Implicit Questions Research Articles

Disentangled Retrieval and Reasoning for Implicit Question Answering.

To date, most of the existing open-domain question answering (QA) methods focus on explicit questions where the reasoning steps are mentioned explicitly in the question. In this article, we study implicit QA where the reasoning steps are not evident in the question. Implicit QA is challenging in two aspects. First, evidence retrieval is difficult since there is little overlap between a question and its required evidence. Second, answer inference is difficult since the reasoning strategy is latent in the question. To tackle implicit QA, we propose a systematic solution denoted as DisentangledQA, which disentangles topic, attribute, and reasoning strategy from the implicit question to guide the retrieval and reasoning. Specifically, we disentangle the topic and attribute information from the implicit question to guide evidence retrieval. For answer reasoning, we propose a disentangled reasoning model for answer prediction based on retrieved evidence as well as the latent representation of the reasoning strategy. The disentangled framework empowers each module to focus on a specific latent element in the question, and thus, leads to effective representation learning for them. Experiments on the StrategyQA dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in answering implicit questions, improving performance in evidence retrieval and answering inference by 31.7% and 4.5%, respectively, and achieving the best performance on the official leaderboard. In addition, our method achieved the best performance on the challenging EntityQuestions dataset, indicating the effectiveness in improving general open-domain QA tasks.

Generating Usage-related Questions for Preference Elicitation in Conversational Recommender Systems

A key distinguishing feature of conversational recommender systems over traditional recommender systems is theirability to elicit user preferences using natural language. Currently, the predominant approach to preference elicitation is to ask questions directly about items or item attributes. Users searching for recommendations may not have deep knowledge of the available options in a given domain. As such, they might not be aware of key attributes or desirable values for them. However, in many settings, talking about the planned use of items does not present any difficulties, even for those that are new to a domain. In this article, we propose a novel approach to preference elicitation by asking implicit questions based on item usage. As one of the main contributions of this work, we develop a multi-stage data annotation protocol using crowdsourcing, to create a high-quality labeled training dataset. Another main contribution is the development of four models for the question generation task: two template-based baseline models and two neural text-to-text models. The template-based models use heuristically extracted common patterns found in the training data, while the neural models use the training data to learn to generate questions automatically. Using common metrics from machine translation for automatic evaluation, we show that our approaches are effective in generating elicitation questions, even with limited training data. We further employ human evaluation for comparing the generated questions using both pointwise and pairwise evaluation designs. We find that the human evaluation results are consistent with the automatic ones, allowing us to draw conclusions about the quality of the generated questions with certainty. Finally, we provide a detailed analysis of cases where the models show their limitations.

Discourse Effect on Children’s Interpretation of Pre-Subject Exclusive Zhiyou ‘Only’

ABSTRACT It has been reported for decades that preschool children (age 4-7) tend to assign non-adult-like interpretations for sentences with pre-subject exclusive only. This study reports findings from two experiments investigating (1) the effects of (in)congruent implicit questions in discourse contexts and (2) word order transformation on children’s interpretations of Mandarin pre-subject zhiyou ‘only’. Experiment 1 showed that children performed non-adult-like in the incongruent discourse condition, similar to the patterns found in previous studies, but adult-like in the congruent discourse condition. Experiment 2 showed that using sentences similar to English ‘Those who ate apples was only the boy’ where the VP precedes the subject NP with zhiyou ‘only’ was not sufficient to overcome the processing difficulty caused by the incongruent discourse for preschool children. The results demonstrate that a congruent context taking the VP as the background (i.e., given and salient information) in Experiment 1, but not the syntactic manipulation in Experiment 2, is sufficient for children to interpret sentences with pre-subject zhiyou ‘only’ at an adult-like level of accuracy. The findings demonstrate that children have the syntactic knowledge for sentences with exclusive zhiyou ‘only’, but the discourse incongruence hinders them from correctly interpreting sentences with exclusive zhiyou ‘only’ when it is in pre-subject position.It has been reported for decades that preschool children (age 4-7) tend to assign non-adult-like interpretations for sentences with pre-subject exclusive only. This study reports findings from two experiments investigating (1) the effects of (in)congruent implicit questions in discourse contexts and (2) word order transformation on children’s interpretations of Mandarin pre-subject zhiyou ‘only’. Experiment 1 showed that children performed non-adult-like in the incongruent discourse condition, similar to the patterns found in previous studies, but adult-like in the congruent discourse condition. Experiment 2 showed that using sentences similar to English ‘Those who ate apples was only the boy’ where the VP precedes the subject NP with zhiyou ‘only’ was not sufficient to overcome the processing difficulty caused by the incongruent discourse for preschool children. The results demonstrate that a congruent context taking the VP as the background (i.e., given and salient information) in Experiment 1, but not the syntactic manipulation in Experiment 2, is sufficient for children to interpret sentences with pre-subject zhiyou ‘only’ at an adult-like level of accuracy. The findings demonstrate that children have the syntactic knowledge for sentences with exclusive zhiyou ‘only’, but the discourse incongruence hinders them from correctly interpreting sentences with exclusive zhiyou ‘only’ when it is in pre-subject position.

