Conceptual Surveys Research Articles

An exploration of gendered differences in cognitive, motivational and emotional aspects of game‐based math learning

AbstractBackgroundDigital game‐based learning (DGBL) has the potential to provide a gender inclusive learning environment for children.ObjectiveThe present study aimed to explore gendered differences among primary school learners in grades three, four, and five within the context of game‐based fraction learning from cognitive, motivational and emotional perspectives.MethodsTwo hundred and sixty‐nine participants completed a pre‐test and post‐test on fraction conceptual knowledge and surveys in math anxiety, intrinsic motivation and self‐efficacy. In addition, facial expression detection technology was employed to evaluate emotional states.ResultsIn general, within the DGBL environment, boys and girls exhibited similar performance in both their understanding of fraction concepts and their motivational aspects. However, gender differences were identified and manifested uniquely across different grade levels. Specifically, third‐grade girls exhibited significantly lower self‐efficacy than boys, but after DGBL intervention, the gender gap in self‐efficacy was no longer significant. Additionally, third‐grade girls achieved significant improvements in both the competence and interest dimensions of their intrinsic motivation, while boys did not show significant improvements. In the fourth grade, girls exhibited a significantly higher frequency of angry expressions compared to boys during gameplay. Fifth‐grade girls' cognitive performance appeared to be less correlated with motivational factors compared to boys.ConclusionsThe results suggest that DGBL may help narrow the gender difference in math learning, with girls potentially benefiting more from DGBL than boys.

Exploring the influence of profitability analysis on SME financing: A conceptual view

By allocating earnings and expenditures to each client independently, customer profitability analysis is a management accounting and credit underwriting tool that enables businesses and lenders to assess the profitability of individual customers or segments of customers. Small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) constitute the backbone of most economies and a key driver of economic expansion. This conceptual study surveys the literature on the subject in order to make assumptions that might be tested in subsequent research on the role of cost-benefit analysis in raising corporate performance. This is accomplished by referencing the viewpoints on financing small and medium-sized businesses as well as the fundamentals of strategic management accounting. The financial services sector, as well as the informal and formal sectors of the economy in every nation, would benefit greatly from an investigation into this issue. The originality of this conceptual study is in its contribution to the advancement of conceptual, methodological, and theoretical justification for the effects of profitability analysis funding of small and medium-sized enterprises. This will support the discussion in the present literature.

Evaluating artificial intelligence literacy courses for fostering conceptual learning, literacy and empowerment in university students: Refocusing to conceptual building

Artificial intelligence (AI) applications have become prevalent in all walks of life, but efforts to promote AI literacy to educated citizens from diverse study backgrounds are limited. There is a research gap in refocussing AI literacy courses from combining conceptual learning with mathematical formulae and programming codes to emphasising conceptual building from the beginning. This study fills the knowledge gap by evaluating AI literacy courses that aim to build conceptual understanding among university students from diverse study backgrounds. Eighty-two volunteers completed two AI literacy courses comprising 7 h of machine learning and 9 h of deep learning. The results of their pre- and post-course conceptual tests, surveys and self-reflective writing tasks indicated that the courses successfully equipped the participants with a conceptual understanding of AI. The participants felt empowered by the significant gains in their literacy and conceptual understanding of AI. The AI literacy courses successfully lower the barrier to entry for AI literacy and address a public need. The courses will be expanded to incorporate the development of AI applications together with discussion of ethical issues regarding the wide use of AI in society. This study can be used to guide future research on fostering AI literacy among educated citizens from diverse study backgrounds.

Fair Label versus Blockchain Technology from the Consumer Perspective: Towards a Comprehensive Research Agenda

Many small farmers and workers on plantations in poorer countries constantly live on the poverty threshold. Those people suffer from rising commodity prices and trade structures that pass price pressure to the weakest link. Farmers are at the mercy of these structures and must comply as they have no other choice. On the consumers' side of the supply chain, it is often hard to recognize agricultural products' fairness and originality, especially in processed food. Many organizations – through food labelling - partially inform consumers about products' provenance and fairness. Whereas several studies confirm that food labels positively influence the consumers' intention to buy food, the vast number of organizations and labels are hard to evaluate and distinguish. A technology that could be a gamechanger in sustainable and fair global agriculture could be Blockchain Technology (BCT). With the help of BCT, the need for a central authority like a "fair label" agency may become obsolete, with the same or even better results. This conceptual article surveys subject matter literature and concludes that there is a noticeable research gap in the possibility of BCT replacing or enhancing fair food labels. Thus, the paper shows the potential of BCT to improve fairer agricultural supply chains and make them transparent for customers. By doing so, some research areas and research questions will be derived. Furthermore, specific directions for future research will be shown.

