In this study, we analyzed students' understanding of a complex calculus graphing problem. Students were asked to sketch the graph of a function, given its analytic properties (1st and 2nd derivatives, limits, and continuity) on specific intervals of the domain. The triad of schema development in the context of APOS theory was utilized to study students' responses. Two dimensions of understanding emerged, 1 involving properties and the other involving intervals. A student's coordination of the 2 dimensions is referred to as that student's overall calculus graphing schema. Additionally, a number of conceptual problems were consistently demonstrated by students throughout the study, and these difficulties are discussed in some detail.

This paper is an attempt to reconsider issues of sameness, difference, equality, and democracy in present public school systems. It focuses on the question of (dis)ability and the implications of rethinking (dis)ability as an ontological issue before its inscription as an educational one concerning the politics of inclusion. The everyday dividing, sorting, and classifying practices of schooling are reconsidered through an analysis of old and new discourses of eugenics as “quality control” of national populations. The paper suggests that in the transmogrification of old to new eugenic discourses, disability becomes reinscribed as an outlaw ontology reinvesting eugenic discourse in a new language that maintains an ableist normativity. The paper concludes by considering the very difficult question of trying to imagine alternatives to sending the posse out in schools.

Narrative text permeates our lives from job applications to journalistic stories to works of fiction. Developing automated metrics that capture creativity in narrative text has potentially far reaching implications. Human ratings of creativity in narrative text are labor-intensive, subjective, and difficult to replicate. Across 27 different story prompts and over 3,500 short stories, we used distributional semantic modeling to automate the assessment of creativity in narrative texts. We tested a new metric to capture one key component of creativity in writing – a writer’s ability to connect divergent ideas. We termed this metric, word-to-word semantic diversity (w2w SemDiv). We compared six models of w2w SemDiv that varied in their computational architecture. The best performing model employed Bidirectional Encoder Representations Transformer (BERT), which generates context-dependent numerical representations of words (i.e., embeddings). The BERT w2w SemDiv scores demonstrated impressive predictive power, explaining up to 72% of the variance in human creativity ratings, even exceeding human inter-rater reliability for some tasks. In addition, w2w SemDiv scores generalized across Ethnicity and English language proficiency, including individuals identifying as Hispanic and L2 English speakers. We provide a tutorial with R code (osf.io/ath2s) on how to compute w2w SemDiv. This code is incorporated into an online web app (semdis.wlu.psu.edu) where researchers and educators can upload a data file with stories and freely retrieve w2w SemDiv scores.

No abstract

No abstract