Many teaching practices implicitly assume that conceptual knowledge can be abstracted from the situations in which it is learned and used. This article argues that this assumption inevitably limits the effectiveness of such practices. Drawing on recent research into cognition as it is manifest in everyday activity, the authors argue that knowledge is situated, being in part a product of the activity, context, and culture in which it is developed and used. They discuss how this view of knowledge affects our understanding of learning, and they note that conventional schooling too often ignores the influence of school culture on what is learned in school. As an alternative to conventional practices, they propose cognitive apprenticeship (Collins, Brown, & Newman, in press), which honors the situated nature of knowledge. They examine two examples of mathematics instruction that exhibit certain key features of this approach to teaching.

/pdf/situated-cognition-and-the-culture-of-learning-3pg6ch1r4f.pdf

Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning

https://steadystate.org/wp-content/uploads/Stern_KuznetsCurve.pdf

The Rise and Fall of the Environmental Kuznets Curve

Econometricians would like to project the image of agricultural experimenters who divide a farm into a set of smaller plots of land and who select randomly the level of fertilizer to be used on each plot. If some plots are assigned a certain amount of fertilizer while others are assigned none, then the difference between the mean yield of the fertilized plots and the mean yield of the unfertilized plots is a measure of the effect of fertilizer on agricultural yields. The econometrician's humble job is only to determine if that difference is large enough to suggest a real effect of fertilizer, or is so small that it is more likely due to random variation. This image of the applied econometrician's art is grossly misleading. I would like to suggest a more accurate one. The applied econometrician is like a farmer who notices that the yield is somewhat higher under trees where birds roost, and he uses this as evidence that bird droppings increase yields. However, when he presents this finding at the annual meeting of the American Ecological Association, another farmer in the audience objects that he used the same data but came up with the conclusion that moderate amounts of shade increase yields. A bright chap in the back of the room then observes that these two hypotheses are indistinguishable, given the available data. He mentions the phrase "identification problem," which, though no one knows quite what he means, is said with such authority that it is totally convincing. The meeting reconvenes in the halls and in the bars, with heated discussion

https://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries/completed/pig-safeguards-2008/submissions/ar103_minter_ellison/subAR103_attachment.pdf

Let's Take the Con Out of Econometrics

Data augmentation and Gibbs sampling are two closely related, sampling-based approaches to the calculation of posterior moments. The fact that each produces a sample whose constituents are neither independent nor identically distributed complicates the assessment of convergence and numerical accuracy of the approximations to the expected value of functions of interest under the posterior. In this paper methods from spectral analysis are used to evaluate numerical accuracy formally and construct diagnostics for convergence. These methods are illustrated in the normal linear model with informative priors, and in the Tobit-censored regression model.

Evaluating the accuracy of sampling-based approaches to the calculation of posterior moments

Marriage and household decision-making: a bargaining analysis

Common preference models of family behavior imply income pooling, a restriction on family demand functions such that only the sum of husband's income and wife's income affect the allocation of goods and time. Testing the pooling hypothesis is difficult because most family income sources are not exogenous to the allocations being analyzed. In this paper, we present an alternative test based on a "natural experiment"--a policy change in the United Kingdom that transferred a substantial child allowance to wives in the late 1970s. Using Family Expenditure Survey data, we find strong evidence that a shift toward greater expenditures on women's clothing and children's clothing relative to men's clothing coincided with this income redistribution.

Do Husbands and Wives Pool Their Resources?: Evidence from the United Kingdom Child Benefit

Labour supply and commuting time: An empirical study

Education as an Investment and a Screening Device

Higher Education and Earnings: College as an Investment and Screening Device

A two-stage technology is a sequential production process that first uses pri mary inputs to produce intermediate inputs and then uses theintermediate inputs to produce final output. In this paper the authors show that two-stage technologies provide a general procedure for combining production functions or cost functions to obtain new specifications suitable for empirical production analysis. They investigate two new cost functions for which the input demand systemssatisfy global regularity conditions in a wide range of nondegenerate cases. Using six data sets, the authors estimate thesetwo input demand systems, both with and without imposing global regularity conditions, and find that one of them performs well. Copyright 1987 by University of Chicago Press.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/1832074

Terence Wales

Papers

Do Husbands and Wives Pool Their Resources?: Evidence from the United Kingdom Child Benefit

Labour supply and commuting time: An empirical study

Education as an Investment and a Screening Device

Higher Education and Earnings: College as an Investment and Screening Device

Specification and Estimation of Nonseparable Two-Stage Technologies: The Leontief CES and the Cobb-Douglas CES