knowledge representation

Knowledge representation, defined as the way individuals structure their knowledge and cognitive processing of events and the associated sense-making processes, is believed to influence teachers’ reasoning/thinking skills. While extensively researched in mainstream teacher education, this line of inquiry is essentially lacking in the L2 teacher education literature. To fill some of the void, the present study explored 36 – 18 novice and 18 experienced – EFL teachers’ representations of classroom management events. The teachers were presented with 8 fragments involving management problems in a novice teacher’s performance and were asked to provide their representations of the scenes. To explore likely differences between the two groups’ representations, the Mann-Whitney U test was used. Data analyses indicated that experienced teachers provided a significantly higher number of representations across majority of the categories of the coding scheme, except for disciplinary issues which were of prime concern to novice teachers. The implications of the study for pre-service and in-service teacher education are discussed.

This paper proposes a categorization of sport that is based on the system of rules that a sport must adhere to. We focus on these systems of rules to examine how a winner is produced in different sports. The rules of a sport dictate the gameplay and the direction it takes. We propose to break down the gameplay into Events. At this junction, we observe two kinds of events – ones that follow sequential logic and ones that do not. Our focus is pertained to sports that comprise sequential events. To examine these events further, to understand how a winner emerges, we take the help of Finite State Automaton from theory of computation (Automata theory). We showcase how sequential sports are eligible to be represented as Finite State Machines. We depict these Finite State Machines as State Diagrams. We examine these State Diagrams to observe how a team/player reaches the final states of the sport, with special focus on one final state – the final state which determines the winner. This exercise has been carried out for the following sports: Hurdles, Track, Shot Put, Long Jump, Bowling, Badminton, Pacman, Weightlifting (Snatch). Based on our observations of how this final State of winning is achieved, we propose a categorization of sports.