What Makes Science Hard for Newcomers?

Part I What makes science hard for newcomers? 1) The background (briefly) of my research - (why the math anxiety model doesn’t fit) 2) The Tier analysis (a visual) – message: there are many types of science learners in your class than simply younger versions of yourself 3) Three approaches (bio, chem, physics) but only one Nature 4) The (different) vocabularies of the three Sciences 5) How mathematics is variously used in Science Part II Rules and rules-driven assignments- lQ vs OQ1) How to incorporate creativity into assignments and tests? 2) Tests- borrowing “thought questions" from other fields (If Columbus hadn't discovered the new World, when and under whose law would it have been discovered?) 3) Grading practices (partial credit, post-exam credit for finding and explaining nontrivial errors 4) Icing on the cake – applications, examples of science/engineering from Tuesdays NY Times Part III Making Change at the Departmental Level 1) Taking control of at least some portion of the curriculum 2) Varying style of presentation 3) Taking control of at least some portion of the exams 4) GRADING pros and cons of grading on a curve 5) Updating labs and lab reporting.

Second tier professionals: English teachers in England

The policy context for mother-tongue educators at all levels in England has been dominated by a matrix with four key elements,running along two spectra, one of learning (content↘assessment) and one of teaching (autonomy↘accountability). In each case the trend has been towards increasing external control and decreasing professional autonomy. Whilst some imposed changes have been recognised as intrinsically valuable, the majority are viewed as detrimental to teachers' status and obstructive for students. The research community has been largely marginalised and has had little scope to influence proceedings. A rapidly developing crisis in teacher retention may yet reverse these trends as the government is forced to recognise the long-term implications of their treatment of the profession.

Morphosyntactic processing in advanced second language (L2) learners: An event-related potential investigation of the effects of L1-L2 similarity and structural distance

Different theoretical accounts of second language (L2) acquisition differ with respect to whether or not advanced learners are predicted to show native like processing for features not instantiated in the native language (L1). We examined how native speakers of English, a language with number but not gender agreement, process number and gender agreement in Spanish. We compare agreement within a determiner phrase (órgano muy complejo “[DP organ-MASC-SG very complex-MASC-SG]”) and across a verb phrase (cuadro es auténtico “painting-MASC-SG [VP is authentic-MASC-SG]”) in order to investigate whether native like processing is limited to local domains (e.g. within the phrase), in line with Clahsen and Felser (2006). We also examine whether morphological differences in how the L1 and L2 realize a shared feature impact processing by comparing number agreement between nouns and adjectives, where only Spanish instantiates agreement, and between demonstratives and nouns, where English also instantiates agreement. Similar to Spanish natives, advanced learners showed a P600 for both number and gender violations overall, in line with the Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis (Schwartz and Sprouse, 1996), which predicts that learners can show native-like processing for novel features. Results also show that learners can establish syntactic dependencies outside of local domains, as suggested by the presence of a P600 for both within and across phrase violations. Moreover, similar to native speakers, learners were impacted by the structural distance (number of intervening phrases) between the agreeing elements, as suggested by the more positive waveforms for within than across-phrase agreement overall. These results are consistent with the proposal that learners are sensitive to hierarchical structure.

Firm Building and Entrepreneurship in Second-Tier High-Tech Regions

This paper examines how a second-tier high-technology region leveraged corporate assets—mostly from transnational firms—in building a knowledge-based economy. The paper reviews how firm building and entrepreneurship influence the evolution of a peripheral regional economy. Using a case study of Boise, Idaho (the US), the research highlights several important sources of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurial firm formation is closely linked with a region's ability to grow incubator organizations, particularly innovative firms. These innovative firms provide the training ground for entrepreneurs. Firms, however, differ and the ways in which firm building activities influence regional entrepreneurship depend on firm strategy and organization. Thus, second-tier high-tech regions in the US are taking a different path than their well-known counterparts such as Silicon Valley or Route 128 around Boston.

Territorial development, planning reform and urban governance: the case of Ireland's second-tier cities

The increased emphasis within Europe on the role of second-tier cities has implications for the ways in which these urban centres are considered within national spatial planning strategies. In centralised, monocentric states like Ireland, there has been a general ambivalence towards urban policy for cities outside the capital city, and historically this has prevented the development of a strong, diversified urban hierarchy undermining prospects for balanced regional development. This paper examines the extent to which a new found emphasis on Ireland’s second-tier cities which emerged in the ‘Gateways’ policy of the National Spatial Strategy (NSS, 2002) was matched by subsequent political and administrative commitment to facilitate the development of these urban centres. Following a discussion of the position of second-tier cities in an international context and a brief overview of recent demographic and economic trends, the paper assesses the relative performance of Ireland’s second-tier cities in influencing development trends, highlighting a comprehensive failure to deliver compact urban growth. In this context, the paper then discusses the implications of current development plans for the second-tier cities and proposals for Irish local government reform for securing compact urban development.

fMRI evidence for the involvement of the procedural memory system in morphological processing of a second language

Behavioural evidence suggests that English regular past tense forms are automatically decomposed into their stem and affix (played  = play+ed) based on an implicit linguistic rule, which does not apply to the idiosyncratically formed irregular forms (kept). Additionally, regular, but not irregular inflections, are thought to be processed through the procedural memory system (left inferior frontal gyrus, basal ganglia, cerebellum). It has been suggested that this distinction does not to apply to second language (L2) learners of English; however, this has not been tested at the brain level. This fMRI study used a masked-priming task with regular and irregular prime-target pairs (played-play/kept-keep) to investigate morphological processing in native and highly proficient late L2 English speakers. No between-groups differences were revealed. Compared to irregular pairs, regular pairs activated the pars opercularis, bilateral caudate nucleus and the right cerebellum, which are part of the procedural memory network and have been connected with the processing of morphologically complex forms. Our study is the first to provide evidence for native-like involvement of the procedural memory system in processing of regular past tense by late L2 learners of English.

