Scalable Science Education via Online Cooperative Questioning

How can the scalable powers of peer learning and online technologies be most effectively used to support conceptual understanding in science education? This paper reviews cognitive science research on how people learn via question answering and authoring and evaluates a promising novel learning design that applies these principles.

Amulab - Advanced multimedia learning laboratory

Amulab states for advanced multimedia learning laboratory. Here we explore how people learn from instructional materials that combine verbal and visual information, and we help develop such materials. Our main focus is on advanced materials in the sense of new media – animations, tutorials, interactive simulations, educational games, and so on.

Using the Cosmic Curriculum of Dr. Montessori Toward the Development of a Place-Based Indigenous Science Program

Indigenous educators desire to use culturally restorative and decolonized pedagogies reflective of their own cultural values and beliefs in their science programs but have lacked models for how to start. They also often lack confidence in their ability to teach the sciences. This three-year qualitative case study used grounded theory methodology to discover (a) how Hawaiian language immersion (HLC) K–6 educators used Maria Montessori’s Cosmic Curriculum for the creation of a science program based on Hawaiian epistemology and cultural values and (b) why the Cosmic Curriculum appealed to the HLC educators. Five key themes emerged: (a) the notion of creation as interconnected and relational, (b) an epistemological similarity regarding how people learn, (c) using timelines as organizing cognitive structures, (d) a focus on the natural sciences, and (e) the use of storytelling and key lessons to engage students. Participants stated that they felt successful in creating science curriculum and teaching the sciences as they adapted the above aspects of Dr. Montessori’s Cosmic Curriculum. Future research should be conducted to discover if her Cosmic Curriculum can be adapted for use in other types of non-Montessori program and whether this kind of science program could encourage students to choose the sciences as a career choice.

Disclosure, Discrimination, and Identity among Working Professionals with Bipolar Disorder or Major Depression

This chapter presents the results of an analysis of in-depth interviews with a snowball sample of 45 people who identified as working professionals diagnosed with bipolar disorder or major depression. It explores three dimensions of their experience: disclosure versus concealment of their diagnosis on the job, exposure to discrimination in the workplace based on their mental illness diagnosis, and identity strategies they used to manage the status inconsistency between being a professional and having a mental illness diagnosis. The findings reveal how people learn to calculate when it is safe to disclose their diagnosis on the job, especially after experiencing discriminatory treatment such as being fired or demoted. They also indicate that applying for workplace modifications to accommodate symptoms of mental illness may be met with unprofessional and unsupportive reactions on the part of managers, Human Resources professionals, and coworkers, which could explain in part why so few participants in this sample sought them. When it comes to balancing inconsistent statuses, the findings demonstrate how people distance themselves from their mental illness identity in favor of the more prized status of working professional as a means of self-preservation. The chapter concludes with a call for sweeping changes in workplace culture to minimize fear and shame and maximize inclusion of people diagnosed with mental illness, allowing them to flourish in careers in which they may realize their full potential.

Reward timing matters in motor learning

Reward can improve motor learning and the consolidation of motor memories. Identifying the features of reward feedback that are critical for motor learning is a necessary step for successful integration into rehabilitation programs. One central feature of reward feedback that may affect motor learning is its timing, that is, the delay after which reward is delivered following movement execution. In fact, research on associative learning has shown that short and long reward delays (e.g., 1 and 6 s following action execution) activate preferentially the striatum and the hippocampus, respectively, which both contribute with varying degrees to motor learning. Given the distinct functional role of these two areas, we hypothesized that reward timing could modulate how people learn and consolidate a new motor skill. In sixty healthy participants, we found that delaying reward delivery by a few seconds influenced motor learning dynamics. Indeed, training with a short reward delay (i.e., 1 s) induced slow, yet continuous gains in performance, while a long reward delay (i.e., 6 s) led to initially high learning rates that were followed by an early plateau in the learning curve and a lower endpoint performance. Moreover, participants who successfully learned the skill with a short reward delay displayed overnight consolidation, while those who trained with a long reward delay exhibited an impairment in the consolidation of the motor memory. Overall, our data show that reward timing affects motor learning, potentially by modulating the engagement of different learning processes, a finding that could be exploited in future rehabilitation programs.

