Symbolic Awareness Research Articles

Cognitive diagnosis and algorithmic cultural analysis of fourth-grade Yi students' mathematical skills in China: A case study of several primary schools in Puge county, Liangshan prefecture.

The Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture is the largest area in China inhabited by the Yi people, and the original Yi characteristics and culture are well maintained. The Yi also have a high degree of ethnic and cultural intermingling with Tibetans, Han and other ethnic groups. The level of mathematical abilities directly determines the quality of mathematical learning of Yi students. Primary four is the stage of "concrete operations," and is a critical point in the development of mathematical symbolic awareness. In this study, the geographical location of the school and the financial income of the township in which the school is located were used as the basis for sampling, and the DINA model was used to diagnose the mathematical ability of fourth grade students in three rural Yi primary schools in Puge County. The study found that there was individual variability in the mathematical abilities of fourth grade Yi students, with 21 different types of cognitive error patterns identified, the main ones being five. In addition, the state of knowledge of fourth grade Yi students in arithmetic revealed that their overall level of mathematical ability was low, showing a lag, with none of the knowledge attributes of arithmetic being fully mastered. Cultural differences between the Chinese and Yi languages contribute to the difficulties that Yi students have in learning mathematical operations, including differences in understanding the place value system, zero, decimal expressions, and differences in the perception of multiplication and division. The above research can inform the implementation of targeted remediation for teaching and learning.

Research on Abstraction Ability under the Background of Mathematics Key Competencies in Junior High School in China

The abstraction ability in junior high school is an extension of the number sense, quantity sense, and symbolic awareness in primary school, and the foundation of mathematical abstraction in senior high school. Abstraction ability is one of the key competencies that junior high school students must have. This study used the China Knowledge Network(CNKI) as a data source to analyze previous research to find out the current situations, deficiencies, and gaps in this direction and found that: (1) Current domestic research on abstraction ability against the background of mathematics key competencies mainly focuses on the following five aspects: strategies for cultivating students' abstraction ability, development status of abstraction ability, evaluation dimension division of abstraction ability, specific manifestations of abstraction ability, influencing factors of students' abstraction ability. (2) The cultivation strategies of students' abstraction ability mainly focus on six aspects, and the researchers have given more comprehensive training suggestions. The previous research mainly investigated the situations of students' abstraction ability and teachers' teaching on the training of abstraction ability. Almost all of the evaluation dimension division of abstraction ability is based on students' mastery of mathematical concepts, principles, rules, and ways of thinking in different situations. There is less research on the specific manifestations and influencing factors of abstraction ability. (3) Based on current research, future research needs to adopt more scientific research tools, a more reasonable analysis framework, expand the research scope, increase validation research, and give more scientific suggestions. So that the research on the abstraction ability of junior high school students is more comprehensive, systematic, and profound.

Technology-mediated task-based learning: creating affordances for English language development in digital intercultural encounters

This study investigates affordances provided by Technology-Mediated Task-Based Learning (TBL) for language development in an online English as a Second Language class with multinational students in a US university context. From a complexity perspective, this study analyzes whether Technology-Mediated TBL helps build trust and confidence among learners enhancing intercultural and symbolic awareness. We used a netnographic methodology, adapting ethnography to include the influence of the internet in technology-mediated environments. Findings showed that Technology-Mediated TBL provides conditions for intercultural encounters. The task cycle allows the emergence of affordances for learners to build confidence and trust while engaged in language development practices.

Children's awareness of ethnic outgroup symbols: Piloting a task in the Republic of Ireland.

Exploring children's awareness of social categories could uncover the foundation of intergroup attitudes and behaviours. Indigenous to Ireland, Travellers are an ethnic minority marked by a tradition of nomadism, only formally recognised as a distinct ethnic group in 2017. This brief report analyses data from 148 children aged 6-12 (55% female) in the Republic of Ireland. A quantitative task was adapted and applied to assess children's awareness of symbols associated with the Traveller community. We found that primary school children could accurately categorise the symbols which relied on perceptually obvious markers of Traveller identity, and that this remained stable across middle childhood. However, children did not correctly categorise symbols related to less observable elements (e.g., language, trade, religion). To the best of our knowledge, these findings are the first to identify specific symbols which are salient in children's awareness about this marginalised group. Implications for school-based interventions are discussed.

