Investigating Concept Mapping and Stimulated Recall to Reveal Academic Teacher Beliefs and how they are enacted through learning designs for the Web

Increasingly, academic teachers are designing their own web sites to add value to or replace other forms of university teaching. These web sites are tangible and dynamic constructions that represent the teachers thinking and decisions derived from an implicit belief system about teaching and learning. The emphasis of this study is to explore the potential of the research techniques of concept-mapping and stimulated recall to locate the implicit pedagogies of academic teachers and investigate how they are enacted through the learning designs of their web sites. The rationale behind such an investigation is that once these implicit belief systems are made visible, then conversations can commence about how these beliefs are transformed into practice, providing a potent departure point for academic development.

Epistemic marking and multiple perspective : an introduction

This paper discusses forms of epistemic marking that instantiate multiple perspective constructions (see Evans 2005). Such forms express the speaker’s and the addressee’s simultaneous epistemic perspectives from the point of view of the speaker, crucially relying on the assumptions of the speaker with regard to the addressee’s knowledge. The analysis of forms considers established semanto-pragmatic concepts, such as semantic scope, mitigation strategies and communicative intention (as marked by sentence-type) in the exploration of forms. In addition, the notion of knowledge asymmetry is discussed alongside the concepts of epistemic status and stance as tools for a semantic analysis of investigated forms

Epistemic marking in Ika (Arwako)

The paper describes epistemic marking in Ika (Arwako-Chibchan, Colombia) and proposes an analysis in terms of a typologically unusual pattern called conjunct/disjunct, which has been attested for a small number of Asian and South American languages. Canonically, conjunct occurs with first person subjects in statements and with second person in questions, as opposed to any other combination of subject and sentence-type, which is disjunct. The pattern found in Ika both conforms to expectations and, at the same time, contributes to a more nuanced analysis of the functional motivations of the conjunct/disjunct pattern. In Ika, conjunct marking encodes the speaker's direct access to an event that involves either (or both) of the speech participants. In addition, conjunct/disjunct marking interacts predictably with a second set of epistemic markers that encode asymmetries in the epistemic authority of the speaker and the addressee. The analysis builds on first-hand data but remains tentative, awaiting further investigation.

The role of 'perspective' in epistemic marking

The paper focuses on inter-personal aspects of the context in the analysis of evidential and related epistemic marking systems. While evidentiality is defined by its capacity to qualify the speaker's indexical point of view in terms of information source, it is argued that other aspects of the context are important to analyze evidentiality both conceptually and grammatically. These distinct, analytical components concern the illocutionary status of a given marker and its scope properties. The importance of the hearer's point of view in pragmatics and semantics is well attested and constitutes a convincing argument for an increased emphasis on the perspective of the hearer/addressee in analyses of epistemic marking, such as evidentiality. The paper discusses available accounts of evidentials that attend to the perspective of the addressee and also introduces lesser-known epistemic marking systems that share a functional space with evidentiality.

An investigation into children’s inductive reasoning strategies:What drives the development of category induction?

In a series of studies, I investigated the developmental changes in children’s inductive reasoning strategy, methodological manipulations affecting the trajectory, and driving mechanisms behind the development of category induction. I systematically controlled the nature of the stimuli used, and employed a triad paradigm in which perceptual cues were directly pitted against category membership, to explore under which circumstances children used perceptual or category induction. My induction tasks were designed for children aged 3-9 years old using biologically plausible novel items. In Study 1, I tested 264 children. Using a wide age range allowed me to systematically investigate the developmental trajectory of induction. I also created two degrees of perceptual distractor – high and low – and explored whether the degree of perceptual similarity between target and test items altered children’s strategy preference. A further 52 children were tested in Study 2, to examine whether children showing a perceptual-bias were in fact basing their choice on maturation categories. A gradual transition was observed from perceptual to category induction. However, this transition could not be due to the inability to inhibit high perceptual distractors as children of all ages were equally distracted. Children were also not basing their strategy choices on maturation categories. In Study 3, I investigated category structure (featural vs. relational category rules) and domain (natural vs. artefact) on inductive preference. I tested 403 children. Each child was assigned to either the featural or relational condition, and completed both a natural kind and an artefact task. A further 98 children were tested in Study 4, on the effect of using stimuli labels during the tasks. I observed the same gradual transition from perceptual to category induction preference in Studies 3 and 4. This pattern was stable across domains, but children developed a category-bias one year later for relational categories, arguably due to the greater demands on executive function (EF) posed by these stimuli. Children who received labels during the task made significantly more category choices than those who did not receive labels, possibly due to priming effects. Having investigated influences affecting the developmental trajectory, I continued by exploring the driving mechanism behind the development of category induction. In Study 5, I tested 60 children on a battery of EF tasks as well as my induction task. None of the EF tasks were able to predict inductive variance, therefore EF development is unlikely to be the driving factor behind the transition. Finally in Study 6, I divided 252 children into either a comparison group or an intervention group. The intervention group took part in an interactive educational session at Twycross Zoo about animal adaptations. Both groups took part in four induction tasks, two before and two a week after the zoo visits. There was a significant increase in the number of category choices made in the intervention condition after the zoo visit, a result not observed in the comparison condition. This highlights the role of knowledge in supporting the transition from perceptual to category induction. I suggest that EF development may support induction development, but the driving mechanism behind the transition is an accumulation of knowledge, and an appreciation for the importance of category membership.