A Case Against Simple-mindedness: Śrīgupta on Mental Mereology

ABSTRACT There’s a common line of reasoning which supposes that the phenomenal unity of conscious experience is grounded in a mind-like simple subject. To the contrary, Mādhyamika Buddhist philosophers beginning with Śrīgupta (seventh–eighth century) argue that any kind of mental simple is incoherent and thus metaphysically impossible. Lacking any unifying principle, the phenomenal unity of conscious experience is instead an unfounded illusion. In this paper, I present an analysis of Śrīgupta’s ‘neither-one-nor-many argument’ against mental simples and show how his line of reasoning is driven by a set of implicit questions concerning the nature of and relation between consciousness and its intentional object. These questions not only set the agenda for centuries of intra-Buddhist debate on the topic, but they are also questions to which any defender of unified consciousness or a simple subject of experience arguably owes responses.

Micromagnetic understanding of evolutions of antiferromagnetic domains in NiO

Antiferromagnetic domain formations and behaviors are long-standing implicit questions in magnetism and are becoming more important in recently emerging antiferromagnetic spintronics. In this paper, we experimentally investigate and numerically simulate evolutions of antiferromagnetic domains in NiO of a bulk single crystal under magnetic fields. With appropriate magnetic and crystallographic potential energy considerations, we extend a micromagnetic framework with a simulation algorithm which reproduces well the domain patterns and furnishes detailed understanding of the domain evolutions. The present work provides an important theoretical methodology to predict and understand behaviors of micromagnetic structures in antiferromagnets.

You are asked A Content Analysis of the Qur'ānic Verses about Inquiring of the Prophet Muhammad

Questioning can be a good starting point for a conversation and an interaction, particularly when it is needed and done deliberately. As one of the best expressive methods, questioning and answering is commonly used in Qur'ān. On the whole, 1260 explicit and implicit questions are asked in Qur'ān. Only in 18 chapters out of 114 chapters of Qur'ān, no question is asked. The questions have different addressees. Sometimes God inquires of the man; sometimes the Angles address God; some other times people ask one another. In some cases, people ask the Prophet (PBUH) their questions which are posed in either simple present tense "Yas'alunaka" or simple past tense "Sa'alaka". Out of thirteen questions, twelve questions were in the simple present and only one was posed in the simple past tense. In the present study, the researchers analyzed these questions based on Tafsīr-e-Nemunih and al-Mizān fī Tafsīr al-Qur'ān commentaries. The topics around which these questions mainly revolve include God, the phases of the moon, things to be spent in the way of God, War in the Holy months, win and gambling, Orphans, menses, lawful foods, Resurrection Day, spoils of war, soul, Dhul Qarnayn, and the mountains. The Prophet's (PBUH) wise responses to the questions and his concern about the needs of the audience in responding are two important findings of the study. Furthermore, the analyses showed how the Holy Prophet (PBUH) turned the threats into opportunities when someone asked undue questions and made the most of those opportunities.

