The Effect of Using E-Mental Schemata Strategy on Improving EFL Students’ Reading Comprehension Sub Skills

This study examines the potential effect of E-mind mapping on the development of reading comprehension sub-skills among seventh-grade students in Jordan. To achieve the aim, a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design was used. The experimental group consisted of 25 students who were taught reading texts by using electronic mind maps, and the control group consisting of 25 students was taught by following the teacher’s guidebook. A pre-post reading comprehension test was developed. The results revealed significant differences in favor of the experimental group. Students in the E-mind mapping group outperformed the control group in their overall reading comprehension as well as in the reading comprehension sub-skills. Identifying the critical idea is the most developed sub-skill, and the least developed sub-skill was identifying cause and effect sub-skill. Keywords: Reading Comprehension, Reading Comprehension Sub-Skills, E-Mind Mapping, EFL

Redeeming the shopping center. Victor Gruen's ideal cellular metropolis and Louvain-la-Neuve

The ‘mall maker' Victor Gruen is well known as the architect who played a dominant role in the design and global proliferation of the shopping mall. While many recent publications already highlighted and re-evaluated the architectural importance of Gruen's shopping center, the urban ideal/utopian projects proposed by Gruen have not been considered in depth thus far. Gruen mixed his design principles for shopping centers with ecological interpretations, proposing the Cellular Metropolis as a new urban utopia. This paper aims to shed light on Gruen's urban ideas, from his critical idea of the ecological-commercial realm to the study of radical commercial hybridizations, which are still relevant lessons for the design of our socio-spatial contemporary condition. In particular, the article focuses on the case study of Louvain-la-Neuve to ground such ideas into a real site.

The Democratic Design Framework: Motivations and the Dual Core

This chapter specifies the features at the heart of the new democratic design framework. Focusing on what motivates the framework, it details the notion of ‘democratic sensibility’ and other features of democracy’s normativity, and democracy’s minimum requirements (the ‘democratic minimum’). This is followed by specification of the critical idea of the ‘dual core’, consisting of (a) practices and (b) political principles. These two interacting elements together form the core of the democratic design framework as a whole. Central to the dynamics of the dual core is the enactment of principles through single or multiple institutionalized practices; the discussion treats this feature in some detail, along with the scope and justification of principles.

A STUDY OF LEAKAGE-CORRECTED TWO-STEP METHOD BASED ON THE NODAL EQUIVALENCE THEORY FOR FAST REACTOR ANALYSIS

The conventional two-step method based on the generalized equivalence theory (GET) cannot be directly applied to the fast reactor analysis since the assumption of the space-energy separability is not very valid due to a relatively long neutron mean free path. This study aims to develop a leakage-corrected two-step method for the fast reactor analysis with the aid of the albedo-corrected parameterized equivalence constants (APEC) method. The critical idea of the APEC method is to correct the homogenized group constants (HGCs) including discontinuity factors (DFs) during the nodal calculation through predetermined APEC functions. The APEC functions are functionalized in terms of the normalized leakage parameters such as a current-to-flux (CFR) ratio so that they can correct the cross-sections (XSs) and discontinuity factors by reflecting the in-situ neutron leakage information of the nodal analysis. The feasibility of the APEC-corrected two-step method was investigated by solving 5-group diffusion equations for a two-dimensional sodium-cooled fast reactor with a 6-triangle finite difference method. The 5-group HGCs for fuel assemblies were determined by using a continuous-energy Monte Carl code, and the conventional assembly discontinuity factors are also introduced for each hexagonal fuel assembly. First of all, it was demonstrated that the simple FDM scheme could reproduce the reference nodal quantities with the GET. And the APEC functions are formulated using the reference solutions to evaluate the feasibility of simple APEC functional for both XSs and DFs. Then, a smaller color-set problem was defined to determine practical APEC functions for the original benchmark, and various numerical evaluations are performed in terms of the k-eff value and nodal power distribution.

The Role of Replication Studies in Educational Research

In the past year, we have used this space to tackle a chronic and important concern in mathematics education: how to increase the impact of research on practice. Because of the unique nature of this issue of JRME, we pause to address the critical idea of replication in educational research. In later issues, we will continue our primary theme and consider how the ideas raised in this editorial can further our understanding of the relationships between research and practice.

Ghost Stories for Darwin

A stimulating interchange between feminist studies and biology, this book explores how the author's dissertation on flower color variation in morning glories launched her on an intellectual odyssey that engaged the feminist studies of sciences in the experimental practices of science by tracing the central and critical idea of variation in biology. The book reveals the histories of eugenics and genetics and their impact on the metaphorical understandings of difference and diversity that permeate common understandings of differences among people exist in contexts that seem distant from the so-called objective hard sciences. Journeying into areas that range from the social history of plants to speculative fiction, the book uncovers key relationships between the life sciences, women's studies, evolutionary and invasive biology, and the history of ecology, and how ideas of diversity and difference emerged and persist in each field.

The Embodiment of Grief

Following recent work by James Engell, this paper sets out to explore points of connection between romantic literary criticism and the "new rhetoric" of the late 18th century. More specifically, it looks at how the earlier concept of the "rhetoric of passion" was taken up by Coleridge in his lectures on Shakespeare, focusing primarily on his treatment of Constance's speech on grief in King John. The same passage was evoked and strongly criticised by such "new rhetoricians" as Lord Kames and Joseph Priestley, who claimed that its intricate imagery rendered it unnatural and unsuitable to the expression of profound grief. Coleridge, by refuting these charges, redefines the earlier concept of the "language of passion" and turns it into a more comprehensive critical idea, which is able to accommodate figurative language beyond the rules of classical rhetoric or a rigidly conceived associationist psychology. He is aided in this by two things: first, by his new understanding of reading as on-going experience (as opposed to Kames's method, based on the analysis of a given passage in the light of pre-established rhetorical and psychological rules), and second, by his emphasis on the rhetorical "embodiment" that takes place in the "impassioned" literary text.

The Virgilian paradox: An Epic of Drama and Sentiment

Every powerful critical idea is the product of a particular interpretive situation: we could even say, with considerable simplification, that it is the product of a prejudice. Every cultural moment develops its own critical myth (or prejudice), and reasons and interprets within the limits of this horizon. Often it needs only a short time for the myth to wither, the prejudice to decay; we realize that its claims, born of a particular historical perspective and valid only in part, were too high, and that it was not content to accept only this partial validity.But when a critical myth fades away, not everything is doomed to disappear. There are still positive traces, still a residual value which, once appropriately adjusted and corrected, can be recuperated. To achieve this, a more powerful interpretive system must arise which absorbs the error within a new perspective. Whatever survives the testing may become a new instrument of interpretation, perhaps one destined to last forever – or at least for a little longer (this is how progress is made).