An International Comparative Study of Students' Scientific Explanation Based on Cognitive Diagnostic Assessment

Scientific explanation is one of the most core concepts in science education, and its mastery level is crucial for a deep understanding of the nature of science. As a new generation of assessment theory, cognitive diagnostic assessment (CDA) can get the knowledge of students' mastery of fine-grained knowledge. Based on the extant research, this research has formed eight attributes of scientific explanation concepts. By coding the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) test items, a CAD tool was formed. Data collected from 574 Grade 4 students in Hangzhou, China, combined with the data of the United States, Singapore, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Russia, were used in our study. The Deterministic Inputs, Noisy “And” gate (DINA) model was used to analyze the results from three aspects: the probability of mastery of attributes, the international comparison of knowledge states, and the analysis of learning paths. This study provided a new perspective from a CDA approach on the assessment of scientific explanation.

Competence-based fuzzy skill functions

Fuzzy skill functions connect knowledge states at the performance level with latent cognitive abilities at the competence level. Given that there may exist precedence relations among skills, the main idea of this study is trying to develop fuzzy competence structures restricted on the possible fuzzy sets of skills that can occur. The knowledge structures delineated by fuzzy skill functions are related to the fuzzy competence structures. Knowledge spaces can be delineated by disjunctive fuzzy skill functions when the fuzzy competence structures are $\sqcup$-closed. Simple closure spaces can be delineated by conjunctive fuzzy skill functions when the fuzzy competence structures are $\sqcap$-closed. Delineating knowledge structures via competence-based fuzzy skill functions just depends on the effective competence states. We design algorithms for delineating knowledge structures via competence-based fuzzy skill functions without listing all fuzzy competence states of fuzzy competence structures.

Are Children Sensitive to What They Know?: An Insight from Yucatec Mayan Children

Metacognitive abilities are considered as a hallmark of advanced human cognition. Existing empirical studies have exclusively focused on populations from Western and industrialized societies. Little is known about young children’s metacognitive abilities in other societal and cultural contexts. Here we tested 4-year-old Yucatec Mayan (a rural native population from Mexico) by adopting a metacognitive task in which children’s explicit assessment of their own knowledge states about the hidden content of a container and their informing judgments (whether or not to inform an ignorant person about the hidden contents of a container) were assessed. Similar to previous studies, we found that Yucatec Mayan children overestimated their knowledge states in the explicit metacognitive task. However, in contrast with studies on Western children, we did not find the facilitating effect of the implicit informing task over the explicit task. These findings suggest that the early development of metacognition combines universal and culture-sensitive features.

Academic Career Advances and Gender Gap

Is there a gender gap barrier against the career advancement of women researchers in Mexico? To explore possible answers to this question, we review the specialized literature, based on the “sticky floor” and “glass ceiling” conceptual framework, and then offer an empirical approach to test whether such a gap exists as well as some theoretical reasons that could explain it. We analyzed a massive dataset of 41,000 members of the National System of Researchers (SNI) under the National Council of Science and Technology (CONACyT) in Mexico from 1991 to 2017. To test determinants of advancement, we consider gender, areas of knowledge, states in which researchers reside, years in which initial applications and promotions took place, and universities to which researchers belong to. We found that there is a similar chance to advance from the lower levels of the system, following the sticky floor analogy, but women make a little progress after these initial levels when compared to men, in line with the glass ceiling idea. We also offer additional research avenues in this topic, due to another important finding, which reveals that 62% of researchers never make progress at the level in which they initially join.

A Simplified Method for Predicting Pattern Match Ratio

Cognitive diagnostic test design (CDTD) has a direct impact on the pattern match ratio (PMR) of the classification of examinees. It is more helpful to know the quality of a test during the stage of the test design than after the examination is taken. The theoretical construct validity (TCV) is an index of the test quality that can be calculated without testing, and the relationship between the PMR and the TCV will be revealed. The TCV captures the three aspects of the appeal of the test design as follows: (1) the TCV is a measure of test construct validity, and this index will navigate the processes of item construction and test design toward achieving the goal of measuring the intended objectives, (2) it is the upper bound of the PMR of the knowledge states of examinees, so it can predict the PMR, and (3) it can detect the defects of test design, revise the test in time, improve the efficiency of test design, and save the cost of test design. Furthermore, the TCV is related to the distribution of knowledge states and item categories and has nothing to do with the number of items.

