Children making sense of science

Abstract This study explored the effects that the incorporation of nature of science (NoS) activities in the primary science classroom had on children’s perceptions and understanding of science. We compared children’s ideas in four classes by inviting them to talk, draw and write about what science meant to them: two of the classes were taught by ‘NoS’ teachers who had completed an elective nature of science (NoS) course in the final year of their Bachelor of Education (B.Ed) degree. The ‘non-NoS’ teachers who did not attend this course taught the other two classes. All four teachers had graduated from the same initial teacher education institution with similar teaching grades and all had carried out the same science methods course during their B.Ed programme. We found that children taught by the teachers who had been NoS-trained developed more elaborate notions of nature of science, as might be expected. More importantly, their reflections on science and their science lessons evidenced a more in-depth and sophisticated articulation of the scientific process in terms of scientists “trying their best” and “sometimes getting it wrong” as well as “getting different answers”. Unlike children from non-NoS classes, those who had engaged in and reflected on NoS activities talked about their own science lessons in the sense of ‘doing science’. These children also expressed more positive attitudes about their science lessons than those from non-NoS classes. We therefore suggest that there is added value in including NoS activities in the primary science curriculum in that they seem to help children make sense of science and the scientific process, which could lead to improved attitudes towards school science. We argue that as opposed to considering the relevance of school science only in terms of children’s experience, relevance should include relevance to the world of science, and NoS activities can help children to link school science to science itself.

Keeping a sense of proportion but losing all perspective: a critique of Gorard's notion of the 'Politician's Error'

In 1999 Stephen Gorard published an article in this journal in which he provided a trenchant critique of what he termed the `politician's error' in analysing differences in educational attainment. The main consequence of this error, he argued, has been the production of misleading findings in relation to trends in educational performance over time that have, in turn, led to misguided and potentially damaging policy interventions. By using gender differences in educational attainment as a case study, this article begins by showing how Gorard's notion of the politician's error has been largely embraced and adopted uncritically by those within the field. However, the article goes on to demonstrate how Gorard's own preferred way of analysing such differences – by calculating and comparing proportionate changes in performance between groups – is also inherently problematic and can lead to the production of equally misleading findings. The article will argue that there is a need to develop a more reliable and valid way of measuring trends in educational performance over time and will show that one of the simplest ways of doing this is to make use of existing, and widely accepted, measures of effect size.

No Sense of an Ending: Researching the Experience of Imprisonment and Release upon Republican Ex-Prisoners

This article describes an interview-based study of the effects of long-term imprisonment upon 18 Republican ex-prisoners and their families. The interviews followed a biographical, narrative format, drawing from experience of psychiatric assessment of released long-term prisoners. Interpretation of the material was influenced by the sociological literature on imprisonment effects and war trauma. The ex-prisoners had spent an average of 11 years in custody. They described complex experiences of loss, psychological change and social integration, particularly in the area of employment. A decade after release some still had vivid difficulties in coming to terms with the losses of the past and finding purpose for the future. There were parallels between the experiences of this goup and those of war veterans returning home. There is insufficient recognition of these phenomena in previous research on the psychological effects of imprisonment.

Cutaneous Grooves: Composing for the Sense of Touch

What if the traditional relationship between touch and music was essentially turned upside down, making the tactile sensation the aesthetic end? This paper presents a novel coupling of haptics technology and music, introducing the notion of tactile composition or aesthetic composition for the sense of touch. A system that facilitates the composition and perception of intricate, musically structured spatio-temporal patterns of vibration on the surface of the body is described. Relevant work from disciplines including sensory substitution, electronic musical instrument design, simulation design, entertainment technology, and visual music is considered. The psychophysical parameter space for our sense of touch is summarized and the building blocks of a compositional language for touch are explored. A series of concerts held for the skin and ears is described, as well as some of the lessons learned along the way. In conclusion, some potential evolutionary branches of tactile composition are posited.

An Extended Implementation of the Great Deluge Algorithm for Course Timetabling

Course Scheduling consists of assigning lecture events to a limited set of specific timeslots and rooms. The objective is to satisfy as many soft constraints as possible, while maintaining a feasible solution timetable. The most successful techniques to date require a compute-intensive examination of the solution neighbourhood to direct searches to an optimum solution. Although they may require fewer neighbourhood moves than more exhaustive techniques to gain comparable results, they can take considerably longer to achieve success. This paper introduces an extended version of the Great Deluge Algorithm for the Course Timetabling problem which, while avoiding the problem of getting trapped in local optima, uses simple Neighbourhood search heuristics to obtain solutions in a relatively short amount of time. The paper presents results based on a standard set of benchmark datasets, beating over half of the currently published best results with in some cases up to 60% of an improvement.