Generating User-Centred Explanations via Illocutionary Question Answering: From Philosophy to Interfaces

We propose a new method for generating explanations with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and a tool to test its expressive power within a user interface. In order to bridge the gap between philosophy and human-computer interfaces, we show a new approach for the generation of interactive explanations based on a sophisticated pipeline of AI algorithms for structuring natural language documents into knowledge graphs, answering questions effectively and satisfactorily. With this work, we aim to prove that the philosophical theory of explanations presented by Achinstein can be actually adapted for being implemented into a concrete software application, as an interactive and illocutionary process of answering questions. Specifically, our contribution is an approach to frame illocution in a computer-friendly way, to achieve user-centrality with statistical question answering. Indeed, we frame the illocution of an explanatory process as that mechanism responsible for anticipating the needs of the explainee in the form of unposed, implicit, archetypal questions, hence improving the user-centrality of the underlying explanatory process. Therefore, we hypothesise that if an explanatory process is an illocutionary act of providing content-giving answers to questions, and illocution is as we defined it, the more explicit and implicit questions can be answered by an explanatory tool, the more usable (as per ISO 9241-210) its explanations. We tested our hypothesis with a user-study involving more than 60 participants, on two XAI-based systems, one for credit approval (finance) and one for heart disease prediction (healthcare). The results showed that increasing the illocutionary power of an explanatory tool can produce statistically significant improvements (hence with a P value lower than .05) on effectiveness. This, combined with a visible alignment between the increments in effectiveness and satisfaction, suggests that our understanding of illocution can be correct, giving evidence in favour of our theory.

Open-World Narrative Generation to Answer Players’ Questions

Planning-based narrative generation is effective at producing stories with a logically-sound flow of events, but it can be limiting due to the rigidity of its constraints and the high burden on the domain author to define story-world objects, initial states, and author and character goals. Giving the system the freedom to add objects and events to the story-world history arbitrarily can improve variety and reduce authorial burden, but risks leading to stories that seem jarringly contrived to the audience. I propose to use question-answering as the antidote to contrivance in a highly-generative interactive narrative system: By modeling the player's beliefs about the story world, inferring the implicit questions the player may be asking through their interactions, and answering those questions in a way consistent with the player's prior knowledge, a system could focus on creating cohesion in the ways that matter most to the player while accepting a degree of contrivance in the details that the player is likely to overlook.

IDENTIFICATION OF PROBLEM-SOLVING DIFFICULTIES OF MOROCCAN PUPILS AND TRAINEE TEACHERS IN LEARNING THE REDOX REACTION CONCEPTS: ELECTROLYSIS CASE

The present study aims to identify and compare difficulties in the acquisition of the knowledge and skills for solving electrolysis redox reactions encountered by Moroccan second-year baccalaureate (high school) students (novices in electrolysis problem-solving) and by trainee teachers of physics and chemistry (experts in electrolysis problem solving) at the Regional Center of Education and Training Professions in Rabat. The students and trainee teachers were asked to answer explicit and implicit questions; these questions were classified as simple or complex. Moroccan learners demonstrated mastery of basic problem-solving skills and chemical concepts, including repeating given knowledge, solving reaction equations, calculating the quantity of matter, calculating the concentration of a solution, and using a RICE (reach, impact, confidence, and effort) table. These skills were analyzed based on the objectives of each question and the skills required to solve each question. Both categories of learners were able to solve all of the problems presented in the questions. The participants included 107 students and 110 trainee teachers; the data were collected during the 2020/2021 school year and analyzed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). The performances of the two groups were compared. On average, the trainee teachers (rank: 137) scored higher than the students (rank: 80) on the problem-solving skills defined in the redox learning outcomes. Thus, the trainee teachers performed better on the questions than the students, indicating a clear difference in mastery of the skills required to solve chemistry problems. However, although the trainee teachers were considered experts and solved the problems more successfully than the students (novices), not all the trainee teachers had mastered all necessary conceptual and methodical skills related to the topic of electrolysis.

Lexical Acquisition during Dialogues through Implicit Confirmation

We have been addressing the problem of acquiring attributes of unknown terms through dialogues and previously proposed an approach using the implicit confirmation process. It is crucial for dialogue systems to ask questions that do not diminish the user’s willingness to talk. In this paper, we conducted a user study to investigate user impression for several question types, including explicit and implicit, to acquire lexical knowledge. We clarified the order among the types and found that repeating the same question type annoys the user and degrades user impression even when the content of the questions is correct. We also propose a method for determining whether an estimated attribute is correct, which is included in an implicit question. The method exploits multiple-user responses to implicit questions about the attribute of the same unknown term. Experimental results revealed that the proposed method exhibited a higher precision rate for determining the correctly estimated attributes than when only single-user responses were considered.