Search for gravitational radiation from intermediate mass black hole binaries in data from the second LIGO-Virgo joint science run

This paper reports on an unmodeled, all-sky search for gravitational waves from merging intermediate mass black hole binaries (IMBHB). The search was performed on data from the second joint science run of the LIGO and Virgo detectors (July 2009-October 2010) and was sensitive to IMBHBs with a range up to similar to 200 Mpc, averaged over the possible sky positions and inclinations of the binaries with respect to the line of sight. No significant candidate was found. Upper limits on the coalescence-rate density of nonspinning IMBHBs with total masses between 100 and 450 M-circle dot and mass ratios between 0.25 and 1 were placed by combining this analysis with an analogous search performed on data from the first LIGO-Virgo joint science run (November 2005-October 2007). The most stringent limit was set for systems consisting of two 88 M-circle dot black holes and is equal to 0.12 Mpc(-3) Myr(-1) at the 90% confidence level. This paper also presents the first estimate, for the case of an unmodeled analysis, of the impact on the search range of IMBHB spin configurations: the visible volume for IMBHBs with nonspinning components is roughly doubled for a population of IMBHBs with spins aligned with the binary's orbital angular momentum and uniformly distributed in the dimensionless spin parameter up to 0.8, whereas an analogous population with antialigned spins decreases the visible volume by similar to 20%.

Learning task specific distributed paragraph representations using a 2-tier convolutional neural network

We introduce a type of 2-tier convolutional neural network model for learning distributed paragraph representations for a special task (e.g. paragraph or short document level sentiment analysis and text topic categorization). We decompose the paragraph semantics into 3 cascaded constitutes: word representation, sentence composition and document composition. Specifically, we learn distributed word representations by a continuous bag-of-words model from a large unstructured text corpus. Then, using these word representations as pre-trained vectors, distributed task specific sentence representations are learned from a sentence level corpus with task-specific labels by the first tier of our model. Using these sentence representations as distributed paragraph representation vectors, distributed paragraph representations are learned from a paragraph-level corpus by the second tier of our model. It is evaluated on DBpedia ontology classification dataset and Amazon review dataset. Empirical results show the effectiveness of our proposed learning model for generating distributed paragraph representations.

Gaps in second language sentence processing

Four groups of second language (L2) learners of English from different language backgrounds (Chinese, Japanese, German, and Greek) and a group of native speaker controls participated in an online reading time experiment with sentences involving long-distance whdependencies. Although the native speakers showed evidence of making use of intermediate syntactic gaps during processing, the L2 learners appeared to associate the fronted wh-phrase directly with its lexical subcategorizer, regardless of whether the subjacency constraint was operative in their native language. This finding is argued to support the hypothesis that nonnative comprehenders underuse syntactic information in L2 processing.

Task design and second language performance: the effect of narrative type on learner output

This article reports on a detailed empirical study of the way narrative task design influences the oral performance of second-language (L2) learners. Building on previous research findings, two dimensions of narrative design were chosen for investigation: narrative complexity and inherent narrative structure. Narrative complexity refers to the presence of simultaneous storylines; in this case, we compared single-story narratives with dual-story narratives. Inherent narrative structure refers to the order of events in a narrative; we compared narratives where this was fixed to others where the events could be reordered without loss of coherence. Additionally, we explored the influence of learning context on performance by gathering data from two comparable groups of participants: 60 learners in a foreign language context in Teheran and 40 in an L2 context in London. All participants recounted two of four narratives from cartoon pictures prompts, giving a between-subjects design for narrative complexity and a within-subjects design for inherent narrative structure. The results show clearly that for both groups, L2 performance was affected by the design of the task: Syntactic complexity was supported by narrative storyline complexity and grammatical accuracy was supported by an inherently fixed narrative structure. We reason that the task of recounting simultaneous events leads learners into attempting more hypotactic language, such as subordinate clauses that follow, for example, while, although, at the same time as, etc. We reason also that a tight narrative structure allows learners to achieve greater accuracy in the L2 (within minutes of performing less accurately on a loosely structured narrative) because the tight ordering of events releases attentional resources that would otherwise be spent on finding connections between the pictures. The learning context was shown to have no effect on either accuracy or fluency but an unexpectedly clear effect on syntactic complexity and lexical diversity. The learners in London seem to have benefited from being in the target language environment by developing not more accurate grammar but a more diverse resource of English words and syntactic choices. In a companion article (Foster & Tavakoli, 2009) we compared their performance with native-speaker baseline data and see that, in terms of nativelike selection of vocabulary and phrasing, the learners in London are closing in on native-speaker norms. The study provides empirical evidence that L2 performance is affected by task design in predictable ways. It also shows that living within the target language environment, and presumably using the L2 in a host of everyday tasks outside the classroom, confers a distinct lexical advantage, not a grammatical one.