cross representations of both procedure and question for finding the answer. Our relational gating network contains an entity gating module, relation gating module, and contextual interaction module. These modules help in solving the "What if..." reasoning problem. We show that modeling pairwise relationships helps to capture higher-order relations and find the line of reasoning for causes and effects in the procedural descriptions. Our proposed approach achieves the state-of-the-art results on the WIQA dataset.

New measurement method corrected a failure in special relativity

A logical reasoning problem in the Special Relativity interpretation of the Lorentz transformation was discovered and corrected by introducing an alternative interpretation of Lorentz transformations with a relativistic measuring process based on both, stretched time and length units, whereby the measurements as a consequence measure a shortened distance and time lines as variables due to used units. The space shuttles are getting longer instead of shorter and a barn-pole paradox does not occur. The spatial locations remain in their locations and space is not contracted and not changed. The failure is that by contracting both units and distance the Lorentz factor is eliminated and relativity was vanished. The elementary particles have their own measuring devices for time and length in the form of wavelengths and frequencies and they read distances and durations of different lengths from space using their own relativistically different units. The new interpretation is covered by the two postulates of Einstein. This is a sensational result too in view of all dramatic and romantic history as there is really a failure discovered. The Lorentz transformations remain being in use with another method. The new theory and the discovered problems of logical failures are explained vividly in the same manner as Special Relativity was using easy be thought samples. Reader do not need a high level of mathematics to be fit for as it is a more qualitatively thematic for every one who is interested in relativity matters.

PROFIL PENALARAN MATEMATIS SISWA SMP DALAM PEMECAHAN MASALAH ARITMETIKA SOSIAL BERDASARKAN KEMAMPUAN MATEMATIKA

Mathematical reasoning is the ability to think about mathematical problems, namely by thinking logically about mathematical problems to get conclusions about problem solutions. There are several factors that can affect students' mathematical reasoning, including mathematical abilities. Dissimilarity of students' mathematical abilities allows for dissimilarity in their mathematical reasoning abilities. So, this research intends to describe students' mathematical reasoning abilities in solving social arithmetic problems based on dissimilarity in mathematical abilities. The purpose of this research was to describe qualitative data about the mathematical reasoning abilities of students with high, medium, or low abilities in solving social arithmetic problems. The instrument used was the Mathematical Ability Test to determine the three research subjects, followed by a Problem Solving Test to get qualitative data about students' mathematical reasoning abilities, then interviews to get deeper data that was not obtained through written tests. Thus, the research data were analyzed using mathematical reasoning indicators. From the result of data analysis, it was found that all students understood the problem well. Students with high and medium mathematical abilities are determining and implementing problem solving strategies properly, namely writing down the step for solving them correctly and making accurate conclusions by giving logical argumens at aech step of the solution. However, students with low mathematical abillities have difficulty in determining and implementing problem solving strategies because they do not understand the concept, thus writing the steps to solve the problems incorrectly and not giving accurate conclusions about the correctness of the solution. Keywords: mathematical reasoning, problem solving, mathematical abilities

An AN ANALYSIS OF MATHEMATICAL REASONING ABILITY IN PROBLEM SOLVING WORD PROBLEM BASED ON GENDER AT UNIVERSITAS MUHAMMADIYAH LAMONGAN

This study aims to describe and analyze the mathematical reasoning and problem solving abilities of PGSD students, Universitas Muhammadiyah Lamongan, based on the gender in resolving story problems. This research is a qualitative descriptive research. The research subjects were 6 PGSD students of Universitas Muhammadiyah Lamongan who were selected based on the criteria of academic abilities; students with high reasoning, moderate reasoning, and low reasoning. The data collection techniques were observation, test, and interview. The data analysis was based on the results of test, observation, and interview obtained by students and based on table rubrics. Data analysis was carried out by the researcher using 6 subjects as representatives consisting of 3 males and 3 females with criteria previously mentioned (high, moderate, low). The results of data analysis on mathematical reasoning and problem solving abilities based on gender were female students' mathematical reasoning abilities were superior than male students' mathematical reasoning abilities. Keywords: Mathematical Reasoning, Problem Solving, Gender

