Grade level, study time, and grade retention and their effects on motivation, self-regulated learning strategies, and mathematics achievement: a structural equation model

The present study complements previous research findings with new data to improve our understanding of the relationship between motivational variables and academic performance in math mediated by self-regulated learning (SRL). A structural equation model with predictor (i.e., grade retention, grade level, and study time), process (i.e., perceived usefulness of SRL strategies, self-efficacy for the use of SRL strategies, and reported use of SRL), and product variables (i.e., academic achievement in mathematics) is proposed. The model was analyzed in two samples of data (calibration and validation samples). The first sample served to fit and respecify the model, and the second one was used to analyze the consistency of the findings of the first sample. A sample of 756 middle school Portuguese students participated in the current study. The results indicate that SRL is positively and significantly related to academic achievement and that the latter is, in turn, powerfully determined by perceived usefulness and self-efficacy, although students’ reported use of SRL strategies decreases from 7th to 9th grades. Self-efficacy and perceived usefulness of SRL strategies were also found to decrease as grade retention increased. These results are discussed with regard to the relevance of self-efficacy and perceived usefulness of SRL strategies in increasing academic achievement.     

Practical Work in Earth Sciences Education: An experience with students in the context of a National Science Programme in Portugal

The programme Ciencia Viva of the Portuguese Ministry of Science and Technology aims to create a greater understanding of science and science education amongst scientists, teachers, school children and the general public, each of whom is encouraged to cooperate and interact through regular contacts. The purpose is to improve practical, experimental and other forms of investigative work. To accomplish such work in schools, an overview of the state of science education worldwide is presented in terms of old and new traditions of the teaching of the physical and historical sciences the latter including the teaching of fieldwork. Traditional practices are compared with those established recently in various parts of the world in which more carefully considered understanding of the nature of science and science education has been established. In illustration of good practice, an outline is offered of the nature and rationale of two sets of curricular materials. These were designed by a team comprising staff members of the University of Aveiro and secondary school teachers and were trialled in schools. These activities are concerned with the internal rock cycle and the internal energy of the Earth in relation to plate tectonic theory. They are also related to the processes of weathering, erosion, transportation and deposition of sedimentary rocks and structures (like wave and current ripple marks) which were formed as part of the external rock cycle driven by the Sun's energy. The account concludes with an outline of the sub programme 'Geology in Summer', a fieldwork programme which introduces a holistic understanding of the workings of the outer part of the Earth to the general public. Students' perspectives and teachers' views about these experiences are generally very positive and are presented at the end. The whole programme was evaluated by an international team of scientists and science educators.     

Problem posing based on investigation activities by university students

This paper reports a classroom-based study involving investigation activities in a university numerical analysis course. The study aims to analyse students' mathematical processes and to understand how these activities provide opportunities for problem posing. The investigations were intended to stimulate students in asking questions, to trigger their thinking processes, to promote their ability to investigate and to support them in learning numerical analysis' concepts and procedures. The results show that the investigations provided opportunities for students to experience mathematical processes, including posing questions, formulating and testing conjectures and, to some extent, proving results. They also provide some understanding about the role of problem posing in these processes. Posing questions occurred mainly in an implicit way, in the interpretation of tasks and in identifying regularities, analysing graphs and testing cases. The conjectures were often based on pattern identification or data manipulation, and the students tended to accept them without testing or proving. The students also proposed alternative formulations for the initial questions and posed new problems from their explorations and attempts to refine previous conjectures.     

The Filipino Nursing Students' Dilemmas in Geriatric Care

The continually rising percentage of the elderly population and the demand for geriatric nursing care are dramatically related. While it is true that most undergraduate programs prepare nurses for the care of geriatric patients, most receive limited academic preparation in the nursing curriculum (Williams & Mezey, 2000 Williams , C. , & Mezey , M. ( 2000 ). Older adults: Recommended baccalaureate competencies and curricular guidelines for geriatric nursing care . American Association of Colleges of Nursing and the John A. Hartford Foundation Institute for Geriatric Nursing . Retrieved August 10, 2008, from http://www.aacn.nche.edu/Education/pdf/Gercomp.pdf  [Google Scholar]). This is particularly true in the Philippines where there is no stand-alone geriatric nursing course.

