Common Theoretical Foundation Research Articles

Beyond gamification: reconceptualizing game-based learning in early childhood environments

The recent promotion and adoption of digital game-based learning (DGBL) in K-12 education presents compelling opportunities as well as challenges for early childhood educators who seek to critically, equitably and holistically support the learning and play of today's so-called digital natives. However, with most DGBL initiatives focused on the increasingly standardized ‘accountability’ models found in K-12 educational institutions, the authors ask whose priorities, identities and notions of play this model reinforces or neglects. Drawing on the literatures of early childhood studies, game-based learning, and game studies, they seek to illuminate the informal contexts of play within the ‘hidden’ and ‘null’ curricula of DGBL that do not fit within the efficiency models of mainstream education in North America. In the absence of a common critical or theoretical foundation for DGBL, they propose a conceptual framework that challenges what they regard to be the institutionally nullified dimensions of autonomy, play, affinity and space that are essential to DGBL. They contend that these dimensions are ideally situated within the inclusive and play-based curriculum early childhood learning environments, and that the early years constitute a critically significant, yet overlooked, location for more holistic and inclusive thinking on DGBL.

Technology to support parental engagement in elementary education: Lessons learned from the UK

This paper compares and contrasts two projects in order to better understand the complex issues surrounding the use of technology to support parental involvement with schools and their children’s learning. The Becta-funded ICT Test Bed evaluation (2002–2006) had the intention of saturating schools (in three areas of social deprivation) with a range of technologies, including 23 elementary schools. The ESRC/EPSRC/DTI-funded Homework project (2003–2006) used participatory design methods to develop and evaluate technology to link home and school in a elementary school in the South East. Both projects shared a common theoretical foundation, that of socio-cultural theory. The theory influenced the evaluation methodology employed in both projects and in the Homework project it additionally influenced the design of the technology intervention. Findings suggest that technologies with readily accessible and interactive resources that are flexible can help develop parental engagement. However, simpler and less resource hungry solutions such as the use of websites and email can provide opportunities for quick wins. In relation to transporting technology between home and school, there are issues for both staff and parents. Without purposeful use, these challenges act as a barrier once they outweigh the novelty effect. We conclude that parental needs are complex and that engagement needs to be sensitively scaffolded rather than focussing on the technology. Participatory design offers an effective means of addressing this and should be the starting point. The technology should facilitate independence and mediate access to a shared space for collaborative activity. The content and guidance needs to be purposeful and relevant, offering a means to integrate learning across the learner’s broader context, including school and home seamlessly.

The uncertain foundation of neo-Darwinism: metaphysical and epistemological pluralism in the evolutionary synthesis

The Evolutionary Synthesis is often seen as a unification process in evolutionary biology, one which provided this research area with a solid common theoretical foundation. As such, neo-Darwinism is believed to constitute from this time onward a single, coherent, and unified movement offering research guidelines for investigations. While this may be true if evolutionary biology is solely understood as centred around evolutionary mechanisms, an entirely different picture emerges once other aspects of the founding neo-Darwinists’ views are taken into consideration, aspects potentially relevant to the elaboration of an evolutionary worldview: the tree of life, the ontological distinctions of the main cosmic entities (inert matter, biological organisms, mind), the inherent properties of self-organizing matter, evolutionary ethics, and so on. Profound tensions and inconsistencies are immediately revealed in the neo-Darwinian movement once this broader perspective is adopted. This pluralism is such that it is possible to identify at least three distinct and quasi-incommensurable epistemological/metaphysical frameworks as providing a proper foundation for neo-Darwinism. The analysis of the views of Theodosius Dobzhansky, Bernhard Rensch, and Ernst Mayr will illustrate this untenable pluralism, one which requires us to conceive of the neo-Darwinian research agenda as being conducted in more than one research programme or research tradition at the same time.

Debating market-based control for patient safety: response to commentaries

> I suppose the process of acceptance will pass through the usual four stages: > > 1. This is worthless nonsense, > > 2. This is an interesting, but perverse,...

A hit-or-miss transform for multivariate images

The hit-or-miss transform (HMT) is considered to be among the fundamental operations in the morphological toolbox. Initially, it was defined for binary images, as a morphological approach to the problem of template matching, whereas its extension to grey-level data has been problematic, leading to multiple definitions, that have been only recently unified by means of a common theoretical foundation. In this paper, we generalise these definitions to the case of multivariate images, and propose a vectorial HMT, allowing the detection of objects over multiple image channels. Moreover, in order to counter the operator’s extreme sensitivity to variations, rank order filters as well as synthetic structuring functions are studied in the context of multivariate data. We additionally present examples of the use of the suggested operator in combination with colour images.

