The role of technology in the study of semiotic representations in mathematics

En este trabajo resumimos algunas reflexiones sobre el papel que pueden desarrollar la tecnología en el estudio de sistemas semióticos de representación, y que constituyen el núcleo para la comprensión de los procesos de construcción del conocimiento matemático de los estudiantes. La cita corresponde con el resumen de una página publicado.

The calculator as an instrument of validation of mathematical knowledge: a case study

En este trabajo se describe una experiencia llevada a cabo con profesores de matemáticas en formación, sobre el papel que pueden desarrollar las nuevas tecnologías para llevar a cabo procesos de demostración y prueba en el aula de secundaria.

Adaptation of a questionnaire to assess the epistemological beliefs of mathematics in secondary school teachers

The objective of the study is to determine the psychometric properties of the Epistemological Beliefs Questionnaire on Mathematics. 171 Secondary School Mathematics Teachers of the Central Region of Cuba participated. The results show acceptable internal consistency. The factorial structure of the scale revealed three major factors, consistent with the Model of the Three Constructs: beliefs about knowledge, about learning and teaching. Irregular levels in the development of the epistemological belief system about mathematics of these teachers were shown, with a tendency among naivety and sophistication poles. In conclusion, the questionnaire is useful for evaluating teacher’s beliefs about mathematics.

Predictors of attitudes toward inclusion of students with special educational needs in future education professionals

One of the main pillars in the development of inclusive schools is the initial teacher training. Before determining if it is necessary to make changes (and of what type) in training programs or curriculum guides related to the attention to diversity and inclusive education, the attitudes of future education professionals in this area should be analyzed. This includes the identification of the relevant predictors of inclusive attitudes. The research reported in this article pursued this objective, doing so with a quantitative survey methodology based on the use of cross-sectional structured data collection and statistical analyses related to the quality of the attitude questionnaire (factor analysis and Cronbach's alpha), descriptive statistics, correlations, hypothesis tests for difference of means, and regression analysis in order to predict attitudes towards inclusion in education. Firstly, the results show that the participants held very positive attitudes toward the inclusion of students with special educational needs. Particularly, older respondents, those with a longer training and, to a lesser extent, women and those who had been in touch with disabled people stood out within this attitude. Secondly, it is evidenced that self-transcendence values ​and, more weakly, contact, function as robust predictors of attitudes of future practitioners towards the inclusion of students with special needs. Some applications for the initial professionalization of educators are suggested in the discussion.

The use of cues for attention in ancient Greek art: aspects that influence concentration in the work of art and its elements

The goal of this study is to identify cues for the cognitive process of attention in ancient Greek art, aiming to find confirmation of its possible use by ancient Greek audiences and artists. Evidence of cues that trigger attention’s psychological dispositions was searched through content analysis of image reproductions of ancient Greek sculpture and fine vase painting from the archaic to the Hellenistic period - ca. 7th -1st cent. BC. Through this analysis, it was possible to observe the presence of cues that trigger orientation to the work of art (i.e. amplification, contrast, emotional salience, simplification, symmetry), of a cue that triggers a disseminate attention to the parts of the work (i.e. distribution of elements) and of cues that activate selective attention to specific elements in the work of art (i.e. contrast of elements, salient color, central positioning of elements, composition regarding the flow of elements and significant objects). Results support the universality of those dispositions, probably connected with basic competencies that are hard-wired in the nervous system and in the cognitive processes.

Charged experience's of natural environments

Natural environments often generate experiences that combine great emotional and moral power- "charged" experiences. Their characteristics are explored through writings that capture them convincingly. They appear to have a perceptual character. Perception of the scene is invested with a sense of something beyond it, and much bigger. It may be God, or immensity in time or space, or the essence of a nation. This encounter is often connected with moral authority. A recurring theme is the sense that environment and the things in it-including the observer-are a self-similar pattern. People are not passive recipients of these experiences. They seek them out. Evoking, the environment in words can often evoke the charged experience too-at least in part. The material suggests tasks for psychologists-most simply, finding systematic ways to describe these experiences. That may help other environmental disciplines, which face difficulty characterising the dimension of response. Theoretically, the material raises questions about the representations generated by perceptual processes. The observation that powerful moral imperatives seem to be given in the act of perceiving is also suggestive for the psychology of morality. Culture certainly plays a part in charged responses, but landscapes have the power to be invested with an emotional and moral charge where other stimuli may not.

Categorizations of physical gesture in piano teaching: A preliminary enquiry

The significance of the “physicality” involved in learning to play a musical instrument and the essential role of teachers are areas in need of research. This article explores the role of gesture within teacher–student communicative interaction in one-to-one piano lessons. Three teachers were required to teach a pre-selected repertoire of two contrasting pieces to three students studying piano grade 1. The data was collected by video recordings of piano lessons and analysis based on the type and frequency of gestures employed by teachers in association to teaching behaviours specifying where gestures fit under (or evade) predefined classifications. Spontaneous co-musical gestures were observed in the process of piano tuition emerging with similar general communicative purposes as spontaneous co-verbal gestures and were essential for the process of musical communication between teachers and students. Observed frequencies of categorized gestures varied significantly between different teaching behaviours and between the three teachers. Parallels established between co-verbal and co-musical spontaneous gestures lead to an argument for extension of McNeill’s (2005) ideas of imagery–language–dialectic to imagery–music–dialectic with relevant implications for piano pedagogy and fields of study invested in musical communication.

