External Representation Research Articles

Gesticulating Biochemistry: Exploring the Impact of using Augmented Reality Models on Students’ Usage of Gestures when Talking about Biochemistry

There are multiple examples in the literature highlighting the connection between gestures and meaning‐making by students learning chemical concepts in chemistry; however, there is little known about whether this connection extends to student learning in biochemistry. Moreover, learning biochemistry often involves the use and coordination of multiple external representations (ranging from 2D illustrations and physical models to 3D virtual models) of macromolecules. How does use of these external representations impact student gesture production and meaning‐making when learning new biochemical content? In this study, we used a newly developed augmented reality (AR) model of the KscA channel to investigate the influence of external representations on student produced gestures during a discussion on KscA function. We focused on several research questions: what are the different biochemistry content knowledge that students express through gestures? What are the different types of gestures and patterns of gesture production used by students to express content knowledge? What are the differences, if any, in student produced gestures before and after the introduction of an AR model? What are the relationships between student produced gestures and the AR model? Semi‐structured clinical interviews were conducted and recorded through Zoom. Seven undergraduate students who enrolled in an upper‐division biochemistry course participated in the interview. During the interview, participants were presented with an AR model of KcsA channel after proposing a theory of how potassium ions move through the channel. Participants were then asked to modify their theory. In the first stage of analysis, interview participants’ utterances were transcribed and their gestures were described in terms of hand shape and movement. The identification of unique gestures as part of the coding process highlighted the importance of hand shape vs movement vs a combination of both as ways to delineate different gestures. In the second stage of analysis, qualitative and quantitative differences in student gesture production were identified through a comparative analysis of student gestures before and after their exposure to the AR model. Exposure to the AR model resulted in a shift from gestures that were more general (for example, holding two hands parallel to represent the channel) to more specific to the channel representation they say (for example, holding two hands to form a funnel shape or curling one hand into a tube shape). Our findings add to existing literature on the use of external representation in biochemistry education by highlighting the relationships between AR mediated external representations and gesture mediated external representations. Implications for both the development of new external representations and instructor’s choice of external representations are discussed.

National Costume Art Design Optimization under the Background of Artificial Intelligence Decision Making and Internet of Things

As the most external symbolic representation of the nation, national costumes are an integral part of the wonderful culture of the Chinese nation. Our country has many ethnic minorities and has a unique national costume culture, which provides rich resources for the art design of ethnic costumes. This paper uses artificial intelligence technology and Internet of Things technology to design a national costume element library system. In this system, users can match national costume suits according to their own preferences, and they can also transmit national culture to people through this system. After the system is designed, the system performance is optimized by interactive algorithms, and the availability of the system is verified by testing system security, stress resistance, concurrency, etc. Through the verification of the system designed in this paper, the national costumes designed by innovative technology can be copied in batches, which enhances the innovation of national costume design in our country and has high production efficiency. It is finally proved that the design results of this paper meet the design requirements.

Students’ External Representation Patterns of Suspending Objects in Static Fluid

<p style="text-align: justify;">This study aims to explore the pattern of external representation of suspending objects in a static fluid. The study used a qualitative descriptive method involving 57 elementary, junior, senior school, and university students. Data collection implemented a 30-item test covering the dominant context of suspending and partially floating and sinking. Some of phenomenographic steps were adapted in data analysis. Based on the data analysis, it can be concluded that there is a dominant external representation pattern, where there is a simplification of the depiction of suspending objects. Suspending position tends to be locked in a limited area, namely in the middle of the depth of the liquid. In the context of suspending objects' cuts, the cuts were generally represented by an upward shifting pattern. Factors that influence the pattern of representation are the involvement of intuition in conceptualizing the phenomena presented, and the conceptual aspect of density has not been integrated into the reasoning process for compiling external representations, both diagrams, and texts. Research limitation is presented in this article.</p>

The dual mechanism of social networks on the relationship between internationalization and firm performance: Empirical evidence from china.

The effects of social networks on the relationship between internationalization and firm performance have been well documented in the international literature, and two dimensions of social networks have also been identified: business ties and political ties. However, few efforts have been made to examine whether there are different mechanisms of business ties and political ties. Based on social network theory and boundary spanning theory, we build a model of a dual mechanism of social networks, and the business ties and political ties of social networks that correspond with information processing and the external representation of boundary spanning theory. Using the data of Chinese listed companies in 2005-2013 and 2013-2017 to test the model, the results indicate that (1) in the relationship between internationalization and firm performance, the role of social networks has a dual mechanism. (2) Business ties play a mediating role in the relationship between internationalization and firm performance. Business ties are conducive to a company's information acquisition and knowledge sharing and play the role of information processing. (3) Political ties play a U-shaped moderating role in the relationship between internationalization and firm performance and assume the role of external representation.

