For a meaningful understanding of physics, it is necessary to realise that this corpus of knowledge operates in a register different from natural thought. This book aims at situating the main trends of common reasoning in physics with respect to some essential aspects of accepted theory. It analyses a great many research results based on studies of pupils and students at various academic levels, involving a range of physical situations. It shows the impressive generality of the trends of c...

Everywhere in the world, except, for the time being, in some Asian countries, young people are losing interest in science. This disenchantment with science studies is particularly strong in the United States, but has affected Europe, and France especially. Official statistics confirm this, and I can add a telling example of my own. When I began teaching physics at Grenoble University in 1960, there were some 350 students studying to be electrical engineers. Today, 57 students are enrolled ...

Why is metacognition gaining recognition, both in education generally and in science learning in particular? What does metacognition contribute to the theory and practice of science learning?Metacognition in Science Education discusses emerging topics at the intersection of metacognition with the teaching and learning of science concepts, and with higher order thinking more generally. The book provides readers with a background on metacognition and analyses the latest deve...

In 1996 physicist Alan Sokal published an essay in Social Text--an influential academic journal of cultural studies--touting the deep similarities between quantum gravitational theory and postmodern philosophy.Soon thereafter, the essay was revealed as a brilliant parody, a catalog of nonsense written in the cutting-edge but impenetrable lingo of postmodern theorists. The event sparked a furious debate in academic circles and made the headlines of newspaper...

Electronic music evokes new sensations, feelings, and thoughts in both composers and listeners. Opening the door to an unlimited universe of sound, it engages spatialization as an integral aspect of composition and focuses on sound transformation as a core structural strategy. In this new domain, pitch occurs as a flowing and ephemeral substance that can be bent, modulated, or dissolved into noise. Similarly, time occurs not merely as a fixed duration subdivided by ratios, but as a plastic...

Part of a vital Springer series on self-study practices in teaching and teacher education, this collection offers a range of contributions to the topic that embody the reflections of science teacher educators who have applied self-study methodology to their own professional development. The material recognizes the paradox that lies between classroom science and the education of science teachers: the disciplines of science are often perceived as a quest for right answers, an unintentional b...

Since the time of the Ancient Greeks, much has been written about the relation between mathematics and music: from harmony and number theory, to musical patterns and group theory. Benson provides a wealth of information here to enable the teacher, the student, or the interested amateur to understand, at varying levels of technicality, the real interplay between these two ancient disciplines. The story is long as well as broad and involves physics, biology, psycho acoustics, the history of ...

Coteaching is two or more teachers teaching together, sharing responsibility for meeting the learning needs of students and, at the same time, learning from each other. Working as collaborators on every aspect of instruction, coteachers plan, teach and evaluate lessons together. Over the past decade, because coteaching can be highly beneficial to both students and teachers it has become an increasingly important element of science teacher education and is expanding into other content areas...

This translation of the French Recherches sur l'abstraction reflechissante (1977), make available in English Piaget's only treatise on reflecting abstraction - a process he came to attribute considerable importance to in his later thinking and which he believed to be responsible for many of the advances that take place in human development, especially our understanding of mathematics.Rich with empirical research on reflecting abstraction at work in the thinking of 4 to 12 y...

While acknowledging the significant gains modernity and post-modernity offer Western civilization in the areas of liberty and knowledge Schmitz sees in their arguments a superficiality that does not "bite to the bone." In The Recovery of Wonder he proposes we approach the world as a gift in order to regain the sense of wonder Shakespeare so eloquently recognized.

This book provides a simplified description of the procedures to be used to perform an analysis of hydrological data within a multifractal framework. After a review of multifractal theory and the presentation of one model for identifying scale invariance properties, examples of applications to rainfall and discharge time series are given. It will be of interest to teachers and researchers in this field, both nationally and abroad.

Torsors, also known as principal bundles or principal homogeneous spaces, are ubiquitous in mathematics. The purpose of this book is to present expository lecture notes and cutting-edge research papers on the theory and applications of torsors and étale homotopy, all written from different perspectives by leading experts. Part one of the book contains lecture notes on recent uses of torsors in geometric invariant theory and representation theory, plus an introduction to the étale homotopy ...