Understanding "Why:" How Implicit Questions Shape Explanation Preferences.

Adults and children 'promiscuously' endorse teleological answers to 'why' questions-a tendency linked to arguments that humans are intuitively theistic and naturally unscientific. But how do people arrive at an endorsement of a teleological answer? Here, we show that the endorsement of teleological answers need not imply unscientific reasoning (n = 880). A series of experiments show that (a) 'why' questions can be understood as a query for one of two distinct kinds of information and (b) these "implicit questions" can explain adults' answer preferences without appeal to unscientific worldviews. As a strong test of this view, we show that people endorse teleological answers that can answer relevant (implicit) questions about something's purpose, even when those answers are explicitly non-causal. Thus, we argue that endorsement of teleological answers does not necessarily equate to the endorsement of teleological 'explanations': Instead, explanation preferences may simply be an indication of people's pragmatic expectations about the questions that others ask. This view reframes how we should think about explanation preferences in general, while also offering practical insight into the pragmatics of question asking.

Consequences of the COVID-19 Lockdown in Germany: Effects of Changes in Daily Life on Musical Engagement and Functions of Music.

The current study investigated how music has been used during the COVID-19 pandemic and how personal factors have affected music-listening behavior. During the shutdown in Spring 2020 in Germany, 539 participants took part in an online survey reporting on functions of music listening, attributes of listened music, and active engagement with music, retrospectively before and during the pandemic. Next to these implicit questions, participants were asked to describe the changes they explicitly noticed in handling music during COVID-19, their current worries, and their new everyday life during the pandemic as well as personality traits and stress reactivity. A logistic regression model was fitted, showing that people reduced their active engagement with music during the lockdown, and the function of killing time and overcoming loneliness became more important, reflecting the need for distraction and filling the silence. Before the lockdown, music was listened to for the function of motor synchronization and enhanced well-being, which reflects how people have lost both their musical and activity routines during the lockdown. The importance of in-person engagement with music in people’s lives became particularly evident in the connection between worries about further restrictions and the need for live music.

أثر مستويات توظيف الأسئلة الضمنية بالفيديو المواضيعي عبر الويب على تنمية مهارات تصميم نموذج ريادة الأعمال الابتکارية وخفض العبء المعرفي لدى طلاب کلية التربية النوعية

هدف البحث الحالي الکشف عن أثر مستويات توظيف الأسئلة الضمنية (المنخفض/ المتوسط/ المرتفع) بالفيديو المواضيعي عبر الويب على تنمية مهارات تصميم نموذج ريادة الأعمال الابتکارية وخفض العبء المعرفي بمقرر الابتکار وريادة الاعمال لدى طلاب کلية التربية النوعية، تم الاعتماد على التصميم التجريبي (3×1) بحيث تضمن التصميم التجريبي المتغير المستقل مستويات توظيف الأسئلة الضمنية (منخفض/ متوسط/ مرتفع) بالفيديو المواضيعي عبر الويب، وثلاث متغيرات تابعة وهي التحصيل الدراسي؛ مهارات تصميم نموذج ريادة الأعمال الابتکارية؛ خفض العبء المعرفي بمقرر الابتکار وريادة الاعمال. وتمثلت أدوات البحث في اختبار تحصيلي، وبطاقة تقييم نموذج ريادة الأعمال الابتکارية، ومقياس العبء المعرفي. وتکونت عينة البحث من 120 طالبا وطالبة تم تقسيمهم إلى ثلاثة مجموعات بالتساوي حسب مستوى توظيف الأسئلة الضمنية. وتم استخدام برنامج SPSS لاختبار فروض البحث. وتوصلت نتائج البحث إلى: وجود تأثير إيجابي لمستويات توظيف الأسئلة الضمنية (منخفض/ متوسط/ مرتفع) بالفيديو المواضيعي عبر الويب على تنمية کل من التحصيل الدراسي، ومهارات تصميم نموذج ريادة الأعمال الابتکارية، ولکن تفوقت المجموعة التجريبية الثانية التي اتبعت مستوى توظيف الأسئلة الضمنية المتوسط بالفيديو المواضيعي عبر الويب في تنمية کل من التحصيل الدراسي، ومهارات تصميم نموذج ريادة الأعمال الابتکارية، وخفض العبء المعرفي، عن المجموعة الأولى التي اتبعت مستوى توظيف الأسئلة الضمنية المنخفض، والمجموعة الثالثة التي اتبعت مستوى توظيف الأسئلة الضمنية المرتفع. الکلمات المفتاحية: الفيديو المواضيعي، الأسئلة الضمنية، نموذج ريادة الأعمال الابتکارية ، العبء المعرفي. Abstract: The current research aimed to detected effect of the levels of appointment embedded questions (low/ medium/ high) in the thematic video over the web on developing the skills of designing an innovative entrepreneurship model and reduce the cognitive load to Innovation and Entrepreneurship course for students of the faculty of specific education. The experimental design based on (3×1) was relied upon so that the independent variable experimental design included the levels of appointment embedded questions (low / medium / high) in the thematic video over the web, on the dependent variables, which are and three dependent variables: academic achievement; innovative entrepreneurship model design skills; reduce the cognitive load in the innovation and entrepreneurship course. Research tools consisted of an achievement test, an innovative entrepreneurship model assessment card, and a cognitive load scale. The research sample consisted of 120 students, and they were divided into three groups equally according to the level of employment of the implicit questions. It has been used SPSS program to test hypotheses. The search results explained that: there is a positive impact of the levels of appointment embedded questions (low/ medium/ high) in the thematic video over the web on the development of both academic achievement and innovative entrepreneurship model design skills, But the second experimental group that followed the levels of appointment embedded questions medium in the thematic video over on the development the web of both academic achievement and innovative entrepreneurship model design skills and reduce the cognitive load, For the first group that followed the levels of appointment embedded questions low, and the third group that followed the levels of appointment embedded questions high. Key words:Thematic Video, Embedded Questions, Innovative Entrepreneurship Model, Cognitive Load.