The effect of mode of presentation on Tower of Hanoi problem solving

The Tower of Hanoi (TOH) is a classic problem that can be solved via multiple strategies. This study used TOH to examine how mode of presentation of a problem influences strategy use and transfer. Undergraduate students (Experiment 1) or Prolific workers (Experiment 2) completed two TOH problems of varying difficulty (4-disk/5-disk). They were randomly assigned to different conditions in which problems were either high in internal representation (mental) or high in external representation (computer). Participants were better able to complete problems successfully when external representations were available but completed problems in fewer moves when relying on internal representations. In addition, participants spent more time between moves when solving problems mentally, suggesting that external representations encourage speed while internal representations promote accuracy when solving recursion problems. Lastly, both experiments provide evidence that first solving a problem mentally encouraged participants to use strategies similar to goal recursion on a second problem.

Inequality and Exclusion in Latin America: Health Care Commodification, Gendered Norms, and Violence

Since the early 1990s, a market‐orientated policymaking in Latin American countries did nothing to secure decent and productive jobs or eliminate gender inequities. It served, rather, to limit social investments that were needed to increase wellbeing, social cohesion, and, eventually, productivity. The pioneering scholarly work of the authors in this thematic issue, using either qualitative or quantitative methodologies, deepens our interdisciplinary understanding of the causes and dynamics of inequality and exclusion in these countries. Contributions are organized in three dimensions: (a) the commodification of health care, (b) gendered social norms, and (c) fragile life and violence. Based on our authors’ findings and suggestions, an agenda for change emerges that emphasizes autonomy from external pressures, community action and representation, eradication of the patriarchy, and expansion of social protection programs.

Identity System in University Students: Transformation Dynamics during Learning Process

Higher education is not only about professional knowledge and skills: it also develops one’s self-awareness. Students’ self-identity changes as they expand their competencies and self-awareness, master new activities, and develop professional values. According to the systemic and constructivist approaches, self-identity is a system of identities that develop in during one’s life and based on one’s conscious identity with any subjects of psychic reality. During their university years, students' self-identity transforms in terms of structure, general state, and attitudes towards certain types of identity. In this empirical research, senior students identified more with family, close social environment, external representation, and personality assessment. They demonstrated a positive attitude towards ethnicity and family roles as their self-identity system grew less stable and autonomous. As a result, self-identity became more dependent and blurred. The same tendencies manifested themselves in the dynamics of professional identity. The more they learnt about their future profession, the more they grew aware of its limitations, and the image of the profession became more ambiguous. All these changes led to self-identity crisis in some graduates.