EXPRESS: The influence of sample size on preferences from experience

People often learn from experience about the distribution of outcomes of risky options. Typically, people draw small samples, when they can actively sample information from risky gambles to make decisions. We examine how the size of the sample that people experience in decision from experience affects their preferences between risky options. In two studies (N=40 each) we manipulated the size of samples that people could experience from risky gambles and measured subjective selling prices and the confidence in selling price judgments after sampling. The results show that, on average, sample size influenced neither the selling prices nor confidence. However, cognitive modeling of individual-level learning showed that most participants could be classified as Bayesian learners, whereas the minority adhered to a frequentist learning strategy and that if learning was cognitively simpler more participants adhered to the latter. The observed selling prices of Bayesian learners changed with sample size as predicted by Bayesian principles, whereas sample size affected the judgments of frequentist learners much less. These results illustrate the variability in how people learn from sampled information and provide an explanation for why sample size often does not affect judgments.

Expanding the Boundaries of Informal Education Programs: An Investigation of the Role of Pre and Post-education Program Experiences and Dispositions on Youth STEM Learning

For generations educators have been supporting children and youth’s science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning through informal education programming. Such programming includes a wide variety of outdoor education programs, camp programs, and increasingly targeted STEM programs run afterschool, on weekends, and over the summer months. However, despite the positive impacts these programs have, few would argue that these programs could not be improved or be designed to better meet the needs of a broader and more diverse population of learners. Arguably, one major flaw in how most educators have approached the design and improvement of these programs—a flaw that permeates almost all informal STEM education efforts–is that either explicitly or implicitly, the focus of educators has been exclusively on what happens during the program itself. Superficially this seems reasonable. After all, the time children/youth are within the temporal and physical boundaries of the program, class, or museum is the time when educators have maximal control over events. However, given what is known about how people learn (National Academies of Sciences, 2018), we argue that this long-standing approach needs to be reconsidered.

Balance strategy in hoverboard control

This work investigates how people learn to perform lower limb control in a novel task with a hoverboard which requires maintaining dynamic balance. An experiment was designed to investigate the learning of balance and control strategies: i.e. hip versus ankle strategy. Motor learning was indicated by a decrease in total muscle activation and time to complete a trial. The results further show that participants with no prior experience of riding a hoverboard learn an ankle strategy to maintain their balance and control the hoverboard. This is supported by significantly stronger phase synchrony and lower dynamic time warping distance between the hoverboard plate orientation, that controls hoverboard motion, and the ankle angle when compared to the hip angle. A decrease of 14.2% in the co-activation of the muscles acting on the ankle joint also confirms the adoption of the ankle strategy. The adopted ankle strategy is robust to the foot orientation despite salient changes in muscle group activation patterns.

Dynamic Complexity: Senior Management Skills for the Safety of Present-Day Mining Companies

Based on the author’s more than 35 years of experience in mining projects and operations’ management – including the expansion of CODELCO’s El Teniente with rock blasting challenges that threatened its continuity – this article introduces a new way of facing safety in today’s companies. The proposal divides the management process into four stages: i) Adequate context diagnostic; ii) How people perceive reality; iii) An action plan; and iv) A focused and goal-oriented organization, where the key is understanding how people learn and interpret the existing reality. Based on these variables, organizations are challenged with developing a capacity to integrate corporate Dynamic Complexity – with “uncertainties” as a key variable – with their environment, both local and global. The proposal includes the Inverted Pyramid of Corporate Responsibility, where the integration capacity to manage communication and outreach processes as part of the company’s continuous development lies in the Board of Directors and the Top Management, thereby allowing the company to correctly address the cultural, professional, and educational diversity of its work teams, facing an increasingly uncertain environment.

Oxytocin modulates neurocomputational mechanisms underlying prosocial reinforcement learning

Humans often act in the best interests of others. However, how we learn which actions result in good outcomes for other people and the neurochemical systems that support this "prosocial learning" remain poorly understood. Using computational models of reinforcement learning, functional magnetic resonance imaging and dynamic causal modelling, we examined how different doses of intranasal oxytocin, a neuropeptide linked to social cognition, impact how people learn to benefit others (prosocial learning) and whether this influence could be dissociated from how we learn to benefit ourselves (self-oriented learning). We show that a low dose of oxytocin prevented decreases in prosocial performance over time, despite no impact on self-oriented learning. Critically, oxytocin produced dose-dependent changes in the encoding of prediction errors (PE) in the midbrain-subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC) pathway specifically during prosocial learning. Our findings reveal a new role of oxytocin in prosocial learning by modulating computations of PEs in the midbrain-sgACC pathway.