Do Children Have Rights or Do Their Rights Have to be Realised? The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child as a Frame of Reference for Pedagogical Action

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) is presented and understood as the primary reference point regarding questions of children's rights. However, the UNCRC is not a neutral instrument deployed to meet the rights of children: it embodies a specific perception of the child, childhood and citizenship. The interpretation of the UNCRC from the point of view of children's legal status emphasises the autonomy of children; the focus is on the rights that children possess. Conversely, the social-political interpretation of the UNCRC addresses the question of how the rights of children can be realised. It is suggested that distinguishing between these interpretations is essential with regard to questions of pedagogy and education.     

Competency Counselor Training for Paraprofessionals

The increasing use of paraprofessionals in the counseling profession acknowledges the many contributions such individuals provide in direct client service and in assistance to professional counselors. To educate competent paraprofessional counselors, however, their training programs must be adapted to their particular needs and circumstances. This article describes a current program that was designed specifically to prepare paraprofessional counselors.     

School Counselors' Perceptions of Training Needs in Multicultural Counseling

Ratings by practicing school counselors' of their needs for training in multicultural counseling indicated that additional training is most needed to promote students' academic achievement and to enhance counselors' cross-cultural communication and racism awareness. Curricular implications are discussed.     

Leadership and Strategic Management: keys to institutional priorities and planning*

Allocating and managing resources have always been important cornerstones of institutional leadership. Institutional resources include financial, physical and human components. Even in the best of times, it is a challenge to do this effectively. In times of diminished and shrinking resources, distributing these precious commodities across the institutions in the most equitable and productive manner is fraught with complications. As higher education funding streams expand and present more options, they also create new challenges. Leaders today must be well-versed in the emerging realms of philanthropy and entrepreneurialism. Beyond monetary resources, leaders and senior managers must monitor and understand the external environment in order to make discerning decisions about the viability of further infrastructure investments because of changing student demographics or the complexities of personnel within the dynamic culture of social organisations. This article will stress the need for leadership and an institutional planning process as essential prerequisites to effective resource allocations. Portugal will also be discussed as a case study.     

EYE MOVEMENTS REVEAL STUDENTS’ STRATEGIES IN SIMPLE EQUATION SOLVING

Equation rearrangement is an important skill required for problem solving in mathematics and science. Eye movements of 40 university students were recorded while they were rearranging simple algebraic equations. The participants also reported on their strategies during equation solving in a separate questionnaire. The analysis of the behavioral and eye tracking data, namely the accuracy, reaction times, and the number of fixations, revealed that the participants improved their performance during the time course of the measurement. The type of equation also had a significant effect on the score. The results indicated that the number of fixations represents a reliable and sensitive measure that can give valuable insights into participants’ flow of attention during equation solving. A correlation between the number of fixations and participants’ efficiency in equation solving was found, suggesting that the more efficient participants developed adequate strategies, i.e. “knew where to look.” The comparison of eye movement data and questionnaire reports was used for assessing the validity of participants’ metacognitive insights. The measures derived from eye movement data were found to be more objective and reliable than the participants’ reports. These results indicate that the measurement of eye movements provides insights into otherwise unavailable cognitive processes and may be used for exploring problem difficulty, student expertise, and metacognitive processes.     

The Development and Psychometric Evaluation of a Multidimensional Measurement Instrument of Professional Expertise

The aim of the present study was to determine the nature of the knowledge and skills related to professional expertise, and to develop means by which such expertise may be individually measured. An instrument was developed consisting of five different scales (with contents ranging from 12 to 19 items each), each reflecting one of five dimensions: knowledge, meta-cognitive knowledge, skills, social recognition, growth and flexibility. Participants were two different, but relevant, groups of raters: individual employees (N = 558) and their immediate supervisors (N = 454). The item-sets for both groups are nominally identical, except that the wording was adapted when necessary to suit one group or the other. The reliabilities of the developed scales were high with Cronbach's alpha ranging from 0.83 to 0.94, for both the self-ratings and the supervisor ratings. All five scales are homogeneous and distinctive as corroborated by Multitrait-Multimethod and LISREL analyses. Background and construction of the instrument are discussed at length and the instrument is appended in two versions: the original Dutch questionnaire and an English version.     

Kant's Philosophy of Education: Between Relational and Systemic Approaches

The purpose of this paper is to view Kant's approach to education in the broader context of Kant's philosophy of culture and history as a process whose direction should be reflectively assumed by human freedom, in the light of man's moral vocation. In this context, some characteristic tensions of his enlightened approach to education appear. Thus, while Kant takes the educational process to be a radically moral enterprise all the way through—and hence, placed in a relational context—he also aspires to constitute education as a science, to be improved through experiments, thereby paving the way for a systemic approach to education; in spite of its moral inspiration, his systemic approach not only could enter into conflict with the moral demand of taking each individual subject as an end, but is also marked by an intrinsic paradox, already involved in the ambiguity of the term ‘humanity’, which might mean a) humanity as a moral disposition present in each individual human being or b) humanity as a whole, as the ‘human species’.     

Queueing Theory

RESUME

The aim of this paper is to stress the need for a better training in stochastic methodology for European engineers. The emphasis is on applied probability. In Section 2, a brief introduction to the main features of queueing theory is given, as well as some examples of applications of queues to manufacturing and service industries. Sections 3 and 4 present some recommendations for further action and some final comments concerning stochastic education for engineers.

L'objectif de cet article est mettre en relief la grande necessityé d'une meilheure formation stocastique dans les cours pour les ingénieurs europeens. L'accent est mis sur le domaine des probability's appliquees. Dans la Section 2 une brieve introduction aux caracteristiques plus importantes de la teorie des queues d'attente estfaite; aussi quelques examples des applications de cette téorie-là aux industries des manufactures et des services. Dans les Sections 3 et 4 on présente quelques recommendations et commentaires finals relatives a I'éducation dans la mathématique stocastique pour les ingénieurs.