A Summary of the Research on Mathematical Symbol Consciousness in China in Recent Ten Years—Knowledge Map Analysis Based on CiteSpace

Symbolic awareness; Mathematical Education; Knowledge graph

Sacramental Meditation

The group practice called "sacramental meditation" relies on sacred objects and spontaneous imagination to prepare its participants for spiritual experience. The meditation object is likened to an icon. The practice is compared with Loyola's "spiritual exercises" and the therapeutic technique of "active imagination'. Fowler's theory of faith development is used to show the forms of symbolic awareness that occur during a meditation. The theory, the method, and the effects of sacramental meditation are reviewed.

Competing Cultures of Conservation

In the last quarter century, environmental conservation efforts by nongovernmental organizations, private companies, or nation states have most prominently featured expansion of formally protected areas and the integration of elements of biological and social sciences in their monitoring and management. For most involved in such efforts, culture has been either an obstacle to wider adoption of practices intended to achieve conservation or a characteristic of societies who protect nature through their management practices and belief systems. The next quarter century would benefit from a broader awareness of conservation culture, which I define as a series of distinct aesthetic, technical, and ideological positions. Conservation cultures pertain not only to small societies, but also to the institutions and initiatives that characterize conservation as a complex transnational field of experts, policy makers, private and public sector leaders, and community members. I write of my own experiences in Appalachia and equatorial Africa and of popular novels and films to show how a reflexive idea of culture, or awareness of symbols and meanings in one’s own self and society, is a key to future conservation success. Contrast and Conflict in Conservation Cultures I grew up in Tennessee, along the perimeter of the U.S. Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a suburban youth whose family often went backpacking in the park on weekends. Oblivious to the history of the park’s designation, I relished that landscape’s contrasts with my ordinary routines. After time in the mountains, my sister and I basked in the hour-long return drive to our home, our bodies salty and streaked with the loamy black soil of southern Appalachia. We would ride out of the park through valleys dotted with shacks, where pickup trucks almost all sported gun racks. As we crossed the Tennessee River into Knoxville we saw emblems of a suburban landscape. The first was the groomed lawn of a graceful yet dilapidated old mansion that housed the Teen Board of Knoxville, a social club that invited us to attend both cotillions and meetings to organize volunteer projects. From that mansion onward we looked out at a parade of carefully mulched dogwood trees and azalea plants nestled around splashing stone fountains. In my residential neighborhood, named Sequoyah Hills after the famous Cherokee leader, such fountains were designed in the 1920s to emulate Native American symbols and designs. They are interspersed with an actual Indian mound, badly eroded but affixed with plaques provided by a neighborhood preservation association that offer a terse history of Cherokee settlement in the region. As an adolescent, I was vaguely conscious of ways of life that had been displaced in favor of the settlements that matured into today’s suburban riverbanks. Not until my early twenties, after working at conservation sites in the Congo Basin as a Peace Corps volunteer and researcher, did I find myself avidly reading reprinted works from the early 1900s such as James Mooney’s ethnography (Mooney & Ellison 1992) of Cherokee culture and Horace Kephart’s (1976) accounts of his time with white farmers and hunters in the southern Appalachians. These books were early attempts to debunk stereotypes about so-called rural or primitive peoples, yet each unwittingly established new stereotypes. In trying to translate alterity, or otherness, in relation to dominant cultural norms, these books also marked cultural difference in ways that inadvertently reinforced boundaries among contemporary land uses. Suburbia and wilderness are distinct, yet both preclude the kind of local subsistence use of resources that Mooney or Kephart chronicled.

Means of communication and sources of information: Two-year-old children's use of pictures as symbols

People use pictures for many purposes, but two common functions are to communicate information to others and to extract new information. Previous research has demonstrated that 2-year-old children fail in using pictures as sources of information in search tasks (DeLoache & Burns, 1994). The purpose of this research was to investigate if children this age could, nonetheless, communicate via a picture the location of an object they have observed being hidden and, if so, whether experience with this function can facilitate using pictures as sources of information. Results show that children successfully used pictures to communicate information and that the symbolic awareness children gained with this task was rapidly transferred to one that required using pictures to extract information, task in which they otherwise fail.

