Literacy mediation as a form of powerful literacies in community-based organisations working with young people in a situation of precarity

This paper aims at understanding the complex relations between bureaucratic literacies, the lives of young people in a situation of precarity and the work of employees of two community-based organisations in Québec (Canada). Drawing on the perspective of the New Literacy Studies, the focus of this article is around the role of literacy mediators that can play youth workers. It also endeavours to clarify the meaning of the term precarity (précarité) by suggesting a multidimensional perspective on it. This paper reveals that literacy mediation can be a form of powerful literacies that offer opportunities to counteract dominant literacies and support new ways of learning. Finally, it suggests a reflection on the importance of the work of community-based organisations in countering the situation of precarity experienced by some young people. It underlines the fact that these organisations are also experiencing financial uncertainty and insecurity that affect their services.     

Examining entrepreneurial attributes of Latin American female university students

The phenomenon of women engaging in entrepreneurship is expanding and becoming acknowledged as a valuable resource that must be institutionally and socially supported. Through entrepreneurship education, female students, as potential entrepreneurs, can develop and strengthen those skills and behaviours identified as characteristic of successful entrepreneurs. This paper explores four attributes associated with entrepreneurship (creativity, problem management, risk management, and self-confidence) of 1838 undergraduate students from 11 universities in Latin America (Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Uruguay) and one in Spain, used as a control group. By comparing the results for the male and female student population, self-confidence appears as an attribute that is present at the same level in both groups; statistically significant differences were reported for the other three attributes (creativity, problem management, and risk management). Entrepreneurship programmes can utilise such information to strengthen in female students those attributes for successful engagement in entrepreneurial activity.     

The tools of quality in electronic engineering education

The university lecture rooms are the main work places where universities can develop their intermediary function between students and society. This function can be influenced by some factors: diploma curriculum, entrepreneurial environment and teacher research. The primary objective of this paper is to integrate these three factors in the lecture room. For that purpose, we started a new field in our centre: the innovation of quality in education. This field will provide the students with a work methodology in agreement with the professional world and will allow continuous improvement in the educational methodology. The experimental intervention was based on the application of the tools of quality to the problem-solving in telecommunications engineering. As a result, we detected the most significant troubles and we obtained guidelines to improve the design and development of the laboratory practices. Two main conclusions were obtained. First, we show that these quality techniques have been revealed as a powerful educational tool for continuous improvement. Second, the students made a good valuation of this way of making them approach their future engineering work. This work will lead us to new activities in the same field.     

An assessment of the sources of the reversal error through classic and new variables

We present two empirical studies with 241 and 211 pre-service teachers that evaluate the explanatory power of word order matching and static comparison as models for the reversal error. We used tasks consisting of generating an algebraic equation representing a comparison given in a verbal statement. We introduce the types of magnitude involved in the statement as variables of analysis, something that was not previously tackled in previous works. Our results show that there are no statistical differences in the production of reversal errors depending on the information included in the name used to designate the variable, and that there are statistical differences depending on the syntactic configuration as well as the type of magnitude involved in the statement. The interpretation of these results indicates that both word order matching and static comparison have some potential as explanatory models for the reversal error, and that neither one of them, alone, is enough to completely explain the phenomenon.     

Does education need strategic piloting?

Entered Unesco in 1965 and held among others the following posts: Co-operative Programme World Bank; Director Educational Policy and Planning; Unesco Special Educational Adviser to six governments in Central America; Adviser attached to the Assistant Director-General for Education responsible for studies on educational futures and coordination of Unesco's Major Project on Education in Latin America and the Caribbean; Director, International Institute for Educational Planning. Since 1988, he has been Assistant Director-General for Planning, Budgeting and Evaluation, Unesco. Author of numerous articles in professional journals on economics of education and educational policy and of a book: Educational Development: Strategies and Decision-making in Central America.     

The influence of aspirations on higher education choice: a telecommunication engineering perspective

This paper analyses the influence of external factors that affect the decision-making process in the selection of telecommunications engineering studies. Particularly, we have studied the influence of factors related to the generation of expectations about the studies. A survey was conducted on a sample of 701 male and female telecommunications engineering students. The results show the existence of a direct relationship between the choice of telecommunications studies in non-vocationally oriented students and their expectations of finding a job more easily, getting higher salaries and more prestige. On the other hand, non-vocationally oriented students show similar academic performance to that of vocationally oriented students.     

Group differences in test-taking behaviour: an example from a high-stakes testing program

This study investigated whether different groups of test-takers vary in their reported test-taking behaviour in a high-stakes test situation. A between-group design (N = 1129) was used to examine whether high and low achievers, as well as females and males, differ in their use of test-taking strategies, and in level of reported test anxiety and motivation. The results showed differences between high and low achievers on a number of test-taking strategies, where high achievers reported using successful strategies to a higher extent. There were also gender differences: females, for example, reported using random guessing to a higher extent than males. Further, low achievers, especially females, reported significantly higher levels of test anxiety than high achievers, and high achievers reported slightly higher levels of motivation when compared to low achievers. To conclude, test-taking behaviour might bring additional variance to test scores, whether or not this is irrelevant variance is discussed.     

Economic returns to schooling decisions

This paper is an attempt to determine the private internal rate of return to investment in two levels and four selected educational programs (computer science, nursing, nutrition, and social work). In these fields, a perennial uneasy situation occurs in which many bachelor's degree graduates and community college vocational degree holders perform exactly the same work and receive different salaries. The monetary benefit returns to individuals are calculated by using the cost-benefit analysis method. Results will be useful not only to public employment agencies and educational institutions, but also particularly to students who strive to acquire the most profitable level of education in the most economical way.Presented at the Nineteenth Annual Forum of the Association for Institutional Research, San Diego, California, May 1979.The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Office of Institutional Research.