Learning Styles of Medical Students With Different Routes of Admission

BackgroundA learning style is the complex manner to learn material most efficiently and effectively and also a good predicator of their preferred learning behaviors. This study explored the status of new medical students’ learning patterns between application and entrance examination.MethodsThis is a cross sectional analysis of learning styles among newly enrolled first year medical students in each first academic year from September 2015 to September 2017. The Memletic Learning Style Inventory was applied as instrument for assessment. Latent class analysis was applied to classify different classes among medical students. Result98 students underwent a national college entrance examination, and 150 students was enrolled through application. All medical students could be assigned into 4 classes according to learning styles, including logical type, solitary type, mix aural-verbal-visual type, and social type. Both gender and admission routes were strong predictors of latent class of learning styles. ConclusionThrough the interview process, we can screen out students with mix aural-verbal-visual class of learning styles through interview in application process. While examination route can select students with logical type and solitary type learning style. This study can improve our understanding of student learning patterns to design learner-specific courses and effective curricula.

Conceptualizing New Jerusalem

This essay re-conceptualizes Muscovite notions of New Jerusalem, by considering the practice of historical replication, including hierotopy, as a religious-political ideology. It explains why and how Tsar Fedor Alekseevich adopted and advanced the replication of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher at the Resurrection “New Jerusalem” Monastery, founded by Patriarch Nikon and his father Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, despite the ecumenical patriarchs’ condemnation of Nikon and his monastery in 1666 and eschatological fears promoted by Old Believers. Fedor resurrected the New Jerusalem idea in order to solidify his inheritance of the Muscovite throne and the Constantinian legacy in connection with the First Russo-Turkish War of 1676–1681. The tsar embraced the “Byzantine-New Jerusalem scenario,” according to which Muscovite rulers who scored military victories through the power of the True Cross in St. Constantine’s image were obliged to preform churchwardenship (ktitorstvo) in imitation of the Byzantine emperor, including the embellishment of the prototypical Jerusalem church and its replications in Russia. The investigation of Tsar Fedor Alekseevich’s Byzantine-New Jerusalem scenario reveals the non-linear, non-logical type of thinking that advanced political goals, including the establishment of the legitimacy of the tsar and his dynasty. This article highlights and qualifies the strategy of historical repetition, in which the icon reproduces the prototype in real, not metaphoric, terms.

Educating researchers in the metadiscipline of foresight

Purpose The science of Foresight differs from the commonplace notion of what a science is because it is a metadiscipline – a logical type of science higher than the logical type of disciplinary sciences. It is practical, uses transdisciplinary processes that combine scientific disciplines and often examines counterfactuals in a scientific manner. This study aims to demonstrate that Foresight is a science, by presenting a number of best practices and potential innovations in higher education that could facilitate obtaining skills for Foresight science. Design/methodology/approach The methods of scientific education that have served us well in the past are inadequate for metadisciplinary sciences such as Foresight. The paper discusses what metadisciplinarity is, using a variety of examples, and distinguishes it from disciplines and ways of crossing disciplinary boundaries. Understanding the essential characteristics of Foresight as a metadisciplinary science leads to identifying current best practices and possible educational innovations in undergraduate education that will facilitate obtaining Foresight skills. Throughout the paper, examples are drawn from the education and professional experience of the author in the USA and Europe. Findings This paper demonstrates that Foresight is a science and presents a number of best practices and potential innovations in higher education that could facilitate obtaining skills for Foresight science. It identifies barriers to those innovations and approaches to overcome them. Originality/value This viewpoint paper clarifies the meaning of the terms interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and metadisciplinarity to identify the essential characteristics of Foresight as a science. Then, it identifies and advocates needed changes in North American higher education to provide earlier and more efficient opportunities for Foresight researchers and users to obtain the skills they need.

Categories

Categories are hard to describe, and even harder to define. This is in part a consequence of their complicated history, and in part because category theory must grapple with vexed questions concerning the relation between linguistic or conceptual categories on the one hand, and objective reality on the other. In the mid-fourth century bc,Aristotle initiates discussion of categories as a central enterprise of philosophy. In the Categories he presents an ‘ontological’ scheme which classifies all being into ten ultimate types, but in the Topics introduces the categories as different kinds of predication, that is, of items such as ‘goodness’ or ‘length of a tennis court’ or ‘red’, which can be ‘predicated of’ subjects. He nowhere attempts either to justify what he includes in his list of categories or to establish its completeness, and relies throughout on the unargued conviction that language faithfully represents the most basic features of reality. In the twentieth century, a test for category membership was recommended by Ryle, that of absurdity: concepts or expressions differ in logical type when their combination produces sentences which are palpable nonsense.Kant, working in the eighteenth century, derives his categories from a consideration of aspects of judgments, hoping in this manner to ensure that his scheme will consist exclusively of a priori concepts which might constitute an objective world. The Sinologist Graham argues that the categories familiar in the West mirror Indo-European linguistic structure, and that an experimental Chinese scheme exhibits suggestively different properties, but his relativism is highly contentious.

