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This study examines middle school students' learning and motivation as they engaged in a new media enriched problem-based learning (PBL) environment for middle school science. Using a mixed-method design with both quantitative and qualitative data, we investigated the effect of a new media environment on sixth graders' science learning, their motivation, and the relationship between students' motivation and their science learning. The analysis of the results showed that: Students significantly increased their science knowledge from pretest to posttest after using the PBL program, they were motivated and enjoyed the experience, and a significant positive relationship was found between students' motivation scores and their science knowledge posttest scores. Findings were discussed within the research framework.

Liminality is a sufficiently comprehensive concept to allow the description and interpretation of how we experience change as existing in a “betwixt and between time”. A situation of liminality implies an intrusion, always difficult to manage, of chaos, of the erratic, into the harmony of everyday life. The activation of ecological sensitivities can lead to spontaneous liminal experiences, triggered by the awareness that the world around us is a changing environment. We intend to show that notions from phenomenology, such as home-world and alien-world, allow the interpretation of climate change as a situation of liminality that we experience due to the de-familiarization of the environment. The way we understand and interpret the world we live in is based on its normality, understood as constantly experienced in our daily bodily behavior. The notion of the home-world expresses the inter-subjective way in which we experience the natural world, as a world that is already given to us. Because its environmental meanings are actively imprinted in our lived corporeality, the home-world becomes a foundational standard against which changes in the natural environment are always cognitively compared within intuitive, already-constituted terms. The same world may appear alien to us when we become aware of sufficiently significant changes in the normality of our everyday experience, associated with discontinuities or disturbances. Because it places the familiar and known in tension with the unfamiliar and unknown, a liminal experience is always, at a subjective level, epistemologically transformative. To the extent that the surrounding natural world loses its already-given character, we will perceive it as an alien-world, more or less different from the one in which we lived our daily lives.

The concept of supervenience and a regimented concept of grounding are often taken to provide rival explications of pre-theoretical concepts of dependence and determination. Friends of grounding typically point out that supervenience claims do not entail corresponding grounding claims. Every fact supervenes on itself, but is not grounded in itself, and the fact that a thing exists supervenes on the fact that its singleton exists, but is not grounded in it. Common lore has it, though, that grounding claims do entail corresponding supervenience claims. In this article, I show that this assumption is problematic. On one way of understanding it, the corresponding supervenience claim is just an entailment claim under a different name. On another way of understanding it, the corresponding claim is a distinctive supervenience claim, but its specification gives rise to what I call the \"reference type problem\": to associate the classes of facts that are the relata of grounding with the types of facts that are the relata of supervenience. However it is understood, supervenience rules out prima facie possibilities: alien realizers, blockers, heterogeneous realizers, floaters, and heterogeneous blockers. Instead of being rival explications of one and the same pre-theoretical concept, grounding and supervenience may be complementary concepts capturing different aspects of determination and dependence.

Aristotelian Actualism is the conjunction of the theses that absolutely everything is actual, that individuals are neither reducible to nor dependent on independently identified properties, and that some individuals are genuine contingent existents. Robert Adams and Gregory Fitch, two prominent proponents of Aristotelian Actualism, have argued that this view has a consequence that any modal logic stronger than M, and so any modal logic in which symmetry and reflexivity are frame conditions, is inadequate. We argue that this is incorrect.

On the received view, counterfactuals are analysed using the concept of closeness between possible worlds: the counterfactual ‘If it had been the case that p, then it would have been the case that q’ is true at a world w just in case q is true at all the possible p-worlds closest to w. The degree of closeness between two worlds is usually thought to be determined by weighting different respects of similarity between them. The question I consider in the paper is which weights attach to different respects of similarity. I start by considering Lewis's answer to the question and argue against it by presenting several counterexamples. I use the same examples to motivate a general principle about closeness: if a fact obtains in both of two worlds, then this similarity is relevant to the closeness between them if and only if the fact has the same explanation in the two worlds. I use this principle and some ideas of Lewis's to formulate a general account of counterfactuals, and I argue that this account can explain the asymmetry of counterfactual dependence. The paper concludes with a discussion of some examples that cannot be accommodated by the present version of the account and therefore necessitate further work on the details.

In 'Quiddistic Knowledge' (Schaffer in Philos Stud 123:1-32, 2005), Jonathan Schaffer argued influentially against the view that the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary. In this reply I aim to show how a coherent and wellmotivated form of necessitarianism can withstand his critique. Modal necessitarianism—the view that the actual laws are the laws of all possible worlds—can do justice to some intuitive motivations for necessitarianism, and it has the resources to respond to all of Schaffer's objections. It also has certain advantages over contingentism in the domain of modal epistemology. I conclude that necessitarianism about laws remains a live option.

A nasty variant was used in a disturbing autism awareness sound bite given wide distribution a couple of years ago by the advocacy organization CAN : In America, the term \"resident alien\" is used for noncitizens allowed to live and work in the United States - a term so demeaning that, colloquially, Americans tend to refer to immigrants as having a green card, rather than as being resident aliens. [...] human and alien are a tightly bonded pair.

This multiple-case study examined how advanced learners solved a complex problem, focusing on how their frequency and application of cognitive processes contributed to differences in performance outcomes, and developing a mental model of a problem. Fifteen graduate students with backgrounds related to the problem context participated in the study. Data sources included direct observation of solution operations, participants' think aloud and stimulated recalls as they solved the problem, as well as solution scores indicating how well each participant solved the problem. A grounded theory approach was used to analyze stimulated recall and think aloud data. A set of thirteen cognitive processes emerged in the coding and were tallied for each participant. Individual cases were then grouped into clusters that shared similar frequencies of prior knowledge activation, performance outcomes, and tool use behaviors. Each cluster was profiled from least to most successful with descriptive accounts of each cluster's approach to solving the problem. A cross cluster analysis indicated how learners' cognitive processes corresponded with problem solving operations that revealed thresholds of knowledge development and formed an integrated mental model of the problem. The findings suggested that mastering problem solving operations within each threshold enhanced the learners' conceptual awareness of where to apply cognitive processes and increased the combinations of cognitive processes they activated at higher thresholds of knowledge development. The findings have implications for anticipating where novices need support within each threshold of knowledge development during complex problem solving.

Arendt-Stern discusses the relations between Rahel Varnhagen and Goethe. For this first German-Jewish generation--as indeed for all the generations to follow--Goethe played a decisive role. Rahel is an excellent and unassailable example of real and authentic assimilation. The proof lies not only in what she herself said and wrote, but in Goethe's declarations: he called her in so many words one of the first people who had ever understood him. For Rahel, Goethe is the \"mediator\" between her and an alien world, an alien history, an alien society where she has no place that would be fixed in advance by birth and convention.

Is the relation between properties and the causal powers they confer necessary, or contingent? Necessary, says Sydney Shoemaker on pain of skepticism about the properties. Contingent, says David Lewis, swallowing the skeptical conclusion. I shall argue that Lewis is right about the metaphysics, but that Shoemaker and Lewis are wrong about the epistemology. Properties have intrinsic natures (quiddities), which we can know. On route I shall also argue that (i) the main necessitarian arguments do not converge on a single view, (ii) properties are transworld entities that cannot be handled by counterpart theory, and (iii) quiddistic skepticism is merely external world skepticism writ small.