There are at least two broad perspectives from which the status of our scientific knowledge claims can be understood. The first is a purely realist view of scientific knowledge, referred to as scientific realism. According to this view the “theoretical entities that are characterized by a true theory do actually exist even though they cannot be directly observed. Alternatively, the evidence tha...

The online discussion forum (ODF) is one of the most widely used e-learning tools in open distance learning (ODL) environments. A popular line of research focuses on producing instruments that can be used to assess the level and amount of learning that takes place via transcript analysis of ODF-discourse. Of current interest is the influential community of inquiry (CoI) theoretical framework, f...

A perspective about science education is developed which has implications for the design of interactive learning technologies. Current philosophical work concerning the interpretative nature of scientific inquiry is reviewed as a context for discussing the situation of the child in developing scientific understanding. This view of learning ernphasizes the relationships among informal understand...

A text parsing component designed to be part of a system that assists students in academic reading an writing is presented. The parser can automatically add a relational discourse structure annotation to a scientific article that a user wants to explore. The discourse structure employed is defined in an XML format and is based the Rhetorical Structure Theory. The architecture of the parser comp...

For a variety of discourse level analyses and tasks performed on scientific literature, it is necessary to identify which (if any) cited paper the discourse entities in focus are attributable to. In this paper we introduce a scientific attribution task that aims to associate a range of linguistic expressions such as definite descriptions, pronouns and “work” nouns with specific cited papers. We...

One problem in science education is that students neither construct in-depth conceptual understanding nor are they able to apply scientific thinking processes. A myriad of studies on conceptual change have investigated the nature and process of conceptual change, pedagogical strategies to foster conceptual change and improve higher-level thinking. We propose a new framework the collaborative sc...

The science and professional practices of vocational psychology and career development are brought into question via a critical polemic informed by the work of Foucault, with a particular focus on the application of theory and techniques of objective assessment and psychometrics. It is asserted that the scientific and professional discourse and constructs of traditional approaches to career dev...