The Compositional Semantics of Modification

Modification is a combinatorial semantic operation between a modifier and a modifiee. Take, for example, vegetarian soup: the attributive adjective vegetarian modifies the nominal modifiee soup and thus constrains the range of potential referents of the complex expression to soups that are vegetarian. Similarly, in Ben is preparing a soup in the camper, the adverbial in the camper modifies the preparation by locating it. Notably, modifiers can have fairly drastic effects; in fake stove, the attribute fake induces that the complex expression singles out objects that seem to be stoves, but are not. Intuitively, modifiers contribute additional information that is not explicitly called for by the target the modifier relates to. Speaking in terms of logic, this roughly says that modification is an endotypical operation; that is, it does not change the arity, or logical type, of the modified target constituent. Speaking in terms of syntax, this predicts that modifiers are typically adjuncts and thus do not change the syntactic distribution of their respective target; therefore, modifiers can be easily iterated (see, for instance, spicy vegetarian soup or Ben prepared a soup in the camper yesterday). This initial characterization sets modification apart from other combinatorial operations such as argument satisfaction and quantification: combining a soup with prepare satisfies an argument slot of the verbal head and thus reduces its arity (see, for instance, *prepare a soup a quiche). Quantification as, for example, in the combination of the quantifier every with the noun soup, maps a nominal property onto a quantifying expression with a different distribution (see, for instance, *a every soup). Their comparatively loose connection to their hosts renders modifiers a flexible, though certainly not random, means within combinatorial meaning constitution. The foundational question is how to work their being endotypical into a full-fledged compositional analysis. On the one hand, modifiers can be considered endotypical functors by virtue of their lexical endowment; for instance, vegetarian would be born a higher-ordered function from predicates to predicates. On the other hand, modification can be considered a rule-based operation; for instance, vegetarian would denote a simple predicate from entities to truth-values that receives its modifying endotypical function only by virtue of a separate modification rule. In order to assess this and related controversies empirically, research on modification pays particular attention to interface questions such as the following: how do structural conditions and the modifying function conspire in establishing complex interpretations? What roles do ontological information and fine-grained conceptual knowledge play in the course of concept combination?

Modification

This article assembles sources that are concerned with modification as a combinatorial semantic operation—in, for example, green box, the attributive adjective green modifies the nominal box and thus constrains the range of potential referents of the complex expression to boxes that are green; similarly, in Martha read a book in the garden, the adverbial in the garden modifies the reading situation by locating it. Notably, modifiers can have fairly fundamental effects; in fake book, the attribute fake induces that the complex expression singles out objects that seem to be books, but are not. Intuitively, modifiers contribute additional information that is not explicitly called for by the target the modifier relates to. Speaking in terms of logic, this roughly says that modification does not change the arity, or logical type, of the modified target constituent. Speaking in terms of syntax, this predicts that modifiers are typically adjuncts and thus do not change the syntactic distribution of their respective target; therefore, modifiers can be easily iterated (see, e.g., big green box or Martha read a book in the garden yesterday). This initial characterization sets modification apart from other combinatorial operations such as argument satisfaction and quantification: combining a book with read satisfies an argument slot of the verbal head and thus reduces its arity (see, e.g., *read a book a journal). Quantification as, for example, in the combination of the quantifier every with the noun box, maps a nominal property onto a quantifying expression with a different distribution (see, e.g., *a every box). Their comparatively loose connection to their hosts renders modifiers a flexible, though certainly not random, means within combinatorial meaning constitution. Therefore research on modification pays particular attention to questions such as the following: how do structural conditions and the modifying function conspire in establishing complex interpretations? What roles do ontological information and fine-grained conceptual knowledge play in the course of concept combination? The sources in the present article shed light on these and related topics.

Inherent and coerced gradability across categories: manipulating pragmatic halos with sorta

In this paper I provide an analysis of the English hedges sorta and kinda, which show a cross-categorial distribution and can induce gradability with non- gradable predicates. I analyze sorta and kinda as degree words and provide a formal analysis of their behavior. With gradable predicates, these behavior similar to other degree words such as very, but with non-gradable predicates, a mismatch of logical type forces the predicate to typeshift to a gradable type, making available a degree argument that represents imprecision. The analysis is developed using Morzycki’s (2011) implementation of Lasersohnian pragmatic halos (Lasersohn 1999), and presents a case study in how gradability may be coerced from non- gradable expressions.