Use Of Scientific Terminology Research Articles

Pursuing the greenery: assessing plant-related content in the new Spanish curricula for compulsory education

ABSTRACT Plants constitute a highly diverse taxonomic group with fundamental ecological functions. However, plant biodiversity loss is currently a dramatic problem. It is essential to promote knowledge and appreciation of plants through formal education, particularly during educational stages that are compulsory for all citizens. This study presents an analysis of the new (2022) national curricula for primary (6–12 years) and compulsory secondary education (12–16 years) in Spain, and of the regional curricula for its largest region, Castilla y León. The analysis was conducted by identifying all plant-related text fragments, and classifying them into an inductive-deductive system of categories. These competence-based curricula are strongly grounded in the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals, since content related to the interactions between the social and the ecological spheres quantitatively prevails over scientific content on plants. However, some areas of plant science are under-represented, appearing only through general statements in which the use of scientific terminology is absent. Opportunities to promote first-hand experience of edible and useful plants are provided by the use of learning situations encouraged in the curricula. Biodiversity is identified as a key issue to be reinforced; despite being included, the curricula fail to associate it with knowledge on plant taxonomy.

Calidad de las tesis de doctorado en la Facultad de Medicina de la Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos

Objetive: Evaluate the quality of doctoral theses at the Faculty of Medicine of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos. Methods: Descriptive study, which consisted of the review of 114 theses on health topics in all four doctoral programs - Medicine, Nursing, Health Sciences and Neurosciences - from the creation of the first doctoral program in 1999, until 2020. Four quality indicators were used: scientific problem, sample, analysis (comparability) and conclusions, as well as other complementary indicators to evaluate the writing of the thesis and its social relevance, categorizing them into excellent, acceptable and not acceptable. Results: With the quality indicators there were 32 excellent theses (28.1%), 34 (29.8%) acceptable, and 48 (42.1%) not acceptable. On the other hand, 63 theses (55.2%) had good syntax (acceptable) and in 5 (3.4%) did not make good use of scientific terminology (not acceptable). 17.0% of the theses had both indicators - methodological and writing - of good quality. Conclusion: The doctoral theses evaluated were methodologically acceptable for the most part, with the health sciences theses achieving the best results with the methodological indicators. From the point of view of social impact, most of the theses had social relevance.

METHODOLOGY OF THE HUMANITIES BY N. I. KAREEV IN THE LIGHT OF THE INTERDISCIPLINARITY

The article is based on the materials of historical, sociological and methodological works by N. I. Kareev and contains an analysis of his understanding of interdisciplinarity. The analysis led to the conclusion that the development of terminology, classification of sciences and research methodology was central to Kareev’s works throughout his entire scientific career. Moreover, Kareev’s constant references to these topics indicate that the scientist felt the need for such a methodological and meta-scientific reflection. Constantly addressing the issues of interaction of sciences (interdisciplinarity), he discovered some conditions that made it possible, namely: interdisciplinarity is possible only with a strict delineation of the subject area of sciences; it is due to a certain phase in the development of the humanities and social sciences, one of which becomes the basis for scientific reflection (in his works it is the sociology); interdisciplinarity in social sciences and humanities is possible only at the level of fundamental research, but not in applied research. N.I. Kareev’s works seem relevant in the light of the ongoing discussions in contemporary Russian humanities about interdisciplinarity, the use of scientific terminology in the humanities and the objectivity of scientific knowledge.

Изучение словарного состава английской научной литературы для оптимизации возможностей преподавания английского языка в образовательных организациях системы МВД России

he object of the study, which formed the basis of this article was to optimize the possibilities of teaching English in educational organizations of the system of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia, and the subject is studying the vocabulary of English scientific literature to optimize the possibilities of teaching English in educational organizations of the system of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia. The aim of the work is to improve and optimize the use of the vocabulary of the English scientific literature to optimize the possibilities of teaching English in educational institutions of the system of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia, as well as developing recommendations for teachers on the use of scientific terminology in the process of teaching a foreign language to students and students of the system of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia. The research methods used in this scientific work are the analysis and systematization of scientific literature on the subject of the research; statistical data processing methods.
 The scientific novelty of the research consists in expanding, supplementing and refining scientific views on optimizing the possibilities of teaching English in educational institutions of the system of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia. The practical significance of the results lies in the substantiation of the possibility of using the vocabulary of the English scientific literature in the process of teaching a foreign language to cadets and students of the Russian Interior Ministry.