1605P Being a medical oncologist during the COVID-19 pandemic: Perception, expectations and concerns. OATH study

In COVID-19 pandemic, medical oncologists worked actively both in their own fields and in COVID-19 health services. In this process, they made efforts not only to disrupt the medical needs of their patients, but also to protect them from COVID-19 mortality with actively or telemedicine integrated. This study aims to determine both the perspective of medical oncologists on the pandemic process and their profession, and their burnout during the pandemic process within the scope of implicit questions.

Exploring Factors Predicting Undergraduate Healthcare Students’ Use of Learning Strategies

<p style="text-align:justify">The present study aimed to investigate the relationship between students’ academic motivation, implicit beliefs about intelligence and learning strategies among undergraduate healthcare students. First-year students of healthcare degree courses from a university in Southern Italy were surveyed. The study measured psychological constructs by means of Academic Motivation Scale, Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire, and Dweck’s implicit questions about beliefs of intelligence. Two regression models were computed to assess the association between students’ beliefs about intelligence, motivations for studying, and learning strategies. In the first regression model, predicting students’ use of cognitive strategies from implicit intelligence beliefs and motivations for studying, stronger autonomous motivations were significant predictors of cognitive strategies. The second regression model, predicting students’ use of metacognitive strategies from implicit intelligence beliefs and motivations for studying, was not significant. These findings can be useful to plan tailored educational interventions to promote students’ motivation, incremental beliefs about intelligence and their use of learning strategies positively related with academic performance.</p>

George Eliot: Interdisciplinary Essays, edited by Jean Arnold and Lila Marz Harper