Land Reform in the Time of Neoliberalism: A Many‐Splendored Thing

Abstract: Over the past 20 years, land reform – defined here as the redistribution of land from large to small properties – has emerged as an important political issue in the Global South. Actors with widely differing ideological perspectives have claimed land reform as central to their political, social and economic platforms. In this paper, I compare reforms championed under the neoliberal auspices of the World Bank (the so‐called Market Led Agrarian Reforms) with those supported by popular grassroots actors such as the Movement of Landless Workers (the MST) in Brazil. I argue that although these two approaches to land reform are often considered antithetical to one another, they share a common theoretical foundation. Both are rooted in a labor theory of property that attributes the fruits of one's labor to the laborer. Where the two differ is in their interpretation of the “original sin” through which land and labor came to be misaligned: neoliberal actors see the state as the key source of land‐related inefficiency while popular grassroots actors identify the market as the key source. I analyze case material from northeastern Brazil and suggest that the institutionalization of the labor theory of property (across civil society, state and market in the region) has generated insecurities for new land reform beneficiaries who must protect their property rights with visible evidence of their productivity.

On rhythmic and discrete movements: reflections, definitions and implications for motor control

At present, rhythmic and discrete movements are investigated by largely distinct research communities using different experimental paradigms and theoretical constructs. As these two classes of movements are tightly interlinked in everyday behavior, a common theoretical foundation spanning across these two types of movements would be valuable. Furthermore, it has been argued that these two movement types may constitute primitives for more complex behavior. The goal of this paper is to develop a rigorous taxonomic foundation that not only permits better communication between different research communities, but also helps in defining movement types in experimental design and thereby clarifies fundamental questions about primitives in motor control. We propose formal definitions for discrete and rhythmic movements, analyze some of their variants, and discuss the application of a smoothness measure to both types that enables quantification of discreteness and rhythmicity. Central to the definition of discrete movement is their separation by postures. Based on this intuitive definition, certain variants of rhythmic movement are indistinguishable from a sequence of discrete movements, reflecting an ongoing debate in the motor neuroscience literature. Conversely, there exist rhythmic movements that cannot be composed of a sequence of discrete movements. As such, this taxonomy may provide a language for studying more complex behaviors in a principled fashion.

Fundamentals of apparent damping phenomena in linear conservative systems

This presentation addresses a class of irreversible phenomena that can develop in linear conservative systems and provides a theoretical foundation to explain the underlying principles. Recent studies have shown that energy can be introduced to a linear system with near irreversibility, or energy within a system can migrate to a subsystem nearly irreversibly, even in the absence of dissipation. Inspired by the properties of probability distribution functions, the general formulation developed here is based on particular properties of harmonic series, which form the common basis of linear dynamic system models. The results demonstrate the existence of a special class of linear nondissipative dynamic systems that exhibit nearly irreversible energy exchange and possess a decaying impulse response. The formulation and its results also support the recent studies that observed near irreversibility and apparent damping in several dynamic systems and provide a common theoretical foundation for such behavior. [Research carried out while AA served at NSF.]

Unbiased Recursive Partitioning: A Conditional Inference Framework

Recursive binary partitioning is a popular tool for regression analysis. Two fundamental problems of exhaustive search procedures usually applied to fit such models have been known for a long time: overfitting and a selection bias towards covariates with many possible splits or missing values. While pruning procedures are able to solve the overfitting problem, the variable selection bias still seriously affects the interpretability of tree-structured regression models. For some special cases unbiased procedures have been suggested, however lacking a common theoretical foundation. We propose a unified framework for recursive partitioning which embeds tree-structured regression models into a well defined theory of conditional inference procedures. Stopping criteria based on multiple test procedures are implemented and it is shown that the predictive performance of the resulting trees is as good as the performance of established exhaustive search procedures. It turns out that the partitions and therefore the models induced by both approaches are structurally different, confirming the need for an unbiased variable selection. Moreover, it is shown that the prediction accuracy of trees with early stopping is equivalent to the prediction accuracy of pruned trees with unbiased variable selection. The methodology presented here is applicable to all kinds of regression problems, including nominal, ordinal, numeric, censored as well as multivariate response variables and arbitrary measurement scales of the covariates. Data from studies on glaucoma classification, node positive breast cancer survival and mammography experience are re-analyzed.