A trial of conceptual surveys on heat, waves, and gravity

A trial of conceptual surveys on heat, waves, and gravity

Investigating students’ seriousness during selected conceptual inventory surveys

Conceptual inventory surveys are routinely used in education research to identify student learning needs and assess instructional practices. Students might not fully engage with these instruments because of the low stakes attached to them. This paper explores tests that can be used to estimate the percentage of students in a population who might not have taken such surveys seriously. These three seriousness tests are the pattern recognition test, the easy questions test, and the uncommon answers test. These three tests are applied to sets of students who were assessed either by the Force Concept Inventory, the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism, or the Brief Electricity and Magnetism Assessment. The results of our investigation are compared to computer simulated populations of random answers.Received 15 May 2019DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.15.020118Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.Published by the American Physical SocietyPhysics Subject Headings (PhySH)Research AreasAssessmentResearch methodologyPhysics Education Research

Impact of evidence-based flipped or active-engagement non-flipped courses on student performance in introductory physics

We describe the impact of physics education research-based pedagogical techniques in flipped and active-engagement non-flipped courses on student performance on validated conceptual surveys. We compare student performance in courses that make significant use of evidence-based active engagement (EBAE) strategies with courses that primarily use lecture-based (LB) instruction. All courses had large enrollment and often had 100–200 students. The analysis of data for validated conceptual surveys presented here includes data from large numbers of students from two-semester sequences of introductory algebra-based and calculus-based introductory physics courses. The conceptual surveys used to assess student learning in the first and second semester courses were the Force Concept Inventory and the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism, respectively. In the research discussed here, the performance of students in EBAE courses at a particular level is compared with LB courses in two situations: (i) the same instructor taught two courses, one of which was a flipped course involving EBAE methods and the other an LB course, while the homework, recitations, and final exams were kept the same; (ii) student performance in all of the EBAE courses taught by different instructors was averaged and compared with LB courses of the same type also averaged over different instructors. In all cases, we find that students in courses that make significant use of active-engagement strategies, on average, outperformed students in courses using primarily LB instruction of the same type on conceptual surveys even though there was no statistically significant difference on the pretest before instruction. We also discuss correlation between the performance on the validated conceptual surveys and the final exam, which typically placed a heavy weight on quantitative problem solving.

Do evidence-based active-engagement courses reduce the gender gap in introductory physics?

Prior research suggests that using evidence-based pedagogies can not only improve learning for all students, it can also reduce the gender gap. We describe the impact of physics education research-based pedagogical techniques in flipped and active-engagement non-flipped courses on the gender gap observed with validated conceptual surveys. We compare male and female students’ performance in courses which make significant use of evidence-based active-engagement (EBAE) strategies with courses that primarily use lecture-based (LB) instruction. All courses had large enrolment and often had more than 100 students. The analysis of data for validated conceptual surveys presented here includes data from two-semester sequences of algebra-based and calculus-based introductory physics courses. The conceptual surveys used to assess student learning in the first and second semester courses were the force concept inventory and the conceptual survey of electricity and magnetism, respectively. In the research discussed here, the performance of male and female students in EBAE courses at a particular level is compared with LB courses in two situations: (I) the same instructor taught two courses, one of which was an EBAE course and the other an LB course, while the homework, recitations and final exams were kept the same; (II) student performance in all of the EBAE courses taught by different instructors was averaged and compared with LB courses of the same type also averaged over different instructors. In all cases, on conceptual surveys we find that students in courses which make significant use of active-engagement strategies, on average, outperformed students in courses of the same type using primarily lecture-based instruction even though there was no statistically significant difference on the pre-test before instruction. However, the gender gap persisted even in courses using EBAE methods. We also discuss correlations between the performance of male and female students on the validated conceptual surveys and the final exam, which had a heavy weight on quantitative problem solving.