Reviewed by: George Eliot: Interdisciplinary Essays ed. by Jean Arnold and Lila Marz Harper William Lee Hughes (bio) George Eliot: Interdisciplinary Essays, edited by Jean Arnold and Lila Marz Harper; pp. xiv + 330. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, $109.99, $84.00 ebook. The straightforward title of George Eliot: Interdisciplinary Essays suggests two implicit questions: why should we read George Eliot today? And how should we read George Eliot today? Readers of Victorian Studies may balk at the question of whether or not we should read Eliot now. Of course we should read Eliot. However, Eliot's place in the canon of Victorian studies was not always assured, and we would do well to remind ourselves that Eliot's popularity in English departments has a history. Included in the introduction to this volume is a short history of Eliot's reception alongside a "Mid-Twentieth-Century Memoir" entitled "George Eliot, Then and Now" by Thomas Pinney (4). This brief history of Eliot's reception notes that, with the advent of aestheticism, late-Victorian readers "bypassed Eliot's earlier realism," and the World Wars then led to criticism of the "conventional Victorian morality" that readers found in Eliot (4). Pinney's memoir, written especially for this collection, describes his experience with an Eliot who was "quite out of fashion" until her revival in the mid-twentieth century: "George Eliot? Who? She was not even an also-ran" (5). Indeed, it took the work of countless scholars to secure Eliot's place in Victorian studies. The collection's answer to the second implied question is, of course, that we should read Eliot with an eye toward interdisciplinarity. The book accordingly is divided into five interdisciplinary sections, on periodical studies and the history of the book, Eliot's research methodology, Eliot and Victorian science, animals and environmental studies, and gender studies and feminism. Each section does two things. At least one essay reasserts Eliot's importance to the study of the Victorian period while at least one other essay connects Eliot to a problem or issue that twenty-first-century readers are struggling with right now in the humanities. As a bicentennial collection that celebrates Eliot's two-hundredth birthday, George Eliot: Interdisciplinary Essays aims to reestablish the centrality of Eliot to Victorian studies while simultaneously gesturing toward her value for a wide range of disciplines in the humanities. The essays on periodical studies and the history of the book offer new perspectives on Eliot in the context of print culture and make connections to contemporary media studies. Wendy S. Williams argues that Eliot cultivated her public image as a great artist especially through her poetry, which she included in her novels as epigraphs or "mottoes" alongside epigraphs of other great poets (46). Alexis Easley connects Eliot's engagement with the New Journalism in Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings in Prose and Verse Selected from the Works of George Eliot (1872) and our current social media context in which "writers use tweets, postings, and recirculated content to establish their own celebrity identities—and where readers consume literature both as tit-bits and as full-length texts" (36). Together, these essays help us to think about Eliot as a kind of social media personality in addition to, or perhaps as an alternative to, a great author of the British canon. While many of us are familiar with Eliot's quarry for Middlemarch (1871–72), we may be less familiar with her methods of conducting research and organizing information for other novels. As Andrew Thompson demonstrates, Eliot wrote Romola (1862–63) in the context of the professionalization of the discipline of history, which put Eliot under enormous pressure to "get things right" (65). In detailing Eliot's [End Page 140] meticulous research on fifteenth-century Rome, Thompson argues that the novel must be read in terms of nineteenth-century historicism and the historical novel. Romola is not only a novel; it is also a work of scholarship. Similarly, Eliot's use of Christian and Hebrew mythology is well known, but, as Molly Youngkin shows, Eliot's engagement with Egyptian mythology has been overlooked. Egyptian mythology appears in all of Eliot's major novels...

VNOS: A Historical Review of an Instrument on the Nature of Science

This paper studies four key aspects of the instrument “Views of Nature of Science” (VNOS); a) its general characteristics, b) the particular characteristics of the forms VNOS-A, VNOS-B, VNOS-C, VNOS-D; VNOS-D+ and VNOS-E, c) the modifications of its open-ended questions, and finally, d) the scope and limitations of the VNOS forms from the new conceptualizations of the Nature of Science (NOS) construct. The methodology is based on documentary research. The criteria of validity and reliability of Scott (1990) are followed. The open-ended questions of VNOS are analysed from four identified inductive categories: extension, reduction, substitution and fragmentation. The main contributions of the article are: 1. Delve into the characterization of VNOS, and its forms, allowing future NOS researchers to interpret the data obtained from the VNOS forms. Thus, each VNOS form identifies open-ended questions focused on various aspects of NOS (direct questions) and open questions focused on a specific context. The VNOS-C form presents more open-ended questions in a specific context and may be of greater interest for research in some populations. Explicit and implicit questions are also identified. The VNOS-D + form has more open-ended questions. Researchers are probably able to find units of analysis to characterize NOS views more easily in the VNOS-D+ form. 2. Relate the open-ended questions and NOS aspects characterize in each VNOS form. 3. Group open-ended questions by characterized NOS aspects, which is of interest for research focused on a particular NOS aspect. 4. Finally, the possibility of characterizing views on “scientific methods” is highlighted, especially when VNOS is used in conjunction with monitoring interviews, as well as with the “Views About Scientific Inquiry” (VASI) instrument. Similarly, it relates to the potential of VNOS forms to characterize some aspects coming from other NOS conceptualizations, especially from “features of science” (FOS) raised by Mathews (2012). All of the above, contributes conceptually and methodologically, to the identification of NOS views of primary and secondary students and their teachers. This is necessary to carry out diagnoses of NOS views in different communities, to propose evaluations of the impact of different teaching strategies and to relate NOS with other constructs, which together allow for the development of skills for informed socioscientific decision-making in the population in general.