Seeing Race in Biblical Egypt: Edwin Longsden Long’s Anno Domini (1883) and A. H. Sayce’s The Races of the Old Testament (1891)

<span>To download this paper, please click </span><a href="http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10077609/1/PIA_28_Challis.pdf">here.</a> <div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"> <span><br /></span> <span>This paper discusses the impact of ideas about the historical and racial origins of the Holy Family that are captured in the painting </span><span>Anno Domini or the Flight into Egypt </span><span>(1883/4) by Edwin Longsden Long. </span><span>Anno Domini </span><span>fits into a wider 19</span><span>th</span><span>-century popular visual and literary narrative around Egypt and its ancient and biblical past. This general narrative, and its racial constructions, has been explored within reception theory and art history, but often overlooked in histories of archaeology and Egyptology. This paper unpacks how </span><span>Anno Domini </span><span>fits into a well-known orientalist way of seeing Egypt but also reflects ideas about race that were prevalent in archaeology and other newly established scientific disciplines at the time. The construction of the Virgin Mary and Christ child as White Europeans in </span><span>Anno Domini </span><span>both reflects and had an impact on constructions of race in Britain and on ancient (and modern) peoples in the Holy Land and Egypt in the late nineteenth century.</span> <span>These constructions fed the growing use of scientific terminology to give such racist imagery authority, as found in A. H. Sayce's ‘Sunday school book’ </span><span>The Races of the Old Testament </span><span>(1891). Sayce’s popular book used photographs taken by the archaeologist Flinders Petrie in 1887 of different 'racial types' from Egyptian monuments. </span><span>Anno Domini </span><span>vividly illustrates the preoccupation with race and identity found in archaeological interpretations of and motivations for recording material culture from ancient Egypt. This paper illustrates how art, archaeology, orientalism and racial theory fused and fed each other.</span> </div></div></div>

A short-term intervention improved children’s insights into causal processes

Understanding of causal mechanisms has largely been ignored in past work on science learning, with studies typically assessing multiple aspects of children’s knowledge or focusing on their explanations without differentiating between accounts of factors, variables and mechanisms. Recent evidence suggests that grasp of mechanisms is in fact a crucial predictor of children’s science achievement; and that spatial-temporal ability is a key driver of this grasp, helping children to envisage the transformations involved in the continuous causal processes they encounter in science lessons. The present research tested the impact of a short-term intervention designed to promote spatial-temporal thinking with regard to one such process, sinking. Children across Years one to three from a school in a disadvantaged area (5 to 8 year-olds, six classes, N=171) were taken through a three-stage classroom exercise: Making initial predictions and observations; engaging in an imaginative game to explore the interactions between objects and water; and then testing further predictions supported by the introduction of scientific terminology. These stages modelled on a scientific investigation, targeting five key steps: (1) perception; (2) representation; (3) analysis; (4) mental imagery; and (5) use of feedback. The exercise produced substantial improvements in children’s performance, regardless of age; better observation and more accurate prediction; more coordinated representations; greater incidence of imagery and mechanism-related analysis; better sensitivity to feedback and increased use of scientific terminology. The data suggest that the ability to utilise spatial-temporal elements in causal inference is highly malleable and that giving children space to think and talk imaginatively about mechanisms is central to their progress. At present, science lessons typically focus on the ‘what’ rather than the ‘why’, and do not actively support such thinking about causal processes.

How to Use Taxonomic Principles in a Non-Scientific Setting to Teach Hierarchical Thinking

Science education as it is taught in the twenty-first century primarily focuses on scientific literacy, specifically on the process of science and how it can be applied. Most process-driven pedagogical tools are based on hypothesis-driven science, in which the hypothesis is the focal point. In descriptive science, the focal point is the organization of data, leading ultimately to the formation of questions and hypotheses. This technique helps students through the process of data collection, organization, and application without the use of scientific terminology. The students are led through the process using common objects, and then required, as a homework assignment, to collect, organize, and apply their own data. By using this simple, repetitive technique, students will see how a classical scientific field (taxonomy) can be applied to modern life situations.

For want of a better word: unlocking threshold concepts in natural sciences with a key from the humanities?

ABSTRACTThe process of identifying threshold concepts invites experts to reflect on their discipline in a new way with the ultimate goal of improving learning and teaching. During a workshop to identify threshold concepts in biochemistry, we asked a group of natural scientists to explore ‘signification,’ a threshold concept from the humanities, as a mechanism to push them out of their comfort zones and recall how it feels to experience learning from a student’s perspective. In addition to accomplishing this goal, we subsequently realized that signification could also help us uncover and remedy ways in which use of scientific terminology impedes learning in biochemistry. Using the results of a survey of university teachers that aimed at refining a list of possible threshold concepts, we present three scenarios to illustrate the challenges that teachers and students encounter when attempting to cement a label (the signifier) and a concept (the signified) into a coherent sign. Based on these findings, we propose that teachers can better explore threshold concepts if they carefully consider the role terminology plays in learning and teaching. Thus we describe the ‘terminological canyon’ through which university teachers must journey in order to produce effective learning and teaching activities related to the threshold concepts. While the work described here pertains to biochemistry, we believe the process and findings can be generalized to a broad range of disciplines.

