Qualitative Reasoning in Education of Deaf Students: Scientific Education and Acquisition of Portuguese as a Second Language

Abstract

Brazilian educational system is faced with the task of promoting deaf people educational rights. Presently, the deaf are integrated in the classroom along with hearing students. Qualitative Reasoning may provide tools to support Portuguese acquisition in the context of the development of scientific concepts. This study describes an experiment with eight deaf students being exposed to three articulate qualitative models organized in gradual levels of complexity. Questionnaires were used to assess ther students' ability of expressing ideas in written Portuguese using the ontology provided by the models. An interesting result was that five students were consistent in the ability of recognizing objects and processes, build up causal chains and apply them to a given situation, assessing derivative values of quantities and making predictions about the consequences of changes, and write up a composition about an ecological accident, using linguistic descriptions of the relevant physical and social processes. These preliminary results are encouraging and ongoing work is the development of models and textual material in different domains, such as electrochemistry, to explore the potential of qualitative models in second language acquisition.

A Twist in the Plot - Systems Thinking and Building Models for Analyzing Literary Artwork

“…(Bredeweg & Forbus, 2003). Published work showed that the QR approach fosters learning processes such as: establishing and completing terminology in a missing model while comparing it to a reference model (Lozano et al, 2015); providing an inductive explanation versus a mere measurement of the outcome (Petrou et al, 2014); integrating interdisciplinary knowledge (Mioduser et al, 2010); conceptual understanding of processes in ecosystems (Salle, Salles & Bredeweg, 2004); detecting errors in the process of learning a second language (Twidale et al,1990); understanding community behaviors through qualitative models (Salles & Bredeweg, 2001;.…”

A Twist in the Plot - Systems Thinking and Building Models for Analyzing Literary Artwork

“…(Bredeweg & Forbus, 2003). Published work showed that the QR approach fosters learning processes such as: establishing and completing terminology in a missing model while comparing it to a reference model (Lozano et al, 2015); providing an inductive explanation versus a mere measurement of the outcome (Petrou et al, 2014); integrating interdisciplinary knowledge (Mioduser et al, 2010); conceptual understanding of processes in ecosystems (Salle, Salles & Bredeweg, 2004); detecting errors in the process of learning a second language (Twidale et al,1990); understanding community behaviors through qualitative models (Salles & Bredeweg, 2001;.…”

A twist in the plot - Systems Thinking and Building Models for Analyzing Literary Artwork

“…(Bredeweg & Forbus, 2003). It enables establishing and completing terminology from a missing model and comparing it to a model built as a reference model (Lozano et al, 2015); providing an inductive explanation versus a mere measurement of the outcome (Petrou et al, 2014); integration of interdisciplinary knowledge (Mioduser et al, 2010); Conceptual understanding in a bilingual environment of processes in ecosystems (Salle, Salles & Bredeweg, 2004); learning a second language by detecting errors (Twidale et al,1993) and understanding of community behavior through qualitative models (Salles & Bredeweg, 2001;.…”