Counter-Arguing During Curriculum-Supported Peer Interaction Facilitates Middle-School Students’ Science Content Knowledge

Abstract

Peer argumentation, especially the discussion of contrary points of view, has experimentally been found to be effective in promoting science content knowledge, but how this occurs is still unknown. The available explanations are insufficient because they do not account for the evidence showing that gains in content knowledge are unrelated to group outcomes and are still evident weeks after collaboration occurs. The aim of this article is to contribute to the understanding of the relationship between peer-group argumentation and science content knowledge learning. A total of 187 students (aged 10 to 11?years) from 8 classrooms participated in the study, with the classrooms spread across 8 public schools, all located in Santiago, Chile. We conducted a quasi-experimental study randomized at school-class level. Four teachers delivered science lessons following a teaching program especially developed to foster dialogic and argumentative classroom talk (the intervention group), and four teachers delivered lessons in their usual way (the control group). Students were assessed individually using both immediate and delayed post-test measures of science content knowledge. The results showed no differences in pre- to post-immediate content knowledge between conditions. However, the intervention-group students increased their content knowledge significantly more than the control-group students between post-immediate and post-delayed tests. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses showed that, after controlling for school-level variables, time working in groups, and scores in the pretest, the formulation of counter arguments, although occurring in both groups, significantly predicted delayed gains in the intervention group only. Moreover, the frequency of counterarguments heard by students during the group work did not make a difference. Focal analysis of one small-group work suggests that teachers’ instructional practice may have contributed to the consolidation of students’ knowledge at an individual level in a post-collaborative phase.     

Moral Worth and Moral Knowledge

To have moral worth an action not only needs to conform to the correct normative theory (whatever it is); it also needs to be motivated in the right way. I argue that morally worthy actions are motivated by the rightness of the action; they are motivated by an agent's concern for doing what's right and her knowledge that her action is morally right. Call this the Rightness Condition. On the Rightness Condition moral motivation involves both a conative and a cognitive element—in particular, it involves moral knowledge. I argue that the Rightness Condition is both necessary and sufficient for moral worth. I also argue that the Rightness Condition gives us an attractive account of actions performed under imperfect epistemic circumstances: by agents who rely on moral testimony or by those who, like Huckleberry Finn, have false moral convictions.     

Three Kairoi – Three Aions. Paul Tillich,Ultimate Concern and Pedagogy of Radical Hope

Studies in Philosophy and Education - For contemporary critical philosophers of education, the thought of Paul Tillich, a protestant theologian, does not seem to be a very likely point of...     

Dedicated to Nation but Against Women? National Narcissism Predicts Support for Anti-Abortion Laws in Poland

The present research examines psychological concomitants of support for anti-abortion laws in Poland in the wake of the Constitutional Tribunal’s 2020 ruling restricting access to abortion in cases of fetal malformations. Results of two cross-sectional studies conducted on representative samples of Poles (Study 1, N?=?994 and Study 2, N?=?432) indicated that support for an almost total abortion ban was associated with national narcissism – a belief in the national in-group’s greatness that is contingent on its external validation. In both studies, the relationship between national narcissism and support for anti-abortion laws was mediated by hostile, but not benevolent, sexism. Study 2 additionally showed that this effect remained significant even when we accounted for other important variables, such as individual narcissism or prejudice towards people with Down syndrome. Overall, our results indicate that national narcissism may play an important role in shaping anti-abortion attitudes.

     

Long-term aversive taste memory requires insular and amygdala protein degradation

Some reports have shown that the ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS) is necessary to degrade repressor factors to produce new proteins essential to memory consolidation. Furthermore, recent evidence suggests that memory updating also relies on protein degradation through the UPS. To evaluate whether degradation of proteins is part of the cellular events needed for long-term storage of taste aversion, we injected lactacystin--an UPS inhibitor--into the amygdala and/or insular cortex 30 min before the first or second training trials. The results revealed that degradation of proteins in either the amygdala or insular cortex suffices for long-term stabilization of first-time encounter taste aversion. On the other hand, lactacystin applied in the insula, but not in the amygdala, before the second training prevented long-term storage of updated information. Our results support that degradation of proteins by means of the UPS is required every time taste aversion is to be stored in long-term memory.     

A method for quantifying focused versus overview behavior in AOI sequences

We present a new measure for evaluating focused versus overview eye movement behavior in a stimulus divided by areas of interest. The measure can be used for overall data, as well as data over time. Using data from an ongoing project with mathematical problem solving, we describe how to calculate the measure and how to carry out a statistical evaluation of the results.     

Men Are Funnier than Women under a Condition of Low Self-Efficacy but Women Are Funnier than Men under a Condition of High Self-Efficacy

The debate about whether women can be as funny as men pervades the popular press, and research has sometimes supported the stereotype that men are funnier (Mickes et al. 2011). The goal of the present research was to determine whether this gender difference can be explained by differences in beliefs about one’s capability for humor (“humor self-efficacy”). Male and female U.S. undergraduates (n?=?64) generated captions for 20 cartoons and rated their own humor self-efficacy. Subsequently, an independent sample of 370 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) users evaluated these captions in a knockout-style tournament in which pairs of captions were presented with each of the cartoons. Each participant was randomly assigned to evaluate captions which were authored by men and women selected to be either low or high in humor self-efficacy. In the initial round of the tournament, each caption was authored by a man and a woman matched for comparable levels of self-identified humor self-efficacy. In subsequent rounds, the remaining captions were paired randomly. MTurk users, unaware of the captioners’ gender, selected the captions of men as funnier only under the low self-efficacy condition and those of women as funnier under the high self-efficacy condition. These data suggest that self-efficacy may be a critical determinant of the successful performance of humor. When people say that women are not funny, they may be relying on an unfounded stereotype. We discuss how this stereotype may negatively affect perceptions of women in the workplace and other settings.