Comparing reading comprehension between children reading augmented reality and print storybooks

Reading in early ages can be a challenge due to difficulties in recognizing new words and may result in lack of proper comprehension of the text. To address this problem, technology has been used in the form of electronic books and more recently Augmented Reality (AR) books. In this study, we measure reading comprehension of children reading an AR storybook and compare it with their counterparts reading the traditional print version of the same book. Reading comprehension was tested in this study by measuring children’s ability in retelling and recalling of the story. A quasi-experimental methodology was employed with post-test only design. The participants were 34 children aged 7 to 9 in Tehran (Iran) which were randomly assigned to either experimental or control group and read the print storybook with and without a tablet. Participants were asked to retell the story and answer comprehension questions right after reading the storybook. Children were observed during storytelling and interviewed. Mann-Whitney test was used for data analysis. The results showed a significant difference between the control and the experimental groups in terms of overall reading comprehension. Children who experienced augmented storybook were better in retelling and answering comprehension questions. However, this was not the case in all subcategories, as there was no significant difference between the groups in retelling theme and setting. Also, the experimental group scored higher in answering implicit questions. Overall, the presentation of related multimedia content with the print storybook will result in improvement in reading comprehension. Possible explanation and implications are discussed.

Frontal scalp potentials foretell perceptual choice confidence.

When making decisions, people naturally ask two implicit questions: how soon can I make a decision, and how certain am I? In perception, people's confidence (how certain?) shows a nonmonotonic relationship with response time (how soon?), such that choice confidence can either increase or decrease with response time. Although a frontoparietal network has been implicated as a neural substrate that binds choice confidence and action (e.g., response time), the dynamic interplay between choice behaviors within such a network has not been clarified. Here, we show that frontal event-related potentials (ERPs) reflect choice confidence before a decision. Specifically, we report a second positive peak of the stimulus-locked frontal ERP at ~500 ms that scales with confidence but not stimulus level, whereas the centroparietal ERP amplitude covaries inversely with response time. This frontal ERP component occurs before the response, which helps explain the inverse relationship between choice confidence and response time (i.e., higher confidence for shorter response time) when choice accuracy is emphasized over speed. Our findings provide the first early neural representation of confidence, consistent with the temporal precedence for its causal role in the current decision-making task: "I decided earlier because I am confident."NEW & NOTEWORTHY We report novel neural correlates of predecisional choice confidence in frontal scalp potential in humans. In conjunction with the centroparietal choice-action event-related potential component, this new frontal choice confidence component further elucidates the dynamics of the frontoparietal decision-making neural circuitry.

Development in the interpretation of ambiguous referents in 3‐ and 5‐year‐olds

AbstractIn verbal communication, a receiver often needs to resolve referential ambiguity. This study set two experimental conditions to separate the possibility of local correspondence based on the persisting strategy of reference assignment from that of more flexible reference skills. A total of 139 three‐year‐old and five‐year‐old children engaged in referencing names and colours in response to ambiguous implicit questions. The double‐referent condition involved a reference assignment task, which alternated explicit questions and implicit questions. In the single‐referent condition, implicit questions appeared at different positions within a series of interactions. The results demonstrated no difference between the conditions, indicating that the difficulty of disambiguation was not due to local correspondences such as “this”‐referent mappings in a particular context. This suggests that the study's procedure appropriately probed inferential competence to enable retrospective disambiguation, thus providing a potential tool for assessing various aspects of pragmatic interpretation.Highlights The main research question is whether the experience of "this"‐referent mappings affects to interpret the subsequent ambiguous referent. A total of 139 three‐ and five‐year‐old children were engaged in the reference assignment task. The results demonstrated that the tendency of disambiguation was not due to local correspondence such as "this"‐referent mappings in a particular context. The procedure used in the study appropriately reflected inferential competence that enables retrospective disambiguation.