0000000000178011
AUTHOR
Gabriel Wittum
Editorial – About a ‚PLATO‘
While learning has constantly been an object of research in manifold disciplines and fields, it has generally been understood in a positive sense. In the Age of Information, we are witnessing an increasing number of phenomena in the context of knowledge construction and accumulation that we describe as “negative learning”. This includes, for example, the deliberate circulation of counterfactual knowledge leading to negative learning outcomes, i.e., deficient decision-making and acting, like medical errors.
A Concept for Quantitative Comparison of Mathematical and Natural Language and its possible Effect on Learning
Starting with the question whether there is a connection between the mathematical capabilities of a person and his or her mother tongue, we introduce a new modeling approach to quantitatively compare natural languages with mathematical language. The question arises from educational assessment studies that indicate such a relation. Texts written in natural languages can be deconstructed into a dependence graph, in simple cases a dependence tree. The same kind of deconstruction is also possible for mathematical texts. This gives an idea of how to quantitatively compare mathematical and natural language. To that end, we develop algorithms to define the distance between graphs. In this paper, w…