Development Of The EGGS Exam Of GeoloGy Standards To Measure Students’ Understanding Of Common Geology Concepts

Geoscience education researchers have considerable need for criterion-referenced, easy-to-administer, easy-to-score, conceptual surveys for undergraduates taking introductory science survey courses in order for faculty to monitor the learning impacts of innovative teaching. In response, this study establishes the reliability and validity of a 28-item, multiple-choice, pre- and post- EGGS Exam of GeoloGy Standards. EGGS addresses 11 concepts derived from a systematic analysis of the overlapping ideas from national science education reforms: NGSS, AAAS Benchmarks, Earth Science Literacy Principles, and NRC National Science Education Standards. Leveraging best-practices for creating and field-testing items, EGGS emphasizes natural student language over technical scientific vocabulary, leverages illustrations over students’ reading ability, specifically targets students’ misconceptions, and covers the range of topics most geology educators expect general education students to know. EGGS is argued to be valid and reliable with college introductory science survey students based on standard measures, including clinical interviews with students and expert review.

An Empirical Study on Moral Hazard of Life Insurance : Evidence from Postal Insurance Market

Due to the difficulty in obtaining data on life insurance contracts, previous studies on moral hazard of life insurance are confined to conceptual discussion or surveys of Korean health panel. To fill this gap, using comprehensive data from Postal insurance market, we perform an empirical study on moral hazard of life insurance from the period of 2008 to 2013. Our empirical findings are summarized as follows. First, employing the Heckman (1979)'s two stage model, we find that having indemnity private health insurance increases the number and period of medical utilization. In addition, number of private health insurance has a positive and highly significant effect on the number of period of medical utilization. Our empirical finding indicates that in a life insurance market with asymmetric information, there exists a moral hazard in order to maximize economic utility.

How physics instruction impacts students’ beliefs about learning physics: A meta-analysis of 24 studies

In this meta-analysis, we synthesize the results of 24 studies using the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS) and the Maryland Physics Expectations Survey (MPEX) to answer several questions: (1) How does physics instruction impact students’ beliefs? (2) When do physics majors develop expert-like beliefs? and (3) How do students’ beliefs impact their learning of physics? We report that in typical physics classes, students’ beliefs deteriorate or at best stay the same. There are a few types of interventions, including an explicit focus on model-building and (or) developing expertlike beliefs that lead to significant improvements in beliefs. Further, small courses and those for elementary education and nonscience majors also result in improved beliefs. However, because the available data oversamples certain types of classes, it is unclear whether these improvements are actually due to the interventions, or due to the small class size, or student populations typical of the kinds of classes in which these interventions are most often used. Physics majors tend to enter their undergraduate education with more expertlike beliefs than nonmajors and these beliefs remain relatively stable throughout their undergraduate careers. Thus, typical physics courses appear to be selecting students who already have strong beliefs, rather than supporting students in developing strong beliefs. There is a small correlation between students’ incoming beliefs about physics and their gains on conceptual mechanics surveys. This suggests that students with more expertlike incoming beliefs may learn more in their physics courses, but this finding should be further explored and replicated. Some unanswered questions remain. To answer these questions, we advocate several specific types of future studies: measuring students’ beliefs in courses with a wider range of class sizes, student populations, and teaching methods, especially large classes with very innovative pedagogy and small classes with more typical pedagogy; analysis of the relationship between students’ beliefs and conceptual understanding including a wide variety of variables that might influence each; and analysis of large data sets from a variety of classes that track individual students rather than averaging over classes.Received 21 March 2014DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.11.010115This article is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.Published by the American Physical Society

A Study of General Education Astronomy Students’ Understandings of Cosmology. Part V. The Effects of a New Suite of Cosmology Lecture-Tutorials on Students’ Conceptual Knowledge

This is the final paper in a five-paper series describing our national study of the teaching and learning of cosmology in general education astronomy college-level courses. A significant portion of this work was dedicated to the development of five new Lecture-Tutorials that focus on addressing the conceptual and reasoning difficulties that our research shows students have with frequently taught cosmology topics, such as the expansion of the universe, the Big Bang, and dark matter. We conducted a systematic investigation of the implementation of these new Lecture-Tutorials and resulting learning gains in order to test the efficacy of these new Lecture-Tutorials. Our investigation included classroom observations, results from pre–post testing using four conceptual cosmology surveys, and comparisons between classes in terms of the class time spent on cosmology topics and other instructional strategies used to teach cosmology. We used this combination of qualitative and quantitative research results to evaluate the conceptual understandings of students who used the new cosmology Lecture-Tutorials compared to those students who did not. The analysis of our data shows that, in many cases, classrooms that used the cosmology Lecture-Tutorials saw a greater increase in their students’ conceptual cosmology knowledge compared to classrooms that did not use the cosmology Lecture-Tutorials. However, our results also indicate how instructors implement the Lecture-Tutorials into their classrooms strongly influences their students’ learning gains.

