An Empirical Study at Évora’s University about Representations of “Quality Teaching” within an Intercultural Context

In this paper the authors tried to compare the representations of «teaching quality» between African portuguese speakers and portuguese native students’ throughout an attempt of intercultural education course. The students had answered to a questionnaire made specially for that propose and although the pilot character of the study, the analysis of the result seems to show that, in opposite to the expected, the concept of «teaching quality» does not present significative differences between them

Dimensionality reduction with image data

A common objective in image analysis is dimensionality reduction. The most common often used data-exploratory technique with this objective is principal component analysis. We propose a new method based on the projection of the images as matrices after a Procrustes rotation and show that it leads to a better reconstruction of images

Earth-Science Education: From all over the World to East-Timor

Earth Science education (ESE) emerges as a relatively new research area and there is an unquestioned need for improving students´ abilities on that field (American Geological Institute, 2008), taking into account that it is important for students’ everyday lives and thus, relevant for scientific literacy. So, the inclusion of a section concerned with this issue, was a very wise decision of the 1st Geological Congress at East-Timor Organising Committee, revealing an up to date vision about education for the XXI century. The paper will be divided in four sections: - Science Education - meaning, epistemology and rationale; - Earth- science-education all over the World in the context of Science Education; - Earth- science education in East-Timor secondary school curriculum; - Earth-science education and challenges for the futur

Adaptive Finite Element Methods for Elliptic Problems with Discontinuous Coefficients

Elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs) with discontinuous diffusion coefficients occur in application domains such as diffusions through porous media, electro-magnetic field propagation on heterogeneous media, and diffusion processes on rough surfaces. The standard approach to numerically treating such problems using finite element methods is to assume that the discontinuities lie on the boundaries of the cells in the initial triangulation. However, this does not match applications where discontinuities occur on curves, surfaces, or manifolds, and could even be unknown beforehand. One of the obstacles to treating such discontinuity problems is that the usual perturbation theory for elliptic PDEs assumes bounds for the distortion of the coefficients in the $L_\infty$ norm and this in turn requires that the discontinuities are matched exactly when the coefficients are approximated. We present a new approach based on distortion of the coefficients in an $L_q$ norm with $q<\infty$ which therefore does not require the exact matching of the discontinuities. We then use this new distortion theory to formulate new adaptive finite element methods (AFEMs) for such discontinuity problems. We show that such AFEMs are optimal in the sense of distortion versus number of computations, and report insightful numerical results supporting our analysis.Comment: 24 page