Chile's higher education: between market and state

Presently, most Higher Education policy issues that are debated in Chilean society revolve around the question of the type of relations that should connect the Higher Education system with the state and society.During the 1980–1990 period, Chilean Higher Education underwent drastic changes under a Military Government, directed to the achieving of three main goals: to open-up the Higher Education system, to differentiate its institutional structures, and to partially transfer the cost of state-financed institutions to the students and/or their families (cost recovery) thus forcing these institutions to diversify their funding sources.As a result of the 1980 reforms, both the institutional composition and the financing of Higher Education experienced dramatic changes. New establishments mushroomed. In turn, the rapid increase in the number of institutions resulted in three major effects:first, Higher Education became private-dominant in the non-university levels and has now a dual public/private nature at the university level;second, establishments grew more regionally dispersed but overall enrolment distribution changed in the direction of a still higher concentration in the capital city;third, creation of new entrance opportunities shows an increasing over-extension with respect to enrolment demand. Also funding of Higher Education was drastically altered by the 1980 reforms. Incremental funding was replaced by a diversified funding system which contemplates the employment of four different mechanisms: public institutional core funding, competitive public allocations rewarding institutions that enrol the best students, a Government financed student-loan scheme, and competitive financing of research projects.A new, democratically elected Government was established in 1990. Its Higher Education policies include three major objectives: to fully restore institutional autonomy cancelling all measures of governmental intervention and reinstating the right of faculty members to freely choose their authorities and provide for the self-government of public universities; to increase public spending without changing the diversified-funding approach adopted by the former Government, and to change the legal framework of Higher Education with the aim of introducing more stringent accreditation and evaluation procedures and institutional accountability.     

Hybrid heuristic and mathematical programming in oil pipelines networks： Use of immigrants

We solve the problem of petroleum products distribution through oil pipelines networks. This problem is modelled and solved using two techniques: A heuristic method like a multiobjective evolutionary algorithm and Mathematical Programming. In the multiobjective evolutionary algorithm, several objective functions are defined to express the goals of the solutions as well as the preferences among them. Some constraints are included as hard objective functions and some are evaluated through a …     

Feeling Brown in the Academy: Decolonizing Mentoring Through a Disidentification Muxerista Approach

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Hispanics” comprise only 4% of the full-time faculty in U.S. universities, although Latin@s comprise 16.4% of the U.S. population. Given the under-representation of Latin@ faculty, efforts to support and retain them are paramount. Recently a small body of literature has surfaced explicitly centering the practices of peer mentoring among Latin@s. Through collaborative auto-ethnography and counter-storytelling, using a framework of disidentification, muxerista mentoring, and community cultural wealth, we add to this literature by discussing our experience of engaging in non-hierarchical Latina peer mentoring at a predominantly White university. The main themes include: merging emotional needs with professional growth, forging learning and research partnerships, Browning teaching spaces and transforming institutional practices.     

The efficiency of information transmission of sign and spoken language

Rhe study compares sign and oral language in terms of information transmission efficiency. The sample consisted of 36 hearing people with no knowledge of sign language and 36 deaf people reasonably fluent in sign language. (The deaf participants' level of hearing loss ranged from severe to profound.) Oral and sign language comprehension was assessed by means of texts at three different difficulty levels. After being exposed to the texts, the study participants had to tell what they had understood about them, answer a set of related questions, and offer a title for each text. When the hearing group's comprehension of oral versions of the texts was compared to the deaf group's comprehension of signed versions, the deaf group showed better comprehension of the explicit content of the texts but added more invented content and made more errors.     