Two-World Literature: Kazuo Ishiguro's Early Novels by Rebecca Suter

Reviewed by: Two-World Literature: Kazuo Ishiguro's Early Novels by Rebecca Suter Matthew C. Strecher Two-World Literature: Kazuo Ishiguro's Early Novels. By Rebecca Suter. University of Hawai'i Press, 2020. 158 pages. ISBN: 9780824882372 (hardcover; also available as softcover and e-book). When Kazuo Ishiguro (b. 1954) broke into the literary world in 1982 with his maiden work, A Pale View of Hills, it was perhaps only to be expected that this very British author should have been associated by some critics with Japan, the land of his birth. This misconception was not alleviated by the fact that both his first novel and his second, An Artist of the Floating World (1986), are set in Japan, albeit one that exists solely in his imagination. It was perhaps also inevitable that he would be compared to other non-Anglo-Saxon British writers such as Salman Rushdie, Timothy Mo, and Shiva Naipaul, and that he should be pushed at times into the tricky position of "postcolonial" writer (notwithstanding the fact that Japan was never a part of the British colonial empire). Over time, attempts were made to read Ishiguro and his work as a kind of quasi-Japanese literature, as "ethnic" English (meaning, presumably, not "White English"), and as "international," which is probably shorthand for "We have no real idea where this person belongs." Ishiguro presents a conundrum to those who are determined to place him and his fiction into a neatly labeled box. Their efforts are not helped by the fact that Ishiguro himself, on an intellectual level, seems to prefer confounding the labelers, perhaps resenting these efforts to pigeonhole his identity. Does being ethnically Japanese make one culturally Japanese? Does it entitle (or indeed, require) one to become a spokesperson for Japan? These questions clearly troubled Ishiguro in his youth when, like many young persons of color living in a predominantly White society, he appears to have found it preferable to blend in and simply "be English." To be sure, having spent his entire life from the age of five in England, whatever his citizenship (he remained a Japanese citizen until 1983), he had surely earned the right to think of himself as an Englishman if he so chose. But the matter was not quite so simple, even for Ishiguro, whose culturally and linguistically Japanese home life, even in Surrey, sowed images in his mind of a birthplace he could barely remember, much less describe in prose. At best he was able to construct a version of Japan in his mind, not for the purpose of introducing Japan to his readers (what would have been the point of such an introduction?), [End Page 182] but to provide a setting for stories that deal with broader, indeed universal, aspects of the human condition. Perhaps this is why, after setting his first two novels in an imaginary version of Japan, he placed his third, Remains of the Day (1989), in the most quintessentially English setting imaginable: a grand and lordly English mansion, owned by a quintessentially charming and conservative English lord (Lord Darlington), looked after by a quintessentially English butler who believes in all the good old values of good old England. These are the three novels that form the focus of Rebecca Suter's fascinating monograph, Two-World Literature, whose title, one finds, refers to a number of related things. On the superficial level, it is an alternative to the idea of "one-world" literature (or for that matter, one-world thinking), celebrated by some as a triumph of "world" literature, decried by others as yet another invitation for White, Western (and, no doubt, predominantly male) parochialism to become the standard by which all literatures of the world will be measured1 As "one-world literature" appears to be at an impasse, Suter opts for "two-world literature" as a means of understanding Ishiguro and his work. But what exactly does "two-world" mean here? Suter explains it as a way of approaching the external world, perception, memory, description, representation, values, and culture through a multifaceted lens of reference, or as she states it, "the capacity, and the will, to hold different perspectives and to understand reality through...

Clothing – A Mark of Noble Identity in Early Modern Transylvania (I)

"‘It is not the coat that makes the man’, the proverb says nowadays. However, for a long time, it was the garment that gave the person individuality. Once the costume was lost, the identity was lost. Clothing is, therefore, one of the essential markers of social convention, with each part of the population being assigned a specific role and place, easily recognizable by shape and color. For several generations, the merchant has been recognized by his attire, the priest and the monk by the color of their tunic, the nobleman by his cut and color. Hence, clothing was the most prominent instrument of external representation. The symbolism of clothing articles, with a very different cut and color range, could immediately be interpreted by the contemporaries. For modern research, the knowledge of the specific characteristics of garments and their wear can be possible – to a considerable extent – only with the help of written sources and images. Therefore, the study aims to examine the role of status indicator, or the social role of clothing from the end of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century, based on the documents of last will of the Transylvanian nobility. The first part is dedicated to the feminine costume."

Developing professional identity among undergraduate medical students in a competency-based curriculum: Educators' perspective.

Professional identity formation (PIF) refers to the possession and exhibition of the conduct of a medical professional. It's an external representation of a medical personnel's feelings, beliefs, experiences, and values that influence the provision of holistic patient care. Apart from training medical students to be competent and skilled physicians, one of the goals of today's medical education must be to encourage them to achieve professional identity formation. Many medical schools across the globe have made this explicit during the clinical years of study, but we believe that professional identity formation starts as early as day one of medical school. So, for educators, apart from delivering basic science subject content during early years of study, the creation of learning opportunities and pedagogic space in the curriculum to enhance competencies of PIF becomes mandatory. This competency-based educational approach will help medical students transform and reconsider their own values and beliefs by relating to the behaviors that are expected by the profession, colleagues, and patients when they graduate as medical doctors. In this paper, we discuss how a competency-based curriculum should provide opportunities for students to interact and communicate effectively with patients and colleagues, to self-reflect on their own personal identity before creating a professional identity that is unique to the profession, to make the right judgment and confidently practice medicine in a business-based healthcare system.