A Study of General Education Astronomy Students’ Understandings of Cosmology. Part I. Development and Validation of Four Conceptual Cosmology Surveys

This is the first in a series of five articles describing a national study of general education astronomy students’ conceptual and reasoning difficulties with cosmology. In this paper, we describe the process by which we designed four new surveys to assess general education astronomy students’ conceptual cosmology knowledge. These surveys focused on the expansion and evolution of the universe, the Big Bang, and the evidence for dark matter in spiral galaxies. We also present qualitative evidence for the validity of these surveys.

Use of interactive lecture demonstrations: A ten year study

The widely held constructivist view of learning advocates student engagement via interactivity. Within the physics education research community, several specific interactive strategies have been developed to enhance conceptual understanding. One such strategy, the Interactive Lecture Demonstration (ILD) is designed for large lecture classes and, if measured using specific conceptual surveys, is purported to provide learning gains of up to 80%. This paper reports on learning gains for two different Projects over ten years. In Project 1, the ILDs were implemented from 1999 to 2001 with students who had successfully completed senior high school physics. The learning gains for students not exposed to the ILDs were in the range 13% to 16% while those for students exposed to the ILDs was 31% to 50%. In Project 2, the ILDs were implemented from 2007 to 2009 with students who had not studied senior high school physics. Since the use of ILDs in Project 1 had produced positive results, ethical considerations dictated that all students be exposed to ILDs. The learning gains were from 28% to 42%. On the one hand it is pleasing to note that there is an increase in learning gains, yet on the other, we note that the gains are nowhere near the claimed 80%. This paper also reports on teacher experiences of using the ILDs, in Project 2.

Reinventing college physics for biologists: Explicating an epistemological curriculum

The University of Maryland Physics Education Research Group has done a five-year project to rethink, observe, and reform introductory algebra-based (college) physics, which primarily serves life-science majors. We refocused the class on helping the students learn to think scientifically—to build coherence, think in terms of mechanisms, and to follow the implications of assumptions. We designed the course to tap into students’ productive conceptual and epistemological resources, based on a theoretical framework from research on learning. The reformed class retains its traditional structure in terms of time and instructional personnel, but we modified existing best-practices curricular materials. We provided class-controlled spaces for student collaboration, which allowed us to observe and record students learning directly. We also scanned all written homework and examinations and administered pre-post conceptual and epistemological surveys. The reformed class enhanced the strong gains on pre-post conceptual tests produced by the best-practices materials while obtaining unprecedented pre-post gains on epistemological surveys instead of the traditional losses.

Development and Use of a Conceptual Survey in Introductory Quantum Physics

Conceptual surveys have become increasingly popular at many levels to probe various aspects of science education research such as measuring student understanding of basic concepts and assessing the effectiveness of pedagogical material. The aim of this study was to construct a valid and reliable multiple‐choice conceptual survey to investigate students’ understanding of introductory quantum physics concepts. We examined course syllabi to establish content coverage, consulted with experts to extract fundamental content areas, and trialled open‐ended questions to determine how the selected content areas align with students’ difficulties. The questions were generated and trialled with different groups of students. Each version of the survey was critiqued by a group of discipline and teaching experts to establish its validity. The survey was administered to 312 students at the University of Sydney. Using the data from this sample, we performed five statistical tests (item difficulty index, item discrimination index, item point biserial coefficient, KR‐21 reliability test, and Ferguson’s delta) to evaluate the test’s reliability and discriminatory power. The result indicates that our survey is a reliable test. This study also provided data from which preliminary findings were drawn on students’ understandings of introductory quantum physics concepts. The main point is that questions which require an understanding of the standard interpretations of quantum physics are more challenging for students than those grouped as non‐interpretative. The division of conceptual questions into interpretive and non‐interpretive needs further exploration.

Do stronger links with practice make perfect?

The relationship between academia and practice, particularly to do with knowledge production through academic research, has long been an issue of much debate. While the extant literature has provided conceptual discussions and numerous surveys of practitioner opinions, there have been few empirical assessments of academics’ perspectives. Thus, we conducted a survey of 843 advertising scholars regarding their opinions about and perceptions of various aspects of the academia–industry relationship, such as research collaboration, research orientation and dissemination of knowledge. Overall, respondents were in favour of building closer ties with the industry to produce better research and strengthen the academy, with some variation by criteria, such as education level and extent of professional experience. In addition, major conceptual dimensions in this academia–industry interface were identified. Stemming from the majority opinions revealed in the study, we provide 11 suggestions regarding how the relationship between industry and the academy can be strengthened.

