Our purpose is to bring together perspectives concerning the processing and use of statistical graphs to identify critical factors that appear to influence graph comprehension and to suggest instructional implications. After providing a synthesis of information about the nature and structure of graphs, we define graph comprehension. We consider 4 critical factors that appear to affect graph comprehension: the purposes for using graphs, task characteristics, discipline characteristics, and reader characteristics. A construct called graph sense is defined. A sequence for ordering the introduction of graphs is proposed. We conclude with a discussion of issues involved in making sense of quantitative information using graphs and ways instruction may be modified to promote such sense making.
Although claims regarding the cognitive benefits of computer programming have been made, results from existing empirical studies are conflicting. To make a more reliable conclusion on this issue, a meta-analysis was performed to synthesize existing research concerning the effects of computer programming on cognitive outcomes. Sixty-five studies were located from three sources, and their quantitative data were transformed into a common scaleEffect Size. The analysis showed that 58 or 89 percent of the study-weighted effect sizes were positive and favored the computer programming group over the control groups. The overall grand mean of the study-weighted effect size for all 432 comparisons was 0.41; this suggests that students having computer programming experiences scored about sixteen percentile points higher on various cognitive-ability tests than students who did not have programming experiences. In addition, four of the seven coded variables selected for this study (i.e., type of publication, grade level, language studied, and duration of treatment) had a statistically significant impact on the mean study-weighted effect sizes. The findings suggest that the outcomes of learning a computer language go beyond the content of that specific computer language. The results also suggest to teachers a mildly effective approach for teaching cognitive skills in a classroom setting.The teaching and learning of programming has become an important topic, especially among computer educators. Widespread availability of microcomputers has led to their increasing use in the nation's schools, with many schools devoting at least some computer time to instruction on programming. According to Pea and Kurland, several million precollege students in the United States receive instruction on computer programming each year [l].
In this research, we examined changes in preservice elementary school teachers' beliefs about teaching and learning mathematics and their abilities to provide mathematics instruction that was based on children's thinking. The 34 participants in this study were introduced to Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI) as part of a mathematics methods course. Belief-scale scores indicated that significant changes in their beliefs and perceptions about mathematics instruction occurred across the 2-year sequence of professional course work and student teaching during their undergraduate program but that their use of knowledge of children's mathematical thinking during instructional planning and teaching was limited. Preservice teachers may acknowledge the tenets of CGI and yet be unable to use them in their teaching. The results raise several questions about factors that may influence success in planning instruction on the basis of children's thinking.
My aim is to describe Jung's approach to the experience of the chaotic, which could equally be termed the irrational, the non‐ego, the unordered or prima materia, and to extract from this a clinical approach to the analytic patient which, in Jung's own writings, is often more implicit than explicit. My interest in this enquiry arises from the clinical experience of the unconscious in the form of transference/ countertransference, involving relentless pressure on both analyst and analysand to attempt to impute meaning and order. I examine Jung's work ‘Synchronicity: an acausal connecting principle’ and extrapolate from it what I think to be its unique contribution to hermeneutics ‐ the ontologically‐based concept of a psychoid understanding of meaning and pattern. In the second part of the paper, I discuss the application to analytic work of Jung's hermeneutic approach. I look at how analysts relate to meaning in terms of their relationship to theory. I illustrate this by comparing two short psychoanalytic papers on aggression, an instinct which is often seen as engendering splitting and which tends therefore to promote the dissociations which Jung was trying to address in ‘Synchronicity’. I then illustrate with clinical material how Jungian analysts might relate to meaning in their approach to the patient. Together, these form the basis of what is commonly called ‘analytic attitude’, which I see as the basis for a distinctively Jungian identity for analytic practice.
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