Investigation of Proportional Reasoning Problem Solving Processes of Seventh Grade Students: A Mixed Method Research

This study was carried out to examine proportional reasoning problem solving processes of seventh grade students. This study was conducted with the explanatory sequential mixed method design. In this respect, firstly, quantitative data from 56 students were collected and analyzed. Then, qualitative data of the study was collected from six students selected according to their success and analyzed. The quantitative data of the study was consisted of a proportional reasoning skill test and analyzed using predictive statistics. The qualitative data of the study were collected through activity cards and the think-aloud protocol, and content analysis was applied to the collected qualitative data. The findings of the study showed that students were most successful at qualitative comparison. On the other hand, the least success was observed for quantitative comparison, and female students were found to be more successful in proportional reasoning problems.

Dual Mechanisms of Cognitive Control: A Hierarchical Bayesian Approach to Test-Retest Reliability

Cognitive control, also known as attentional control or executive function, is a set of fundamental processes that are utilized in a wide range of cognitive functioning: including working memory, reasoning, problem solving, and decision making. Currently, no existing theory of cognitive control unifies experimental and individual differences approaches. Some even argue that cognitive control as a psychometric construct does not exist at all. These disparities may exist in part because individual differences research in cognitive control utilizes tasks optimized for experimental effects (i.e., Stroop effect). As a result, many cognitive control tasks do not have reliable individual differences despite robust experimental effects (Hedge, Powell, & Sumner, 2018). In the current study, we examine the efficacy of a new task battery based on the Dual Mechanisms of Cognitive Control theory (DMCC; Braver, 2012) to provide reliable estimates of individual differences in cognitive control. With two sets of analyses, the first traditional (e.g., split-half, ICC, and rho), and the second hierarchical Bayesian, we provide evidence that (1) reliable individual differences can be extracted from experimental tasks, and (2) weak correlations between tasks of cognitive control are not solely caused by the attenuation of unreliable estimates. The implications of our findings suggest that it is unlikely that poor measurement practices are the cause of the weak between-task correlations in cognitive control, and that a psychometric construct of cognitive control should be reconsidered

Parameterized complexity of abduction in Schaefer’s framework

Abductive reasoning is a non-monotonic formalism stemming from the work of Peirce. It describes the process of deriving the most plausible explanations of known facts. Considering the positive version, asking for sets of variables as explanations, we study, besides the problem of wether there exists a set of explanations, two explanation size limited variants of this reasoning problem (less than or equal to, and equal to a given size bound). In this paper, we present a thorough two-dimensional classification of these problems: the first dimension is regarding the parameterized complexity under a wealth of different parameterizations, and the second dimension spans through all possible Boolean fragments of these problems in Schaefer’s constraint satisfaction framework with co-clones (T. J. Schaefer. The complexity of satisfiability problems. In Proceedings of the 10th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, May 1–3, 1978, San Diego, California, USA, R.J. Lipton, W.A. Burkhard, W.J. Savitch, E.P. Friedman, A.V. Aho eds, pp. 216–226. ACM, 1978). Thereby, we almost complete the parameterized complexity classification program initiated by Fellows et al. (The parameterized complexity of abduction. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth AAAI Conference on Articial Intelligence, July 22–26, 2012, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, J. Homann, B. Selman eds. AAAI Press, 2012), partially building on the results by Nordh and Zanuttini (What makes propositional abduction tractable. Artificial Intelligence, 172, 1245–1284, 2008). In this process, we outline a fine-grained analysis of the inherent parameterized intractability of these problems and pinpoint their FPT parts. As the standard algebraic approach is not applicable to our problems, we develop an alternative method that makes the algebraic tools partially available again.