A stochastic prey-predator system in a polluted environment with Beddington-DeAngelis functional response is proposed and analyzed. Firstly, for the system with white noise perturbation, by analyzing the limit system, the existence of boundary periodic solutions and positive periodic solutions is proved and the sufficient conditions for the existence of boundary periodic solutions and positive periodic solutions are derived. And then for the stochastic system, by introducing Markov regime switching, the sufficient conditions for extinction or persistence of such system are obtained. (...) Furthermore, we proved that the system is ergodic and has a stationary distribution when the concentration of toxicant is a positive constant. Finally, two examples with numerical simulations are carried out in order to illustrate the theoretical results. (shrink)

Teachers involved in English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching play a significant role in the process of moving toward educational equity. Teacher cognition is very influential in shaping teacher practice and thus affects students’ academic performance. However, although the role of EFL teachers as equity agents has been recognized, few studies have explored EFL teachers in-depth in terms of their cognition and practice. Moreover, no review studies have given sufficient attention to the task of elucidating the interrelations between EFL (...) teachers’ cognition and practices in the context of educational equity. Therefore, to provide a novel perspective and generate fresh insights into this research field, the current study attempts to explain the connotations of these constructs, highlights the interplay between EFL teachers’ equity-oriented cognition and practice, and identifies both experiential and contextual factors that might have an effect throughout the teaching process. Finally, practical implications and directions for teachers, researchers, policy-makers, and social justice leaders who are interested in actualizing education as a means of attaining equity are also discussed. (shrink)

The previous literature analyzed the widespread imitative innovation of Chinese enterprises from various perspectives, including enterprises' rational choice of cost-gain, property rights system, human capital and policy environment. However, this paper provides a brand-new perspective on government subsidies for the reasons behind the imitative innovation of enterprises. According to the statistics from Chinese enterprise-labor matching, we found that government subsidies stimulated enterprises to make “imitative innovation” through patent purchase rather than independent R&D. Government subsidies were used for low-risk “imitative innovation” (...) because of enterprises' rent-seeking behavior, low R&D ability and the review of government subsidy projects. Based on the above conclusions, this paper suggests that the government should reduce or withdraw its intervention in enterprise innovation and implement the post-subsidy and post-evaluation mechanism for government-subsidized programs. (shrink)

Previous research has established that people can implicitly learn chunks, which do not require a memory buffer to process. The present study explores the implicit learning of nonlocal dependencies generated by higher than finite-state grammars, specifically, Chinese tonal retrogrades and inversions , which do require buffers . People were asked to listen to and memorize artificial poetry instantiating one of the two grammars; after this training phase, people were informed of the existence of rules and asked to classify new poems, (...) while providing attributions of the basis of their judgments. People acquired unconscious structural knowledge of both tonal retrogrades and inversions. Moreover, inversions were implicitly learnt more easily than retrogrades constraining the nature of the memory buffer in computational models of implicit learning. (shrink)

Educational assessments tests are often constructed using testlets because of the flexibility to test various aspects of the cognitive activities and broad content sampling. However, the violation of the local item independence assumption is inevitable when tests are built using testlet items. In this study, simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of item response theory models and testlet response theory models for both the dichotomous and polytomous items in the context of equating tests composed of testlets. We also examine (...) the impact of testlet effect, length of testlet items, and sample size on estimating item and person parameters. The results show that more accurate performance of testlet response theory models over item response theory models was consistently observed across the studies, which supports the benefits of using the testlet response theory models in equating for tests composed of testlets. Further, results of the study indicate that when sample size is large, item response theory models performed similarly to testlet response theory models across all studies. (shrink)

This article describes how phenomenography, as a qualitative research method, can be used to tackle key challenges in science education. It begins with an overview of the development of phenomenography. It then describes the philosophical underpinnings of phenomenographic inquiry, including ontological and epistemological roots, and its unique second-order perspective. From theoretical background to practicality, the paper uses rich examples to describe in detail the procedures of conducting a phenomenographic study, including sampling and data collection, analyzing phenomenographic data, and communicating key (...) findings. The paper concludes by showing how the phenomenographic method can be used to develop students’ conceptual understanding of scientific concepts, to inform effective instructional design in science teaching, and to identify and improve evidence-based factors in student learning to enhance learning outcomes in science. (shrink)