Communicating musical knowledge through gesture: Piano teachers’ gestural behaviours across different levels of student proficiency

Teachers’ communication of musical knowledge through physical gesture represents a valuable pedagogical field in need of investigation. This exploratory case study compares the gestural behaviour of three piano teachers while giving individual lessons to students who differed according to piano proficiency levels. The data was collected by video recordings of one-to-one piano lessons and gestures were categorized using two gesture classifications: the spontaneous co-verbal gesture classification (McNeill, 1992; 2005) and spontaneous co-musical gesture classification (Simones, Schroeder & Rodger, 2013). Poisson regression analysis and qualitative observation suggest a relationship between teachers’ didactic intentions and the types of gesture they produced while teaching, as shown by differences in gestural category frequency between teaching students of higher and lower levels of proficiency. Such reported agreement between teachers’ gestural approach in relation to student proficiency levels indicates a teachers’ gestural scaffolding approach whereby teachers adapted gestural communicative channels to suit students’ specific conceptual skill levels.

Promoting Harmonious Relations and Equitable Well-Being: Peace Psychology and “Intractable” Conflicts

The chapter explores Bar-Tal’s legacy in relation to key concepts, perspectives, and findings that comprise the growing field of peace psychology, specifically the promotion of sustainable peace through the indivisible constructs of harmonious relations and equitable wellbeing. Analyzed through a peace psychology lens, Bar-Tal’s work highlights both the barriers to and bridges for achieving sustainable peace. Central concepts from his work, such as fear, insecurity, and an ethos of conflict, demonstrate key obstacles to fostering harmonious intergroup relations based on social justice. Bar-Tal’s work also identifies processes that can overcome these barriers, which is consistent with peace psychology’s emphasis on the development of constructive responses to violence and conflict. For example, the chapter outlines how confidence-building mechanisms, mutually respectful identities, and reconciliation processes, may help foster an ethos of peace that can be embedded in the structure of societies through peace education. The chapter concludes with implications and suggestions for future research, with a focus on the role of young people in settings of prolonged intergroup division and generational approaches to peacebuilding, as conceptualized through a peace psychology lens.

Profiles of ageing in the South of Portugal: education and cognitive functioning in elderly persons living in institutionalized and community contexts

The region of the Algarve shows huge differences between the coastline where population in the urban areas grows, and the inland rural areas, in some cases very isolated, which frequently have high ageing indexes. This general scenario, with an elderly population with very different economic and social conditions, frames the ongoing PhD research designed as a cross-sectional study of an intentional sample of elderly persons. The basic theoretical framework departs from the perspective of developmental psychology of life-span and the model of selection, optimisation and compensation for optimal ageing (Baltes & Baltes, 1990; Freund & Baltes, 2002). The present study is a first step in the analysis of empirical data collected in the PhD sample (N=156; age range 65 to 97 years; M = 80.4 years; SD = 7.2 years). Its purpose is to assess the cognitive functioning of participants, screening for cognitive impairment and examine the relations between the cognitive status of the subjects and a number of selected variables including educational level, age, physical activity and living contexts of the subjects. We accessed the cognitive status of the participants with the Portuguese version of Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) finding a 10.3% prevalence of positive cases with cognitive impairment. The results also show significant relationships between the cognitive status accessed by the MMSE and educational level, professional qualification, age, living arrangement and activity level of the participants. The relationship verified between educational level and cognitive status of the participants was the largest correlation found in the study with the variability in educational level accounting for 44.8% of the variability in MMSE score. This results points in the same direction of several lines of research that corroborate the strong intercorrelation between education and cognitive functioning in old age.

How the sublime became "now": time, modernity and aesthetics in Lyotard's rewriting of Kant

Writing in the late 1980s, Nancy gives as examples of the "recent fashion for the sublime" not only the theoreticians of Paris, but the artists of Los Angeles, Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the sublime may of course no longer seem quite so "now" as it did back then, whether in North America, Europe, or Japan. Simon Critchley, for one, has suggested that, at least as regards the issue of its conceptual coupling to "postmodernism," the "debate" concerning the sublime "has become rather stale and the discussion has moved on." Nonetheless, if that debate has indeed "moved on"-and thankfully so-it is not without its remainder, particularly in the very contemporary context of a resurgence of interest in explicitly philosophical accounts of art, in the wake of an emergent critique of cultural studies and of the apparent waning of poststructuralism's influence-a resurgence that has led to a certain "return to aesthetics" in recent Continental philosophy and to the work of Kant, Schelling, and the German Romantics. Moreover, as Nancy's precise formulations suggest, the "fashion" [mode] through which the sublime "offers itself"-as "a break within or from aesthetics"-clearly contains a significance that Critchley's more straightforward narration of shifts in theoretical chic cannot encompass. At stake in this would be the relation between the mode of fashion and art's "destiny" within modernity itself, from the late eighteenth century onwards. Such a conception of art's "destiny," as inextricably linked to that of the sublime, is not unique to recent French theory. In a brief passage in Aesthetic Theory, Adorno also suggests that the "sublime, which Kant reserved exclusively for nature, later became the historical constituent of art itself.... [I]n a subtle way, after the fall of formal beauty, the sublime was the only aesthetic idea left to modernism." As such, although the term has its classical origins in Longinus, its historical character for "us," both Nancy and Adorno argue, associates it specifically with the emergence of the modern. As another philosopher states: "It is around this name [of the sublime] that the destiny of classical poetics was hazarded and lost; it is in this name that ... romanticism, in other words, modernity, triumphed."