This phenomenological study purports to capture the lived experiences of Filipino nursing students' dilemmas in geriatric care. Five Filipino senior nursing students and three clinical faculty from a comprehensive university in the Philippines were purposely chosen for the study. A two-part instrumentation was used. The first is the robotfoto, a Dutch term which means a cartographic sketch of the subject (Kelchtermans & Ballet, 2002 Kelchtermans , G. , & Ballet , K. ( 2002 ). The micropolitics of teacher induction: A narrative bibliographical study on teacher socialization . Teaching and Teacher Education , 18 ( 1 ), 105 – 120 .[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). The second was a semi-structured face-to-face interview that was recorded with the consent of the participants. The full texts were phenomenologically reduced using a repertory grid to observe both cool and warm analyses, which facilitates the identification of unique conceptual clusters. Findings of this study have described the elements that define student dilemmas in geriatric care. The emerged Students' Dilemmas in Geriatrics Causality Quadrant (SDGCQ), which consists of (a) Foundational Deficit, (b) Psychological Deficit, (c) Relational-Attitudinal Deficit, and (d) Occupational Deficit, are valuable discussion points for needed reforms in the present-day nursing curriculum.     

Coherence estimate between a random and a periodic signal: Bias, variance, analytical critical values, and normalizing transforms

The present work deals with recent results on the sampling distribution of the magnitude-squared coherence (also called just coherence) estimate between a random (Gaussian) and a periodic signal, in order to obtain analytical critical values, alternative expressions for the probability density function (PDF) as well as the variance and bias of the estimate. A comparison with the more general case of coherence estimation when both signals are Gaussian was also provided. The results indicate that the smaller the true coherence (TC) values the closer both distributions become. The behaviour of variance and bias as a function of the number of data segments and the TC is similar for both coherence estimates. Additionally, the effect of a normalizing function (Fisher's z transform) in the coherence estimated between a random and a periodic signal was also evaluated and normality has been nearly achieved. However, the variance was less equalized in comparison with coherence estimate between two Gaussian signals.     

Using genetic algorithms to evolve a population of topical queries

Systems for searching the Web based on thematic contexts can be built on top of a conventional search engine and benefit from the huge amount of content as well as from the functionality available through the search engine interface. The quality of the material collected by such systems is highly dependant on the vocabulary used to generate the search queries. In this scenario, selecting good query terms can be seen as an optimization problem where the objective function to be optimized is based on the effectiveness of a query to retrieve relevant material. Some characteristics of this optimization problem are: (1) the high-dimensionality of the search space, where candidate solutions are queries and each term corresponds to a different dimension, (2) the existence of acceptable suboptimal solutions, (3) the possibility of finding multiple solutions, and in many cases (4) the quest for novelty. This article describes optimization techniques based on Genetic Algorithms to evolve “good query terms” in the context of a given topic. The proposed techniques place emphasis on searching for novel material that is related to the search context. We discuss the use of a mutation pool to allow the generation of queries with new terms, study the effect of different mutation rates on the exploration of query-space, and discuss the use of a especially developed fitness function that favors the construction of queries containing novel but related terms.     

Classroom management of situated group learning: A research study of two teaching strategies

Although peer-based work is encouraged by theories in developmental psychology and although classroom interventions suggest it is effective, there are grounds for recognising that young pupils find collaborative learning hard to sustain. Discontinuities in collaborative skill during development have been suggested as one interpretation. Theory and research have neglected situational continuities that the teacher may provide in management of formal and informal collaborations. This experimental study, with the collaboration of the science faculty in one urban secondary college, investigated the effect of two role attribution strategies on communication in peer groups of different gender composition in three parallel Year 8 science classes. The group were set a problem that required them to design an experiment to compare the thermal insulating properties of two different materials. This presents the data collected and key findings, and reviews the findings from previous parallel studies that have employed the same research design in different school settings. The results confirm the effectiveness of social role attribution strategies in teacher management of communication in peer-based work.     

The media construction of the sports’ elite from the European perspective: an analysis of the European Symposium of Sports 2010

Since the first Olympic Games, the figure of the athlete has roused enormous passion. One may wonder if nowadays the cultural mechanisms that produce them are analogous and perform the same functions as in the past. This article aims to answer these questions. For this purpose, we have relied on the analysis of the discourse from different actors in the 2010 European Symposium of Sports “Thinking Sports, Transforming Society: The EU in favor of citizenship for the XXI Century”. The results will provide relevant information about the responsibility of the mass media in the production of a sports spectacle, the role of the big brands and the exemplarity of the sports’ elite. In this manner, the need was conveyed of producing a different view of sports, so that in the contest between humanistic values and materialistic values, those who contribute to the welfare of the citizens could achieve glory.