Measuring the development of a common scientific lexicon in nanotechnology

Over the last two decades, nanotechnology has not only grown considerably but also evolved in its use of scientific terminology. This paper examines the growth in nano-prefixed terms in a corpus of nanotechnology scholarly publications over a 21-year time period. The percentage of publications using a nano-prefixed term has increased from <10 % in the early 1990s to nearly 80 % by 2010. A co-word analysis of nano-prefixed terms indicates that the network of these terms has moved from being densely organized around a few common nano-prefixed terms such as “nanostructure” in 2000 to becoming less dense and more differentiated in using additional nano-prefixed terms while continuing to coalesce around the common nano-prefixed terms by 2010. We further observe that the share of nanotechnology papers oriented toward biomedical and clinical medicine applications has risen from just over 5 % to more than 11 %. While these results cannot fully distinguish between the use of nano-prefixed terms in response to broader policy or societal influences, they do suggest that there are intellectual and scientific underpinnings to the growth of a collectively shared vocabulary. We consider whether our findings signify the maturation of a scientific field and the extent to which this denotes the emergence of a shared scientific understanding regarding nanotechnology.

The misuse of terms in scientific literature

Abstract Contact: angelo.facchiano@isa.cnr.it

Classification-based scientific term detection in patient information

Although intended for the “average layman”, both in terms of readability and contents, the current patient information still contains many scientific terms. Different studies have concluded that the use of scientific terminology is one of the factors, which greatly influences the readability of this patient information. The present study deals with the problem of automatic term recognition of overly scientific terminology as a first step towards the replacement of the recognized scientific terms by their popular counterpart. In order to do so, we experimented with two approaches, a dictionary-based approach and a learning-based approach, which is trained on a rich feature vector. The research was conducted on a bilingual corpus of English and Dutch EPARs (European Public Assessment Report). Our results show that we can extract scientific terms with a high accuracy (&gt; 80%, 10% below human performance) for both languages. Furthermore, we show that a lexicon-independent approach, which solely relies on orthographical and morphological information is the most powerful predictor of the scientific character of a given term.

Language and values in the human cloning debate: a web-based survey of scientists and christian fundamentalist pastors

Over the last seven years, a major debate has arisen over whether human cloning should remain legal in the United States. Given that this may be the ‘first real global and simultaneous news story on biotechnology’ (Einsiedel et al., 2002, p. 313), nations around the world have struggled with the implications of this newly viable scientific technology, which is often also referred to as somatic cell nuclear transfer. Since the successful cloning of Dolly the sheep in 1997, and with increasing media attention paid to the likelihood of a successful human reproductive clone coupled with research suggesting the medical potential of therapeutic cloning in humans, members of the scientific community and Christian fundamentalist leaders have become increasingly vocal in the debate over U.S. policy decisions regarding human cloning (Wilmut, 2000). Yet despite a surfeit of public opinion polls and widespread opining in the news media on the topic of human cloning, there have been no empirical studies comparing the views of scientists and Christian fundamentalists in this debate (see Evans, 2002a for a recent study of opinion polls assessing religion and attitudes toward cloning). In order to further investigate the values that underlie scientists' and Christian fundamentalist leader's understanding of human cloning, as well as their differential use of language in communicating about this issue, we conducted an open-ended, exploratory survey of practicing scientists in the field of molecular biology and Christian fundamentalist pastors. We then analyzed the responses from this survey using qualitative discourse analysis. While this was not necessarily a representative sample (in quantitative terms, see Gaskell & Bauer, 2000) of each of the groups and the response rate was limited, this approach was informative in identifying both commonalities between the two groups, such as a focus on ethical concerns about reproductive cloning and the use of scientific terminology, as well as significant differences including concerns over ‘playing God’ for the Christian pastors, focus on therapeutic cloning by scientists, and subtle but informative differences between the two groups in their use of scientific terminology and their interpretations of human cloning as scientific progress.

Scientific terminology and context: How broad or narrow are our meanings?

The valuable insights of Slisko and Dykstra (Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 34, 655–660, 1997) enhance discussions concerning the use of scientific terminology in classrooms and conceptions studies. Their insights encouraged self-reflection on prior definitions in this journal (Pushkin, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 33, 223–224, 1996). Definitions intended to address specific terms with more clarity and precision, in retrospect, illustrate the potential difficulties specific terms create for educators and learner alike. Refined definitions will reflect a broader context. The term pseudoconception (Pushkin, 1996) is addressed in more detail. Conceptions studies may focus on learners' incorrect understandings; pseudoconceptions focus on correct understandings. Pseudoconceptions reflect the context of understanding; sensitivity is needed to the broadness or narrowness of that context. We sometimes perceive that education theory, physics, and chemistry are incompatible. All equally unique and important, none is completely independent from the others. Providing meaningful learning opportunities, science educators should see relevance in each; definitions of scientific terminology can reflect this. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 34: 661–668, 1997.