Previous studies showed inconsistent results on the association between searching for calling and its psychosocial functioning outcomes. The link of searching for calling to its psychosocial functioning outcomes may be influenced by the presence of calling because the search for and presence of calling can co-exist within individuals. Thus, the present study employed a person-centered method to identify subgroups combining the search for and presence of a calling and then explore the identified profiles' differences in work meaning and job satisfaction. (...) Study participants were Chinese kindergarten teachers. Latent profile analysis revealed four different groups: actively maintaining calling, unsustainable calling, moderately increasing calling, and actively increasing calling. Subsequent analyses showed notable differences across the four groups on work meaning and job satisfaction. Participants in profile 1 with both the highest searching for and presence of calling would experience more work meaning and job satisfaction than those in the other profiles whose strengths of searching for and presence of calling were relatively low. Participants in profile 4 had higher searching for and presence of calling than those in profile 3, and they experienced more meaningfulness at work and were more satisfied with their job. These findings indicate that actively searching for calling is closely associated with more work meaning and job satisfaction among people who already perceive intensive calling. Implications, limitations, and future directions of the results are discussed. (shrink)

This article examines online identity practices of Chinese doctors mediated through borrowed linguistic resources in a leading medical app. Setting against rapid societal changes in China which open up traditionally ‘powerful’ professions to market competition, and the development of a booming digital economy, this app and its semiotic work drawing on Chinese Internet vernacular, I will argue, offer a fascinating lens to probe into the highly dynamic online discursive practices in contemporary China. Drawing on the notions of entextualization and resemiotization, (...) I will trace and analyse the patterned ways in which pre-existing linguistic resources are creatively reworked by the app to achieve new identity-making purposes. Situating the changes of the field of healthcare in China within a worldwide shift towards neoliberal ideologies and practices, I will also briefly discuss how the emergence of such new social space in digital settings may impact the production and communication of health knowledge and services in China. (shrink)

As observed by both western and Chinese scholars, despite the cultural and historical distance between them, the works of Confucius and J. L. Austin (together with other scholars of speech act theory) share similar views on the performative dimensions of language. Speech act theory underscores how utterances constitute actions instead of reporting inner mental states of the speakers, while Confucian texts also draw attention to the embeddedness of language in the wider contexts of personal affairs and social order. In this (...) article, we conduct a detailed comparison of the two to demonstrate that their views on language and communication, although sharing some important concerns, differ significantly in two main aspects: (1) The relationship between one’s ‘internal’ cultivation and ‘external’ behaviours; (2) The conceptualization of language and ethics. In conclusion, we discuss the implications of a Confucian outlook for the study of language and communication and point out some directions for future research. (shrink)

We investigate the role of legitimacy in setting organizational goals as a way to address the potential “dark,” unethical side of organizational goal setting. Coupling qualitative and quantitative research methods to better understand legitimacy in goal setting, we first induce novel hypotheses based on observed practice and then provide survey evidence to test the performance implications. Study 1 reports findings based on interviews with twenty-two company executives. We identify attention to goal credibility, prioritization of stakeholders directly involved in the goal’s (...) attainment when setting goals, and communication openness regarding goals, as well as their combination, as being important to organizational performance outcomes. Study 2 determines whether these three practices and their interaction predict performance using a survey conducted with 522 companies across four countries. Among other findings, we contribute to the organizational goal setting literature by showing that higher organizational performance is associated with the amount of priority given to the key actors (typically employees) directly involved with the goal’s attainment. We also find a positive interaction between attention to goal credibility, key actor (employee) importance, and communication openness on financial performance and non-financial goal attainment. Our work takes an initial step toward understanding how organizations can better shape the legitimacy of organizational goals for improved organizational performance and reduced unethical behavior. (shrink)

While rules and exemplars are usually viewed as opposites, this paper argues that they form end points of the same distribution. By representing both rules and exemplars as (partial) trees, we can take into account the fluid middle ground between the two extremes. This insight is the starting point for a new theory of language learning that is based on the following idea: If a language learner does not know which phrase‐structure trees should be assigned to initial sentences, s/he allows (...) (implicitly) for all possible trees and lets linguistic experience decide which is the “best” tree for each sentence. The best tree is obtained by maximizing “structural analogy” between a sentence and previous sentences, which is formalized by the most probable shortest combination of subtrees from all trees of previous sentences. Corpus‐based experiments with this model on the Penn Treebank and the Childes database indicate that it can learn both exemplar‐based and rule‐based aspects of language, ranging from phrasal verbs to auxiliary fronting. By having learned the syntactic structures of sentences, we have also learned the grammar implicit in these structures, which can in turn be used to produce new sentences. We show that our model mimicks children’s language development from item‐based constructions to abstract constructions, and that the model can simulate some of the errors made by children in producing complex questions. (shrink)

