Composing an “Agon” and “Lettering a Public”: Democracy Between Binaries?

In response to ongoing expansion of neoliberal ideology in democratic education, this essay details a classroom experiment that attempts to “redo,” or “recraft” democracy. Recrafting democracy, in this context, takes shape in active efforts to compose an agonistic public sphere through a specific kind of “lettering a public.” As described, intentionally inefficient student efforts to “care-fully” compose, revise, and mail democratic letters allowed a more reciprocal and felt form of democratic deliberation to unfold. The essay describes the “Dear Demos” course assignment and articulates how the experiment in doing democracy might work to contest neoliberal notions of efficient, technocratic models of self-governance.

The Influence of the Benefit Redistribution Method on the Willingness to Voluntary Contribute to Public Goods Provision Classroom Experiment

Currently we are facing Covid 19 pandemics and it opens many questions about willingness of individuals to give up some private pleasure to contribute to public wellbeing. Theoretical economic research suggest that methodology of group account distribution does affect the contribution size. Lawyers, politicians and economists try to answer these questions using various scientific approaches and methods. One of them is to examine the willingness of individuals to contribute to public goods. Using a laboratory classroom experiment, we test various situations through public goods game. We examine whether economic entities are willing to contribute in situations when it is not advantageous for them from an individual point of view, but it is advantageous for society.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN GROWTH MINDSET, GRIT, AND ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT: DOES GOAL COMMITMENT MATTER?

This present study’s consisted of Ghanaian junior high school adolescents, precisely JHS1 and JHS 2. The study duration spanned from January 2019 to October 2020. During the study period, two assessments were done. In the first assessment, primary six students consisting of 425 adolescents, were assessed from 35 schools. During the year 2019, students in primary six who partook in the first assessment were engaged when they had been promoted to Junior high school. They included students who had become part of the classroom experiment. Eventually, this approach resulted in a sample size of 632 students for both JHS 1 and JHS 2. The data collection used structured questionnaires, and the snowballing approach was used for sampling and sample recruitment. The analytical method used for data analysis is structural equation modeling (SEM). This method is reliable for understanding the unique relationship between the dependent and independent variables to reveal their direct and indirect effects. This present study found that a growth mindset and grit are proportionally related to students’ academic achievement. However, grit should be measured by the perseverance of effort, not consistency of interest and conscientiousness, to positively affect academic achievement. Both goal commitment and growth mindset are related to understanding how grit contributes positively to academic success. In essence, the findings imply that students need to have the perseverance to trigger their growth mindset and goal commitment to affect their academic pursuits positively. KEYWORDS: Growth mindset; Grit; Academic achievement; Goal commitment

Proximity can induce diverse friendships: A large randomized classroom experiment

Can outside interventions foster socio-culturally diverse friendships? We executed a large field experiment that randomized the seating charts of 182 3rd through 8th grade classrooms (N = 2,966 students) for the duration of one semester. We found that being seated next to each other increased the probability of a mutual friendship from 15% to 22% on average. Furthermore, induced proximity increased the latent propensity toward friendship equally for all students, regardless of students’ dyadic similarity with respect to educational achievement, gender, and ethnicity. However, the probability of a manifest friendship increased more among similar than among dissimilar students—a pattern mainly driven by gender. Our findings demonstrate that a scalable light-touch intervention can affect face-to-face networks and foster diverse friendships in groups that already know each other, but they also highlight that transgressing boundaries, especially those defined by gender, remains an uphill battle.

Concept-based instruction for applied L2 acquisition

This study’s objective is to present an overview of experimental applications of Concept-Based Instruction (CBI) for Second Language Acquisition. CBI aims to describe complex grammatical notions in a thorough manner in order to facilitate their acquisition. Even though CBI is still considered as a recent domain in language teaching, the growing body of research makes it timely to present a systematic review, which is currently lacking. In the present paper, we will first describe the theoretical background upon which CBI is grounded. Then, we will carry out an analysis of 29 CBI studies in which a classroom experiment was performed, with the objective of considering the strengths and limits of this teaching method.

Ultimatum Game Bargaining Behaviour: A Classroom Experiment

This study aims to investigate the types of bargaining behaviour students have and the variables that affect these bargaining behaviours by designing an ultimatum bargaining game in the classroom environment (during the real exam). The experimental group consists of 202 students who took the spring term economics final exam. The strategic interaction between students was formulated as a two-person bargaining problem. A cooperative solution was based on the Nash solution also obtained for bargaining problem among students. The findings of this study show that the highest bargaining equilibrium in this game is the equilibrium status based on the Nash solution. Moreover, we concluded that the success of the economy course and the grade-level affect the students’ behaviour according to the equilibrium strategy based on the Nash solution. JEL Codes: C90, C70, C78, C57

Post-editing Machine Translation in MateCat: a classroom experiment

Advances in machine translation resulted in an increase of both volume and quality of machine-translated texts. However, machine translation still requires humans to post-edit the translation. This paper proposes a product-based approach of a post-editing (PE) experiment that was carried out with a total of 10 MA translation students. The goal of this study comprised both the analysis of the post-editing results performed by student translators involving a machine-translated text in MateCat and the subsequent error markup. By comparing the quality reports obtained at the end of the post-editing process, we analysed the linguistic quality results and observed a heterogeneous error distribution, considerable divergence in severity level ratings and a huge span of TTE (time to edit). This study aims at making a contribution to the integration of post-editing activities into the translation technology classroom for students without prior experience in PE.