C 13 – 1 H dipolar-driven C13–13C recoupling without C13 rf irradiation in nuclear magnetic resonance of rotating solids

Two recently proposed C13–13C recoupling methods under magic angle spinning (MAS), resonant interference recoupling (RIR), and C13–1H dipolar-assisted rotational resonance (DARR), are examined on a common theoretical foundation using the average Hamiltonian theory. In both methods, a rf field is applied on not C13 but H1 to recouple the C13–1H dipolar interactions, and spectral overlap necessary to conserve energy for C13–13C polarization transfer is achieved by the C13–1H dipolar line broadening. While DARR employs time-independent C13–1H interactions recoupled by suitable rf irradiation to H1 spins, RIR uses time-dependent C13–1H interactions modulated appropriately by H1 rf irradiation. There are two distinct cases where C13–1H line broadening realizes C13–13C spectral overlap. For a pair of a carbonyl or aromatic carbon and an aliphatic carbon, spectral overlap can be achieved between one of the spinning sidebands of the former C13 resonance and the C13–1H dipolar powder pattern of the latter. On the other hand for a pair of spins with a small chemical shift difference, the two center bands are overlapped with each other due to C13–1H dipolar broadening. For the former, we show that both RIR and DARR occur in the first order, while for the latter, DARR recoupling is appreciable for time-independent C13–1H interactions. We refer to the former DARR as the first-order DARR recoupling and the latter as the second-order DARR. Experimentally, we examined the following C13–1H recoupling methods for DARR: H1 CW irradiation fulfilling a rotary-resonance condition or a modulatory-resonance condition, and H1 π pulses applied synchronously to MAS. For RIR, the FSLG-m2m¯m sequence is applied to H1. Several one-dimensional DARR and RIR experiments were done for N-acetyl[1,2-13C, 15N] DL-valine, and [2,3-13C] L-alanine. It was found that the polarization transfer rate for RIR is larger than that for DARR except for fast spinning, while the rate for DARR is less sensitive to the spinning speed. Further, we showed that the efficiency of the second-order DARR recoupling is not significantly less than that of the first-order DARR. Among the C13–1H recoupling methods examined, CW irradiation at the n=1 rotary-resonance condition is superior for DARR because it gives a larger C13–1H dipolar broadening, leading to broadband recoupling. We showed that a broadband-recoupling experiment with the first and the second-order DARR by CW irradiation at the n=1 rotary-resonance condition is applicable to signal assignment as well as structural determination of a multiply/uniformly C13 labeled molecule as demonstrated by two-dimensional C13–13C DARR polarization-transfer experiments of uniformly C13, N15-labeled glycylisoleucine.

A nonfunctional approach to system integrity

Systems provide integrity protection by ensuring that there is no unauthorized modification of information. Traditional models of protection tend to define integrity in terms of ad hoc authorization techniques whose effectiveness is justified more on the basis of experience and "best practice," rather than on any common theoretical foundation. A formal definition of integrity is proposed that is independent of any particular implementation mechanism. A series of simple examples is used to demonstrate that existing integrity mechanisms such as separation of duties, well-formed transactions, and so forth, can be regarded as implementation techniques for achieving integrity. The proposed characterization of integrity is nonfunctional, that is, it falls into the same category of properties as noninterference and its relatives. As a consequence, validating that a system has integrity can be expected to be as challenging as validating that a system upholds noninterference.

Motivational Factors and the Visitor Experience: A Comparison of Three Sites

ABSTRACTMuseums, art galleries, botanical gardens, national parks, science centers, zoos, aquaria and historic sites are important public learning institutions. The free‐choice learning offered in these settings is closely linked to visitors' intrinsic motivation, making it important to understand the motivational factors that impact on visitors' experiences. This paper presents data from a questionnaire administered to visitors at three sites: a museum, an art gallery, and an aquarium. Similarities and differences among the sites are reported in relation to visitors' expectations, perceptions of learning opportunities, engagement in motivated learning behaviors, and perceptions of the learning experience. The importance of learning to museum visitors and the unique opportunities and challenges of the museum in relation to other educational leisure settings are discussed. The authors argue that the study of motivational factors might contribute to the development of a common theoretical foundation for interpretation in museums and other informal learning settings.

Toward an Understanding of Cognitive Consensus in a Group Decision-Making Context

This article consolidates and integrates what has been learned about group-level interpretation into a common theoretical language and conceptual foundation on which future research can be based. The term cognitive consensus refers to similarity among group members regarding how key issues are defined and conceptualized. In addition to addressing neglected definitional issues, this article embeds cognitive consensus in an input-process-outcome framework, and propositions are offered concerning the variables that both impact and result from its development. It is argued that the notion of cognitive consensus provides a valuable means for understanding how decision makers collectively make sense of ill-structured issues in a group setting and is conceptually appealing because it integrates group, cognitive, negotiation, and decision-making research.