A Conceptual Change Teaching Strategy to Facilitate High School Students' Understanding of Electrochemistry

Recent research in chemistry education has shown an increasing interest in the facilitation of conceptual change in student understanding of chemical concepts. Most of the studies have tried to show the difference in student performance on algorithmic and conceptual problems. The objective of this study is to go beyond and design a teaching strategy based on two teaching experiments that could facilitate students' conceptual understanding of electrochemistry. The study is based on two sections (control, n = 29; experimental, n = 28) of 10th grade high school students at a public school in Venezuela. Experimental group participated in two teaching experiments designed to generate situations/experiences in which students are forced to grapple with alternative responses leading to cognitive conflicts/contradictions. Results obtained show that learning electrochemistry involves both algorithmic and conceptual problems. On Posttest 1, 93% of the experimental group students responded correctly, in contrast to 39% of the control group. On Posttest 2, 39% of the experimental group responded correctly, in contrast to 0% of the Control group. The difference in performance on both posttests is statistically significant (p < 0.001). It is concluded that the teaching experiments facilitated students' understanding (progressive transitions) of electrochemistry.     

Two decades of educational research in Sweden

The article is an attempt to set forth the institutional setting for educational research in Sweden after 1945 and to describe the major directions of research. Governmental school committees began in the 1940's to commission research pertaining to the structure of the compulsory school system and to the objectives and content of the curriculum. As part of the school reform and the attempts to facilitate innovations, the first research institute linked with teacher-training was established in the 1950's. Since the beginning of the 1960's, the National Board of Education has maintained a Bureau of Research and Development. Finally, the proper role of the researcher in his relationship to the policy-makers is discussed on the basis of Swedish experiences.

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Résumé L'article tente de décrire le cadre institutionnel pour les recherches dans le domaine d'éducation en Suède après 1945 et de montrer les tendances principales de ces recherches. Ce fut dans les années quarante que des comités gouvernementaux scolaires commencèrent à commander des recherches ayant rapport au système scolaire obligatoire, aux objectifs et au contenu du programme d'études. Le premier institut de recherches lié à l'instruction des enseignants fut établi dans les années cinquante comme une partie de la réforme scolaire et des tentatives de faciliter l'innovation. Le Ministère d'Education National entretient, depuis le commencement des années soixante, le Service de Recherche et de Développement. Enfin, on traite, en prenant les expériences suédoises comme base, le meilleur rôle du chercheur à l'égard de son rapport avec les architectes de la politique.

     

The development of source evaluation skills during adolescence: exploring different levels of source processing and their relationships (El desarrollo de las habilidades de evaluación de las fuentes durante la adolescencia: una exploración de los distintos niveles de procesamiento de las fuentes y sus relaciones)

Abstract

This study examines the development of source evaluation skills in four groups of students from 10 to 19 years of age. We designed a set of tasks based on a distinction between three components of source evaluation: the identification of source parameters; the evaluation of source features such as the source’s competence or benevolence under explicit instructions; and the use of source features in assessing a document’s relevance with respect to a given task. This inventory was administered to 245 teenagers in grades 5, 7 and 9 and to undergraduate students. All types of source evaluation skills developed throughout adolescence, with some of them remaining suboptimal for older readers. Furthermore, we found weak relationships between students’ identification of source parameters and their use of source features in the absence of any specific prompt. Finally, source evaluation tasks were weakly related to teenagers’ word reading skills. Taken together, these results document teenagers’ acquisition of source evaluation skills and warrant a distinction between readers’ ability to comprehend source features and to use these features when assessing information quality.     

Effects of teacher professional characteristics on student achievement: an investigation in blended learning environment with standards-based curriculum

Use of different teaching materials and curriculum for the same subjects is always a confounding factor in studies investigating teacher characteristics and student achievement. The purpose of this study is to understand the effects of different teacher qualities on student achievement in high schools with a standards-based curriculum delivered over a blended learning environment. Utilizing quantitative research approach, this study investigates the effects of teacher characteristics and teaching practices in a course offered through Cisco Networking Academy, which has a standards-oriented curriculum delivered online. Participants in the study were 226 teachers and 3299 students from Networking Academies located in the USA. The findings suggest that certain teacher characteristics such as teaching experience, degree, and primary teaching field do not have effects on student achievement.