The mass media and terrorism

The mass media promotes terrorism by stressing fear and an uncertain future. Major changes in US foreign and domestic policy essentially went unreported and unchallenged by the dominant news organizations. Notwithstanding the long relationship in the United States between fear and crime, the role of the mass media in promoting fear has become more pronounced since the United States `discovered' international terrorism on 11 September 2001. Extensive qualitative media analysis shows that political decision-makers quickly adjusted propaganda passages, prepared as part of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), to emphasize domestic support for the new US role in leading the world. These messages were folded into the previous crime-related discourse of fear, which may be defined as the pervasive communication, symbolic awareness, and expectation that danger and risk are a central feature of everyday life. Politicians marshaled critical symbols and icons joining terrorism with Iraq, the Muslim faith, and a vast number of non-western nations to strategically promote fear and use of audience beliefs and assumptions about danger, risk and fear in order to achieve certain goals, including expanding domestic social control.

Smart on crime: The new language for prisoner release

This exploratory study of news media reports examines language of incarceration shifts from ‘tough on crime’ to ‘smart on crime’ as a feature of broader, contextual meanings about: (1) the costs and benefits of prison and incarceration; (2) the moral meanings and ‘practical reasoning’ associated with imprisonment; (3) the language of deviance and respectability. This work is linked to two long-term projects. One is the ‘discourse of fear’, the pervasive communication, symbolic awareness, and expectation that danger and risk are a central feature of everyday life. The other is ‘the language of justice’, or a discourse analysis of justice speech and the construction of social control. Our aim in this project is to explore the changing discourse of incarceration. News reports were selected and analyzed using ethnographic content analysis and ‘tracking discourse’, or following certain issues, words, themes, and frames over a period of time, across different issues, and across different news media. We find that ‘smart on crime’ did promote more lenient sentences for less demonized offenders, but the message was more receptive to news organizations if delivered by claims makers associated with criminal justice organizations. Some implications for claims making and the social construction of reality are discussed.

Alfred Schutz: Transcendence, Symbolic Intersubjectivity, and Moral Value

This article uses the writings of Alfred Schutz as catalysts to analyze three distinctive modes of transcendences operative in human experience. Particular attention is given to the role symbolic awareness plays in the formation and embodiment of moral value. I argue that Schutz's theory of symbols is helpful in illuminating the way shared horizons of value meaning and collective moral purpose can occur in relation to cultural and geographical anonymity. I then draw upon the moral theory of H. Richard Niebuhr to highlight the positive role that symbolic value horizons play in preventing ethnocentric world-views and in promoting common centers of discourse and visions of wholeness.

Children and the Discourse of Fear

The news media, a dominant source of information about social issues, use entertainment formats to organize reports that audiences will understand. Part of this organized effort is the use of a discourse of fear, or the pervasive communication, symbolic awareness, and expectation that danger and risk are central features of everyday life. Reliant on formal agents of social control as news sources about fear, news reports tend to repeat certain words, themes, and perspectives that support more social control. Although associated with crime, the discourse of fear includes other topics and concerns as well. A qualitative content analysis approach, “tracking discourse,” permits a mapping of discourse over time and across various topics. Analysis of the use of fear in three major newspapers during 1987–1996 shows that it has increased; that a large part of the discourse of fear includes children and the spaces they occupy (e.g., schools and neighborhoods); and that it changed from a focus on specific events in the 1980s to a more generalized, pervasive perspective in the 1990s, peaking in about 1994. It is argued that this is important for making claims about “necessary” social action to protect children, as well as protect us from children.Fear is the path to the dark side.—Star Wars: Episode 1: The Phantom Menace

Fear in the News: A Discourse of Control

Fear pervades popular culture and the news media. Whether used as a noun, verb, adverb, or adjective, an ongoing study finds that the word “fear” pervades news reports across all sections of newspapers, and is shown to move or “travel” from one topic to another. The use of fear and the thematic emphases spawned by entertainment formats are consistent with a “discourse of fear,” or the pervasive communication, symbolic awareness and expectation that danger and risk are a central feature of the effective environment. A qualitative content analysis of a decade of news coverage in The Arizona Republic and several other major American news media (e.g., the Los Angeles Times, and ABC News) reveals that the word “fear” appears more often than it did several years ago, particularly in headlines, where its use has more than doubled. Comparative materials obtained through the Lexis/Nexis information base also reveals that certain themes are associated with a shifting focus of fear over the years (e.g., violence, drugs, AIDS), with the most recent increases associated with reports about children. Analysis suggests that this use of fear is consistent with popular culture oriented to pursuing a “problem frame” and entertainment formats, which also have social implications for social policy and reliance on formal agents of social control.