CONSTRUCTION OF THE CONTRACT OF ASSIGNMENT IN PRIVATE LAW: GENESIS AND DEVELOPMENT

Research Objective. The article deals with the construction of the agency agreement, its genesis since the Roman law and development up to the modern stage. The authors analyse the experience of foreign legal systems, legislation in a historical context, identify the features of the agency agreement in correlation to related institutions of private law. The authors research the issues of independence of the contractual structure of agency agreement, its unique characteristic which is inherent only to the institution of voluntary representation. Authorization in voluntary representation occurs through authorization the agent (which is the basis for external representation relations). Conclusions. This study emphasizes key areas of qualification of the agency agreement, based on the provisions of applicable civil law, doctrine and law enforcement practice.

The Life-Idealism of Michel Henry

The purpose of the present essay is to exposit and interpret the principal contours of the phenomenology of Christianity proposed by Michel Henry in dialog with his theological critics. Against the claims commonly made about him, Henry is not a Gnostic of any sort: neither a monist, nor a dualist, nor a pantheist, nor a denier of faith, nor a world- or creation-denier or anything of the sort. He rather proposes a form of “life-idealism” according to which (i) life is the foundation of the possibility of the world, (ii) life assumes a visible, external representation (viz., the empirical body) in its activities in the world, and (iii) the meaning of the world is that it is the arena in which life pursues the goal of its own perfection and growth. Interpreted in this light, his thought is not Gnostic.

Penalaran Visuospasial Siswa Kategori Intelligence Quotient (IQ) Superior

The purpose of this study was to describe the superior intelligence quotient (IQ) category students' visuospatial reasoning. This research was conducted at MAN 1 Trenggalek because the school had already conducted an IQ test. This research uses a qualitative approach with a descriptive exploratory type. The subjects in this study were students who had already done an IQ test with a superior IQ. This study will describe 2 subjects based on relatively the same tendency. Data collection techniques used documentary studies on IQ, test questions, think aloud, and semi-structured interviews. The data analysis in this study refers to Tversky B's research on visuospatial reasoning. The validity of the data in this study used technical triangulation. The results of this study indicate that students with superior IQ are able to meet the indicators of visuospatial reasoning, namely external representation, analysis, synthesis and conclusions as a whole. This is indicated by students with superior IQ who are able to complete the questions according to the procedure and completely.

Shrinking of spatial hand representation but not of objects across the lifespan

Perception and action are based on cerebral spatial representations of the body and the external world. However, spatial representations differ from the physical characteristics of body and external space (e.g., objects). It remains unclear whether these discrepancies are related to functional requirements of action and are shared between different spatial representations, indicating common brain processes. We hypothesized that distortions of spatial hand representation would be affected by age, sensorimotor practice and external space representation. We assessed hand representations using tactile and verbal localization tasks and quantified object representation in three age groups (20–79 yrs, total n = 60). Our results show significant shrinking of spatial hand representations (hand width) with age, unrelated to sensorimotor functions. No such shrinking occurred in spatial object representations despite some common characteristics with hand representations. Therefore, spatial properties of body representation partially share characteristics of object representation but also evolve independently across the lifespan.

Development of a test to explore the students’ mental models and external representation patterns of hanging objects

This study aims to develop a test that can be used to explore mental models and representation patterns of objects in the liquid fluid. The test developed by adapting the Reeves's Development Model was carried out in several stages, namely: determining the orientation and test segments; initial survey; preparation of the initial draft; try out; expansion of coverage; expert validation; trial and proving validity-reliability; and test finalization. The content and construct validity were determined by involving two experts as raters. The test reliability was determined using Cohen's Kappa (к), which involved 43 students and combined the test-retest and inter-rater methods to determine the consistency of students' responses. The developed test consists of 30 items covering the context of floating, sinking, and hanging objects. The hanging objects are the dominant context of the test. The results showed that in the development process, the test has very good validity and high reliability. The test can be used to explore mental models and external representation patterns on students in elementary, junior, senior high schools, and undergraduate. Furthermore, limitations of the test are also presented in this paper.

Nodes Afford Connection: A Pilot Study Examining the Design and Use of a Graphical Modeling Language

External representations such as diagrams facilitate reasoning. Many diagramming systems and notations are amenable to manipulation by actual or imagined intervention (e.g., transposing terms in an equation). Such manipulation is constrained by user-enforced constraints, including rules of syntax and semantics which help preserve the representation’s validity. We argue that the concepts of affordances and signifiers can be applied to understand such representations, and we suggest the term graphical affordance to refer to rule-constrained syntactic manipulation of an external representation. Following this argument, we examine a graphical modeling language in terms of these graphical affordances, and we present a pilot study examining how participants interact with the modeling language. Preliminary results suggest that using the modeling language, as opposed to prose representation, influences user behavior in a manner aligned with the graphical affordances and signifiers of the modeling language.

