Travail d’articulation et organisation de travail : Etude dans un collectif de l’enseignement public

Articulation work is an activity that makes other’s work easier or allows a whole work collective to reach its objectives. It is necessary for a coordinated functioning in organizations, but is often unrecognized and seldom considered as a full activity. In this study, we tried to find if work organization could affect the occurrence of articulation work. We analyzed articulation work made between pairs of persons and its relations with the proximity of their offices, the amount of working time in common, the proximity of their posts, the degree of interdependance linked to their duties. Among these organizational factors, we noticed that only the interdependance level could explain the differences in articulation work depending on the pairs of individuals considered.     

Creativity in Digital Reality / Creatividad en la realidad digital

Abstract

Digital environments — simulations, games and realities — have been gaining more attention in behaviour research as the relevant technology has become more advanced and affordable. This increased attention has been paralleled by the growing research literature, a corner of which belongs to studies of creativity in digital environments. This mini review highlights the main threads of this corner, focusing on the utilization of digital environments in education and industry.     

Communal schools and teacher victimization

Despite data showing that teacher victimization is at least as great a problem as student victimization, far less research exists regarding teacher victimization than student victimization and overall school crime, particularly with regard to the application of criminological theory to explain the victimization of teachers. We address this gap by examining the hierarchical relationship between communal school organization and teacher victimization in a nationally representative sample of 37,497 teachers from 7,488 public schools in the United States. Results showed that teacher experienced less victimization in schools that were more communally organized. We discuss these findings and present implications for school-based delinquency prevention.     

No frills: Simple regularities in language can go a long way in the development of word knowledge

Recent years have seen a flourishing of Natural Language Processing models that can mimic many aspects of human language fluency. These models harness a simple, decades-old idea: It is possible to learn a lot about word meanings just from exposure to language, because words similar in meaning are used in language in similar ways. The successes of these models raise the intriguing possibility that exposure to word use in language also shapes the word knowledge that children amass during development. However, this possibility is strongly challenged by the fact that models use language input and learning mechanisms that may be unavailable to children. Across three studies, we found that unrealistically complex input and learning mechanisms are unnecessary. Instead, simple regularities of word use in children's language input that they have the capacity to learn can foster knowledge about word meanings. Thus, exposure to language may play a simple but powerful role in children's growing word knowledge. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/dT83dmMffnM .

Research Highlights

• Natural Language Processing (NLP) models can learn that words are similar in meaning from higher-order statistical regularities of word use.
• Unlike NLP models, infants and children may primarily learn only simple co-occurrences between words.
• We show that infants' and children's language input is rich in simple co-occurrence that can support learning similarities in meaning between words.
• We find that simple co-occurrences can explain infants' and children's knowledge that words are similar in meaning.