Search results for "Concept learning"

On the Intrinsic Complexity of Learning

1995

AbstractA new view of learning is presented. The basis of this view is a natural notion of reduction. We prove completeness and relative difficulty results. An infinite hierarchy of intrinsically more and more difficult to learn concepts is presented. Our results indicate that the complexity notion captured by our new notion of reduction differs dramatically from the traditional studies of the complexity of the algorithms performing learning tasks.

Assessing complexity in learning outcomes : a comparison between the SOLO taxonomy and the model of hierarchical complexity

2015

An important aspect of higher education is to educate students who can manage complex relationships and solve complex problems. Teachers need to be able to evaluate course content with regard to complexity, as well as evaluate students’ ability to assimilate complex content and express it in the form of a learning outcome. One model for evaluating complexity is the Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes (SOLO) taxonomy. The aim of this analysis is to address the limitations of the SOLO taxonomy in detecting the more subtle differences of the learning outcomes and to clarify the concept of learning modes. This is done by analysing the SOLO taxonomy by means of the model of hierarchical comp…

Difficulties in learning the concept of electric field

1998

This article analyzes students' main difficulties in learning the concept of the electric field. To carry out this analysis we have supposed that the historical study of the main qualitative leaps that have taken place in the construction of the theory of field may help to diagnose such difficulties. Thus, we have made a brief description of the main conceptual profiles within which electric interactions can be interpreted (Coulombian and Maxwellian) and examined to what extent they are used by students in sixth form and in university. To achieve this we have devised and applied an open question questionnaire and personal. The results obtained showed that most students, even university stud…

Digging into group establishment: Intervention design and evaluation

2021

Previous research has documented challenges in students’ group work. An identifiable segment of the previous research that relates to improving students’ group work conditions is the study of group formation and self- and peer-assessment. Though studies that primarily focus on how to address the conditions of students’ group work and the existing problems can be found, there are not many related to higher education settings. On this ground, the present article advances a qualitative evaluation of the intervention that promotes student groups’ self-awareness and thereby self-regulation toward fair group work during a software engineering project. An inductive thematic analysis was applied to…

What to do about science “misconceptions”

1990

The problems of ‘competence’ and alternatives from the Scandinavian perspective ofBildung

2015

The paper aims to show how competence as an educational concept for the 21st century is struggling with theoretical problems for which the concept of Bildung in the European tradition can offer alternatives, and to discuss the possibility of developing a sustainable educational concept from the perspectives of competence and Bildung. The method of the study is conceptual analysis of ‘competence’ and Bildung. The paper concludes that (1) competence must be abandoned as an educational concept, as its problems cannot be solved due to the lack of a theory of educational content. With competence, the content aspect of education is obscured and hidden from public debate, and human autonomy is thr…

Writing as a Learning Tool

2001

How learning is understood in everyday schooling and conceptualized in research varies a great deal, as does the way in which writing is used for enhancing learning. This paper reviews recent research conducted mainly in Europe, North Arrierica, and Australia to outline what kind of challenges research is facing at the moment. The paper begins with examining how the concept of learning is defined in everyday use and in research. It considers the analysis of learning conceptions important because the way that learning is understood greatly determines how writing is used as a tool for learning. Second, it analyzes the theoretical basis for using writing as a learning tool--theories are divide…

“But big is a funny word”: a multiple perspective on concept formation in a foreign-language-mediated classroom

2015

In recent years, foreign-language mediated instruction (immersion, content-based language learning and teaching) has been studied from various perspectives. In the following study, a single event from a Finnish third-grade EFL-mediated geography lesson is studied by combining insights from three research approaches: sociocultural, socio-cognitive, and discourse-pragmatic. The data analysis focuses on how during concept formation, the participants use commonplace means present in every classroom – textbook and chalkboard, spoken and written, verbal and nonverbal communicative means – to construct knowledge and its social context. The results indicate that there exist strong parallels among t…

Becoming a beer expert: is simple exposure with feedback sufficient to learn beer categories?

2015

Category learning is an important aspect of expertise development which had been little studied in the chemosensory field. The wine literature suggests that through repeated exposure to wines, sensory information is stored by experts as prototypes. The goal of this study was to further explore this issue using beers. We tested the ability of beer consumers to correctly categorize beers from two different categories (top- and bottom-fermented beers) before and after repeated exposure with feedback to beers from these categories. We found that participants learned to identify the category membership of beers to which they have been exposed but were unable to generalize their learning to other…

Conceptual implicit memory: a developmental study.

1995

The widely accepted standpoint that implicit memory emerges earlier in development than explicit memory, and is more stable from childhood to adult age, is based on experimental data essentially collected in perceptual tasks. The present study was aimed at investigating whether these findings still hold when a more conceptual task is used. We compared the performance of children at two age levels (2nd and 4th grades) on a category-exemplar generation task. Results showed that performances of the two groups were comparable when the target items were typical of their categories, as in Experiment 2, and for a subset of the items in Experiment 1. However, the older children outperformed the you…