Characterising two German city networks: the interplay of internal structure, issue orientation and outreach strategies

ABSTRACT Making use of qualitative data from case studies on two of the most important city networks in the field of migration and diversity in Germany, this contribution aims to deepen the understanding of city networks and their modes of operation. Based on a literature review covering the characteristics of city networks we propose an analytical framework that distinguishes between the dimensions of internal and external representation. This framework enables the analysis of the two cases: Deutscher Städtetag (Association of German Cities) and Kommunaler Qualitätszirkel zur Integrationspolitik (Municipal Quality Circle on Integration Policy). While the former is an umbrella organisation of larger cities, the latter can be described as an informal network of likeminded municipalities in the field of migration and diversity. In order to shed light on the interplay of structure, strategies and issues addressed by these networks (in the field of migration), we draw on the analysis of various documents as well as participant observation and face-to-face interviews. Concluding, we critically discuss the conventional characteristics of city networks and develop assumptions on how a network’s structure influences its outreach strategies.

Different mechanisms of magnitude and spatial representation for tactile and auditory modalities

The human brain creates an external world representation based on magnitude judgments by estimating distance, numerosity, or size. The magnitude and spatial representation are hypothesized to rely on common mechanisms shared by different sensory modalities. We explored the relationship between magnitude and spatial representation using two different sensory systems. We hypothesize that the interaction between space and magnitude is combined differently depending on sensory modalities. Furthermore, we aimed to understand the role of the spatial reference frame in magnitude representation. We used stimulus–response compatibility (SRC) to investigate these processes assuming that performance is improved if stimulus and response share common features. We designed an auditory and tactile SRC task with conflicting spatial and magnitude mapping. Our results showed that sensory modality modulates the relationship between space and magnitude. A larger effect of magnitude over spatial congruency occurred in a tactile task. However, magnitude and space showed similar weight in the auditory task, with neither spatial congruency nor magnitude congruency having a significant effect. Moreover, we observed that the spatial frame activated during tasks was elicited by the sensory inputs. The participants' performance was reversed in the tactile task between uncrossed and crossed hands posture, suggesting an internal coordinate system. In contrast, crossing the hands did not alter performance (i.e., using an allocentric frame of reference). Overall, these results suggest that space and magnitude interaction differ in auditory and tactile modalities, supporting the idea that these sensory modalities use different magnitude and spatial representation mechanisms.

Longitudinal Study of Metacognitive Skills and External Representation of Students in the Context of Problem-Solving

This study aims to longitudinally describe the metacognitive skills and external representation in the context of problem-solving at Chemistry Education, Tadulako University. The qualitative study respondents were selected from a number of first year students for two consecutive semesters. Two respondents were selected based on results of selection using a metacognitive skills assessment questionnaire (MCAI) and we categorized as high and medium. Three problems were resolved by respondents at intervals of one to two weeks in each semester through a one-on-one thinking aloud and it was followed by a semi-structured interview. Data collection was recorded using a video camera. Metacognitive skills and external representation data from the odd and even semesters were deeply analyzed. This analysis technique was carried out by examining the results of problem solving and semi-structured interviews in detail and matching them with the indicators of metacogni-tive skills and external representation used by both respondents. The data analysis results showed that the thinking ability of respondents with high metacognitive skills in problem solving, experienced developments over time along with the development of their cognitive regulation and external representation. On the other hand, respondents with intermediate metacognitive skills during problem solving, were relatively the same for two consecutive semesters. Therefore, teachers need to consider the use of learning strategies by taking into account the number of students who have dominant characteristics in classroom learning, in terms of metacog-nitive skills and external representation.

Culturally Appropriate Behavior in Virtual Agents: A Review

Social behavior cannot be considered without the culture in which it is expressed. The following is a concise state of the art review of intelligent virtual agents displaying culturally appropriate behavior in games and serious games. In particular, it focuses on agents displaying personality and emotion, and their ability to engage in social interactions with others. The relationship between the characters’ external representation and the cultural believability is highlighted; and the internal and visual aspects of the current state of the art agents are discussed. A schematic view of the literature and the elements required for embodied culturally appropriate agents is presented, offering opportunities for future research.