Space being the precondition for human existence, human perception and experience vary responding to different spaces. Modern urban dwellers live in urban space where they seem to have much space mobility but end up living in a homogenized concrete jungle. This fact has influenced, if not defined, modern urban dwellers’ life experience and caused their anxieties about such an existence. However, wilderness, as opposed to urban space, is not merely a type of space, but a way of existence relating to (...) diversity, freedom, and healthy savagery. Civilizational evolution explains the change of human perception of wilderness from fear and desire to conquer to longing and affection, and in this sense the history of the evolution of space perception is also a history of civilization because space and culture are entwined and the more diversified the types of human living space, the more diversified their existences. In the contemporary world, the significance of wilderness not only lies in its resistance to the aforementioned homogenized, unidimensional, urban human existence, but the civilization of wilderness points to a new form of civilization that is intrinsically different from technological civilization for whose disease the civilization of wilderness per se may serve as a possible remedy. (shrink)

How is scientific knowledge used, adapted, and extended in deriving phenomena and real-world systems? This paper aims at developing a general account of 'applying science' within the exemplar-based framework of Data-Oriented Processing (DOP), which is also known as Exemplar-Based Explanation (EBE). According to the exemplar-based paradigm, phenomena are explained not by deriving them all the way down from theoretical laws and boundary conditions but by modelling them on previously derived phenomena that function as exemplars. To accomplish this, DOP proposes to (...) maintain a corpus of derivation trees of previous phenomena together with a matching algorithm that combines subtrees from the corpus to derive new phenomena. By using a notion of derivational similarity, a new phenomenon can be modelled as closely as possible on previously explained phenomena. I will propose an instantiation of DOP which integrates theoretical and phenomenological modelling and which generalises over various disciplines, from fluid mechanics to language technology. I argue that DOP provides a solution for what I call Kuhn's problem and that it redresses Kitcher's account of explanation. (shrink)

Feedback plays a crucial role in the writing processes. However, in the literature on foreign language writing, there is a dearth of studies that compare the effects of teacher feedback and automated feedback on both cognitive and psychological aspects of FL writing. To fill this gap, the current study compared the effects of teacher feedback and automated feedback on both revision quality and writing proficiency development, and perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use of the feedback in English writing among (...) English learners as an FL in China. It also investigated students’ perceptions of the strengths and weaknesses of the two types of feedback. The study adopted a mixed-methods design. The quantitative method collected the data through a pre-test and a post-test, which measured the participants’ English writing proficiency development; a writing task, which received either teacher feedback or automated feedback; and a close-ended questionnaire, which examined students’ perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use of the feedback. The qualitative method collected the data through an open-ended questionnaire, which examined the participants’ perceptions of the strengths and weaknesses of teacher feedback or automated feedback depending on the type of feedback they received. Chinese university EFLs in two English classes taught by the same English teacher participated in the study: one class received teacher feedback while the other received automated feedback using Pigaiwang. While the students in the two classes did not differ significantly on the pre-test of students’ writing proficiency, students who received teacher feedback scored significantly higher on revision than those who received automated feedback. Students in the teacher feedback class also had significantly higher ratings on perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use of the feedback than those in the automated feedback class. However, students in the automated feedback class obtained significantly higher scores on the post-test of the writing proficiency. The qualitative results identified three themes of strengths and two themes of weaknesses for the teacher feedback and the automated feedback, respectively. The results suggest that while teacher feedback has a more positive effect on the psychological aspect of FL writing, automated feedback may be more effective in developing FL writing proficiency in the long run. (shrink)

BackgroundEthically challenging critical events and decisions are common in nursing homes. This paper presents nursing home doctors’ descriptions of how they include the patient and next of kin in end-of-life decisions.MethodsWe performed ten focus groups with 30 nursing home doctors. Advance care planning; aspects of decisions on life-prolonging treatment, and conflict with next of kin were subject to in-depth analysis and condensation.ResultsThe doctors described large variations in attitudes and practices in all aspects of end-of-life decisions. In conflict situations, many doctors (...) were more concerned about the opinion of next of kin than ensuring the patient’s best interest.ConclusionsMany end-of-life decisions appear arbitrary or influenced by factors independent of the individual patient’s values and interests and are not based on systematic ethical reflections. To protect patient autonomy in nursing homes, stronger emphasis on legal and ethical knowledge among nursing home doctors is needed. (shrink)