O que é ecologia de paisagens?

A ecologia de paisagens é uma nova área de conhecimento dentro da ecologia, marcada pela existência de duas principais abordagens: uma geográfica, que privilegia o estudo da influência do homem sobre a paisagem e a gestão do território; e outra ecológica, que enfatiza a importância do contexto espacial sobre os processos ecológicos, e a importância destas relações em termos de conservação biológica. Estas abordagens apresentam conceitos e definições distintas e por vezes conflitantes, que dificultam a concepção de um arcabouço teórico comum. Nesse trabalho, proponho uma definição integradora de paisagem como sendo "um mosaico heterogêneo formado por unidades interativas, sendo esta heterogeneidade existente para pelo menos um fator, segundo um observador e numa determinada escala de observação". Esse "mosaico heterogêneo" é essencialmente visto pelos olhos do homem, na abordagem geográfica, e pelo olhar das espécies ou comunidades estudadas na abordagem ecológica. O conceito de paisagem proposto evidencia ainda que a paisagem não é obrigatoriamente um amplo espaço geográfico ou um novo nível hierárquico de estudo em ecologia, justo acima de ecossistemas, pois a escala e o nível biológico de análise dependem do observador e do objeto de estudo. A ecologia de paisagens vem promovendo uma mudança de paradigma nos estudos sobre fragmentação e conservação de espécies e ecossistemas, pois permite a integração da heterogeneidade espacial e do conceito de escala na análise ecológica, tornando esses trabalhos ainda mais aplicados para resolução de problemas ambientais.

Accounting and the business economics tradition in Germany

From the German point of view, accounting is a very important part of business economics. However, in order to understand the theoretical development of accounting in Germany during the twentieth century, it is necessary to identify the influences of the social, economic and legal environment on business economics in general and accounting in particular. Much business economics has emphasized microeconomic theory, but this ignores the problems of organization, and the institutional aspects of the business world. Financial accounting in particular cannot be understood in Germany without reference to legal rules and tradition. Although theorizing about accounting may have been the main root of the business economics tradition in Germany, other aspects of business economics have developed, and it has not been possible to construct a common theoretical foundation covering all aspects of business economics. Hence, it is necessary to study the development of German accounting theory and practice on its own terms.

Reservoir timescales for anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere

Non-steady state timescales are complicated and their application to specific geophysical systems requires a common theoretical foundation. We first extend reservoir theory by quantifying the difference between turnover time and transit time (or residence time) for time-dependent systems under any mixing conditions. We explicitly demonstrate the errors which result from assuming these timescales are equal, which is only true at steady state. We also derive a new response function which allows the calculation of age distributions and timescales for well-mixed reservoirs away from steady state, and differentiate between timescales based on gross and net fluxes. These theoretical results are particularly important to tracer-calibrated "box models" currently used to study the carbon cycle, which usually approximate reservoirs as well-mixed. We then apply the results to the important case of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere, since timescales describing its behavior are commonly used but ambiguously defined. All relevant timescales, including lifetime, transit time, and adjustment time, are precisely defined and calculated from data and models. Apparent discrepancies between the current, empirically determined turnover time of 30-60 years and longer model-derived estimates of expected lifetime and adjustment time are explained within this theoretical framework. We also discuss the results in light of policy issues related to global warming, in particular since any comparisons of the "lifetimes" of different greenhouse gases (CO2, CH4, N2O, CFC's etc.) must use a consistent definition to be meaningful.

Mathematical significance and application perspectives of medium logic calculus (ML) and medium axiomatic set theory (MS)

In the sense of basic theory of mathematics, ML (Medium Logic) and MS (Medium Set Theory) have widened the foundation of logic and set theory of the precise classical mathematics and extended the research objects of mathematics from precision into fuzziness. Hence ML and MS, in a higher form, contain the whole of precise classical mathematics and its theoretical foundation. ML and MS have also resolved the problems of the revision of the comprehension principle left over historically, i.e. they have not only excluded all the paradoxes in the system, but also preserved all the reasonable content of the comprehension principle. ML and MS have provided a common theoretical foundation for both precise classical mathematics and future uncertain mathematics. The fifth generation of computers must lay its foundation on the acknowledgement of intelligent logic of medium states. Obviously ML will be this logic. ML and MS will also be the theoretical foundation of expert systems and advance the techniques of pattern recognition, graphic analysis, artificial intelligence, intelligent robots, computer vision, etc. to a new stage. In addition to the uncertain quantitative analysis, based on the theoretical foundation of ML and MS, the theory of large systems will present extraordinarily new prospects.