Health-promoting school development in Zhejiang Province, China

In 2003, after three pilot projects successfully implemented WHO's Health-Promoting Schools (HPS) concept, officials in Zhejiang Province, China, expanded to additional 51 schools (93,000 students and their families and 6800 school personnel). Each school identified a health issue to begin HPS development, followed by conceptual orientation, resource mobilization, teacher training, surveys, interventions, outreach and evaluation. This study focused on the extent to which participating schools implemented the HPS concept and improved their psycho-social environments (PSEs). Forty-nine of the 51 schools met China's HPS criteria. Schools with fewer resources and with substantial resources, i.e. schools in both rural and urban areas, met the criteria. Schools' PSEs, as measured by the PSE Profile, improved as they became HPS. Findings from interviews and observations identified strong encouragement and support from officials, school personnel, students, parents and community leaders, and consistency of HPS with the national policy on quality education, as success factors.

Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven's Late Style (review)

Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven's Late Style. By Michael Spitzer. (Musical Meaning and Interpretation.) Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2006. [369 p. ISBN-10 0-253-34724-6; ISBN-13 978-0-253-34724-4. $39.95.] Music examples, bibliography, indexes. Michael Spitzer is a master of detail-musicological, historical, and philosophical. He demonstrated this recently in his excellent book on the history of metaphor (Metaphor and Musical Thought [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003]). He demonstrates this again in his new book about Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno's writings on Ludwig van Beethoven's late style. It is a lengthy study in which readers are offered extensive musical analyses, conceptual surveys, and modernist, philosophical arguments. Sometimes one has the feeling that the material does not hang together, not because the author is striving to reach his own late style, but rather because too much is going on. This is often a problem with books written about Adorno (I know it myself): there is an impulse to explain all and everything, from every angle, while yet explicitly resisting the idea that all and everything can be explained. Alternatively put, the writer has the aim or need to open up Adorno's thinking to contemporary readers while granting that, of historically necessity, the thought is-and must remain-hermetically concealed. Spitzer shares this aim, but compounds the difficulty of his task every time he draws on the work of other theorists concerned with similar themes. Too many names and too many thoughts: a little less material would have kept the compelling argument specifically about Adorno on Beethoven's late style more focused. This book will most profitably be read by advanced specialists in the field of philosophy, critical theory, aesthetic theory, and musicology, though it ought also to find readership amongst those interested in the particular idea of late style. An extremely useful summary of the chapters is offered in the book's conclusion. Spitzer's general aim is to retrieve the classicism of Beethoven against those who argue that Beethoven's works are to be understood more in terms of a romantic conception of late style. His book is written after or partially in tribute to Charles Rosen's classic book, The Classical Style (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972). Late style belongs as much to the classicists as to the romantics, even attendant commitments to the fragmentation or disintegration of form-which only shows that the very distinction between classicism and romanticism requires revision. To rethink Beethoven's classicism is to rethink his contribution to modernism and to the dialectic of enlightenment more generally. A specific aim of this book is to show why Adorno was so preoccupied with Beethoven and what, therefore, Adorno offered by way of his critical theory to our historical and musical, and specifically allegorical, understanding of tonal music. With the focus on allegory, Spitzer expands upon his previous work on metaphor. Mostly, however, this new book is a commentary on Adorno's posthumously published, incomplete book in which all of his texts on Beethoven's late style are included (Beethoven: Philosophie der Musik: Fragmente und Texte. [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993]). It remains an intriguing question why Adorno failed to complete his proposed book on Beethoven, because, in my view, the answer would reveal something deep about the contemporary impossibility (as Adorno constantly spoke of that impossibility) of producing a philosophy of music at all, given the late, fatal, or catastrophic condition of modernity. Spitzer does not treat this question directly, though he is manifestly aware of the throttling difficulties implicit in late modernism of producing such a philosophy. Spitzer's book engages with several on-going debates on both sides of the analytical/continental divide as well as on both sides of German and Anglo-American musicology and philosophy. …

A Conceptual Review of Nanosensors

Nanosensors are gaining increasing attention due to the need to detect and measure chemical and physical properties in difficult to reach biological and industrial systems that are in the nano-scale region. This conceptual review surveys various nanosensors, which are categorized into three broad types: optical, electromagnetic and mechanical nanosensors. The sensing concepts and their corresponding advantages are discussed with reference to their applications.