An Exploration of Aspects of Language Proficiency and Algebra Learning

We have attempted to investigate whether 3 cognitive components of language proficiencymetalinguistic awareness of symbol, syntax, and ambiguity-are associated with students' success in learning the notation of algebra. Pencil-and-paper tests were given to assess students' metalinguistic awareness and their ability to use algebraic notation. In a total sample of more than 1500 students, aged 11 to 15, who were in their 1st to 4th years of algebra learning, we found that very few students with low metalinguistic awareness scores achieved high algebra scores. We discuss implications of this finding for the school algebra curriculum.

Jung, the Tao, and the Classic of Change

This paper developed from a series of lectures and seminars given in London and Cambridge, England, in early 1999 and takes into consideration participants' comments. In it, Dr. Karcher looks at the connection between Jung's psychology and the Chinese oracle book called I ChingorYijing,usually translated as Classic of Change.This connection centers on a mysterious symbolic awareness that Chinese philosophers call tao or way. This symbolic awareness involved both Jung and his psychology in a very special “orientation,” a Journey to the East.

A symbolic awareness context identified through a grounded theory study of health visiting

The purpose of the study, which is not yet complete, was one of theory building or conceptualization. This was needed because of a lack of information about how health visitors identify which approach to use within any particular situation. An overview of the method of grounded theory explains how data were collected and analysed. Then, one major aspect of the emerging theory--a symbolic awareness context which seems to surround and influence interactions between health visitors and their clients--is outlined. The analysis suggests that, when the interaction is examined in context, any one question, purpose or topic selected by health visitor or client as a specific focus, forms only a relatively small component part of the whole. Strategies which enhance openness and consonance within the context are detailed. The awareness context has implications for health visiting practice and organization.

Phenomenological questions about obsession and delusion.

The problem of the relationship between obsession and delusion is dealt with from descriptive, anthropoanalytical and purely phenomenological points of view. The main differential aspects are focused. The phenomenological concept of the progressive fading of the 'feeling of Ego activity' is proposed as the functional bias at the basis of the continuum linking obsessive symbolic awareness to delusional perception.

Symbols, anxiety, and ritual: A functional interpretation

This article deals with the relationship between symbols and ritual. The thesis is advanced that the human capacity for symbol production creates disruptive problems as well as adaptive advantages and that ritual serves as one major mechanism for controlling these disruptive aspects. Symbolic awareness greatly expands an organism's psychological field, and it is argued here that this expansion in turn generates problems of information organization, extended awareness of threat and amplification of appetitive drives. These extensions of consciousness are potentially disruptive and anxiety producing to the individual and may threaten group coherence as well. We maintain that by structuring symbolic expression, ritual behavior serves the important function of delimiting the proliferative tendencies inherent in symbol production and thereby helps to control this disruptive potential.

Toward an Ontology of Relativism

Despite the significant impact of the awareness of perspectival relativism on the religious imagination, recent philosophers and theologians have rarely subjected epistemological relativism to careful scrutiny. This paper attempts to overcome the current theological impasse by a careful exploration of the metaphysical implications of relativism. The central thesis of the essay is that truth is relative because meaning is contextual and being is relational. Contextualized meaning and relational beingjoin to form relative truth disclosed through symbolic awareness. The roots of contemporary relativism lie deep within eighteenth and nineteenth century philosophical movements and are inseparably entangled with the psycho-social pluralization endemic to the process of modernization. The efforts of Neo-orthodoxy, polytheism, and the scientific study of religion to resolve dilemmas posed by epistemological relativism are inadequate. What has gone unnoticed is that the discovery of truth's relativity is the realization of its inherently dialectical character. This insight begins to emerge when it is recognized that meaning is contextual and context is semiophantic. Principles identified in Hegel's logic, in MerleauPonty's phenomenology of temporality, and in Ricoeur's and Gadamer's hermeneutics disclose that meaning assumes form through dialectical interrelationship in which co-implicates mutually constitute each other. The synchronic and diachronic dimensions of relationality reveal the inexhaustability and perpetual revisability of meaning. The problem of semantics, however, is inseparable from the question of ontology. Ontological reflection leads to the conclusion that being itself is dialecticalfundamentally social or essentially relational. Determinate identity is born of ontological intercourse with otherness. Relations are not external and accidental, but are internal and essential to being itself. Identity and difference, unity and plurality, oneness and manyness are thoroughly corelative, joined in a dialectical relation of reciprocal implication. This pluralized unity and unified plurality is the ontological matrix of truth's relativity.