Teresa Susana Mendes Pereira and Ana Alice Baptista
The purpose of this paper is to present an instance of the system developed in the OmniPaper project, regarding the mechanisms of distributed information retrieval. These…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present an instance of the system developed in the OmniPaper project, regarding the mechanisms of distributed information retrieval. These mechanisms were developed for newspaper articles and they were then instantiated in the context of the scientific publication.
Design/methodology/approach
One of the steps of the system's development was the definition of the metadata layer that supports the research and the navigation functionalities as well as the contents' syndication. Several tasks were performed for the definition of the metadata layer, namely: analysis of several metadata standard vocabularies; selection of the metadata elements; definition of an application profile and the RSS template; development of a metadatabase, through the use of a native Resource Description Framework (RDF) database management system to store the RSS descriptions of the scientific publications; implementation of the search and navigation processes developed in the prototype; finally, tests and validation of all developed functionalities.
Findings
The RSS technology is well suited for handling the description of scientific contents. RDF records that were used in the OmniPaper RDF prototype were replaced by RSS. The subject and lexical thesauri were kept. This strong metadata layer allows the creation of several services that facilitate the conceptual search of scientific contents.
Research limitations/implications
The system implemented was tested but not evaluated in a real environment with specific users.
Originality/value
This paper presents a system that uses a central metadatabase to support conceptual searching mechanisms. This is a solution for a value‐added service for the scientific community that is fully based in state‐of‐the‐art standard technologies and is fully open for integration with other systems. Moreover this could be implemented by journals to improve the current mechanisms used to access, distribute and disseminate the scientific research developments.
Details
Keywords
Gorete Fonseca and João Pedro da Ponte
The study aims to understand what learning is evidenced regarding knowledge about the teaching of mathematics by five primary teachers when they reflect on research lessons. To do…
Abstract
Purpose
The study aims to understand what learning is evidenced regarding knowledge about the teaching of mathematics by five primary teachers when they reflect on research lessons. To do so, we used situations from the formal and informal reflection sessions that took place after teaching four research lessons.
Design/methodology/approach
It is a qualitative and interpretative research. Data collection was done by participant observation with elaboration of a research journal, audio recording of sessions and a whole-group interview. Data analysis was made by content analysis based on the conceptual framework.
Findings
The study shows the relevance of carrying out successive research lessons, followed by moments of formal and informal reflection, leading to improvements in relation to the way the task is proposed to the pupils, the representations used and the monitoring and questioning carried out by the teacher in the various phases of the lesson.
Originality/value
In lesson study, very often, only one research lesson is held. This case shows the potential of successive research lessons, each of which is followed by moments of reflection, in promoting the development of teachers’ didactic knowledge, namely regarding teaching practice, providing a more in-depth look at the way pupils work on mathematical tasks and the role of the teacher in promoting learning. Reteaching proved to be a valuable strategy to support teachers’ reflections in order to improve the leading of pupils’ work.