An evaluation of mathematical models of the transport of biologically reacting solutes in saturated soils and aquifers

Three different conceptual frameworks have been adopted in the past for the development of mathematical models of bacterial growth and biologically reacting solute transport in saturated porous media. Two schools of thought are based upon assuming that the pore scale geometrical configuration of the attached bacteria consists of biofilms or microcolonies; the third school of thought represents the traditional approach where pore scale processes are neglected and the bacteria are assumed to respond to the macroscopic bulk fluid substrate concentration. On the basis of a schematic block diagram representation of a saturated porous medium hosting a microbial population, it is shown that these frameworks share a common theoretical foundation, and that they differ only by the choice of particular constitutive equations for several transfer parameters. Using one possible option in this respect, we derive a mathematical model that involves no unwarranted assumption about the distribution of the microorganisms in the pore space. The governing equations of this latter model are shown to be formally identical to those obtained by F.J. Molz et al. (1986), using the concept of microcolony, and to those that would result from adopting a simple form of biofilm model to describe bacterial growth in the pore space. Some of the consequences of this formal similarity between macroscopic transport equations obtained in different conceptual frameworks are discussed from an operational standpoint and in terms of model validation.

COHERENT INFORMATIONAL ENERGY AND ENTROPY

Aiming to provide a common theoretical foundation for all known biblio‐metric laws, the author starts from a systemic view of the information transfer process and assimilates it with a physical diffusion process, in particular the conduction of heat in solids. Previous literature induces in the properly ranked space of new authors an interest potential (temperature) confirmed by exchange of reference‐citation pairs, and driving a controlled information flow. The model gives its distribution for given initial and borderline conditions, allowing at the same time the establishment of new definitions for informational energy and entropy, which are coherent with the corresponding physical ones. The theory shows that impulsory energy supply is bound to negative entropy inflow which brakes the normal entropy ‘production’ in the ‘dissipative’ structures of the considered system. In this way the introduction of information into concrete thermodynamic systems analysis can hopefully be expected.

The Development of Social Measurement

Social measurement is the one which shows the most conspicuous development in the recent twenty years among research methods. The instruments of social measurement contains two types ; (1) scales and (2) indexes. Scales take the form of linear function of items and indexes do not. In this paper we are concerned with scales only. As we know, scales should have reliability and validity, and there are rather few obstacles about reliability. As for validity of scales, the situation differs among predicting scales and internal scales. Predicting scales, e. g. marital adjustment predicting scale, parole prediction scales, Warner's I. S. C., which have external criterion to be predicted, can use the correlation coefficient (or corresponding summarizing mesaures) between the external criterion and the scale scores, as a coefficient of validity. By internal scales I mean the ones which have not an external criterion, and are examplified in socio-economic status scales and attitude measurement scales in general. Internal scales, which have internal consistency, are considered at present time also to have validity. Therefore, scaling theories of internal scales have endevored to obtain internal consistency. The first scholar who gave attention to internal consistency and carefully constructed internal scales, was L. L. Thurstone. After his equal-appearing interval scale, there appeared Likert's scale which uses item analysis as a means of obtaining internal consistency. But item analysis could not secure complete internal consistency, as R. F. Sletto and L. Guttman indicated. Before the invention of Guttman's scale, factor analysis was considered the only means of securing internal consistency. Guttman's scale analysis was a splendid and epoch-making scaling theory, but the fact that his scalability is a special case of internal consistency, was discovered in the light of L, azarsfeld's latent structure theory. This latent structure theory, which introduced the concept of trace line and defined unidimensionality definitely by mathematical formula, offered a common theoretical foundation to various scaling techniques. But it is not yet completed as a new technique of scaling. We expect that it will be further developed in the future. Meanwhile, does internal consistency guarantee the validity of an internal scale? I cannot but say “no, ” because it is only a formal property. Still there remains the question concerning what the scale measures. Unfortunately at present, we have no way except to rely upon face-validity or validating the scale through long pragmatic processes. There is another important problem to be solved. Should all internal scales have an internal consistency? Does the situation exist where a multi-dimesional internal scale is necesitated? If this is the case, such a third scale would involve a future problem in my judgment.