The radical and requisite openness of viable systems - implications for healthcare strategy and practice

This paper begs an ontological question about the nature of health and challenges some underpinning assumptions in western healthcare. In its analysis, the structure of health, in its various statuses, is framed as a complex adaptive system made up of dynamically interacting subsystems that include the physiological, psychological, spiritual, social, cultural, and more, realms. Furthermore, openness in complex systems such as health, is necessary for the exchange of energy, information, and resources. Yet, within healthcare much effort is invested in constraining systems’ behaviours, whether they be systems of knowledge, states of health, models of care, and more. This paper draws on the complexity sciences and Levinasian philosophy to explicate the essential role of system openness in individual and population health, and the viability of healthcare systems. It highlights holism to be ‘not whole-ism’, and system openness to be, not just a reality, but a critical feature of viability. Hence requisite openness is advocated as essential to efficacious and ethical healthcare practice and strategy, and vital for good quality health.

What’s New to You? Preschoolers’ Partner-Specific Online Processing of Disfluency

Speech disfluencies (e.g., “Point to thee um turtle”) can signal that a speaker is about to refer to something difficult to name. In two experiments, we found evidence that 4-year-olds, like adults, flexibly interpret a particular partner’s disfluency based on their estimate of that partner’s knowledge, derived from the preceding conversation. In entrainment trials, children established partner-specific shared knowledge of names for tangram pictures with one or two adult interlocutors. In each test trial, an adult named one of two visible tangrams either fluently or disfluently while children’s eye-movements were monitored. We manipulated speaker knowledge in the test trials. In Experiment 1, the test-trial speaker was the same speaker from entrainment or a naïve experimenter; in Experiment 2, the test-trial speaker had been one of the child’s partners in entrainment and had seen half of the tangrams (either animal or vehicle tangrams). When hearing disfluent expressions, children looked more at a tangram that was unfamiliar from the speaker’s perspective; this systematic disfluency effect disappeared in Experiment 1 when the speaker was entirely naïve, and depended on each speaker’s entrainment experience in Experiment 2. These findings show that 4-year-olds can keep track of two different partners’ knowledge states, and use this information to determine what should be difficult for a particular partner to name, doing so efficiently enough to guide online interpretation of disfluent speech.

Context and consciousness: Documenting evidentials

A domain pertinent to knowing in interaction is evidentiality, but documenting evidential markers can be challenging. Among methodologies, direct elicitation and questionnaires offer the advantages of efficiency and cross-linguistically comparable data. They can, however, miss markers that are below the level of speaker consciousness, as well as significant discourse and social factors. Experimental tasks can provide cross-linguistically comparable data complete with discourse context, and in some cases evidence of the role of differential knowledge states of participants. A single task might miss genre-specific markers, however. Documentation of extensive unscripted speech in a variety of genres, much of it interactive, can provide a foundation for identifying the full sets of markers to be investigated and for uncovering functions beyond specifying the source of information. Insights from speakers can then take us further, potentially shedding light on subtle circumstances underlying choices among alternatives, particularly those reflecting social factors. But we need to know how to listen. Effective collaboration depends crucially on recognition of the variability of speaker consciousness of the markers. If this is kept in mind, speakers can serve as important co-analysts, scouting through their lifetime experiences to provide hypotheses about the contexts in which alternative constructions would be appropriate, meanings they can add, and social and cultural factors influencing their use. Resulting hypotheses can then be tested against the documented material and refined until they account well for the data. These points are illustrated with material from Central Pomo, indigenous to California.

The Signature of All Things: Children Infer Knowledge States from Static Images

From minimal observable action, humans make fast, intuitive judgments about what other people think, want, and feel (Heider & Simmel, 1944). Even when no agent is visible, children can infer the presence of intentional agents based on the environmental traces that only agents could leave behind (Saxe et al., 2005; Newman et al., 2010). Here we show that, beyond inferring the presence of agents, four- to six-year-olds can also determine the mental states that best explain an environmental trace. Participants (N = 35, M: 5.6 years, range:4.0 − 6.8 years) saw pairs of dresser drawers with different numbers and orientations of open drawers, and they were asked to de- termine which static scenes was generated by an agent with a given knowledge state (whether the agent wasn’t searching at all but was just playing, knew exactly where an object was hidden, knew the approximate location, had no idea where it was hidden, or at first didn’t know and then remembered). We compare children’s performance to a computational model that extends models of mental-state attribution to consider cases where the behavior is not observed but must be inferred from the structure of the environment. We find that children’s graded pattern of responded shows quantitative similarity to the predictions made by our model