Students and the Governance of Higher Education in Norway

The article discusses the question of student participation in higher education governance at the national and the institutional levels in Norway. Two ideal-type perspectives on governance are developed in order to illuminate the Norwegian case: a democratic perspective and a market perspective. The article provides a brief overview of the historical development of student participation in higher education governance, emphasizing how students view their own role in the governance arenas in which they participate. Close attention is paid to student participation and influence in quality assurance schemes at both the national and the institutional levels. In the conclusion, the article discusses how the recent developments are changing the balance towards the market model of higher education governance, without obliterating significant elements of the hitherto predominant democratic governance model.

     

Locality-adapted kernel densities of term co-occurrences for location prediction of tweets

While geographical metadata referring to the originating locations of tweets provides valuable information to perform effective spatial analysis in social networks, scarcity of such geotagged tweets imposes limitations on their usability. In this work, we propose a content-based location prediction method for tweets by analyzing the geographical distribution of tweet texts using Kernel Density Estimation (KDE). The primary novelty of our work is to determine different settings of kernel functions for every term in tweets based on the location indicativeness of these terms. Our proposed method, which we call locality-adapted KDE, uses information-theoretic metrics and does not require any parameter tuning for these settings. As a further enhancement on the term-level distribution model, we describe an analysis of spatial point patterns in tweet texts in order to identify bigrams that exhibit significant deviation from the underlying unigram patterns. We present an expansion of feature space using the selected bigrams and show that it eventually yields further improvement in prediction accuracy of our locality-adapted KDE. We demonstrate that our expansion results in a limited increase in the size of feature space and it does not hinder online localization of tweets. The methods we propose rely purely on statistical approaches without requiring any language-specific setting. Experiments conducted on three tweet sets from different countries show that our proposed solution outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques, yielding significantly more accurate predictions.     

Mathematics-related emotions among Finnish adolescents across different performance levels

This study examined the relation of mathematics performance and gender with seven mathematics-related emotions (enjoyment, pride, anger, anxiety, shame, hopelessness and boredom) among adolescents. Using strict and lenient mathematics performance cut-off scores, respective groups of adolescents with mathematics difficulties (MD, n = 136), low (LA, n = 166) and typical mathematics performance (TA, n = 1056) were identified. Our results revealed that the MD group reported more shame than the LA group. The MD group also reported more negative emotions and less positive emotions than the TA group, with the exception of boredom, for which there was no statistically significant difference. The interaction effect between mathematics performance group and gender on emotions was significant. Only females with MD showed significantly higher levels of hopelessness and shame than females with LA, while males with LA even reported more boredom than males with MD. Concerning gender differences, males reported slightly more pride and enjoyment than females. However, the direction and magnitude of the gender differences showed great variance among mathematics performance groups. The practical implications of the results are discussed.     

Danish majority children's reasoning about exclusion based on gender and ethnicity

This study investigated 282 eight- to twelve-year-old Danish majority children's judgments and justifications of exclusion based on gender and ethnicity (i.e., Danish majority children and ethnic-minority children of a Muslim background). Children's judgments and reasoning varied with the perpetrator of the exclusion and the social identity of the target. Children assessed exclusion based on ethnicity as less acceptable than exclusion based on gender and used more moral reasoning for the former than the latter. Children judged it less acceptable for a teacher than a child to exclude a child protagonist. Children were sensitive to status, judging it less acceptable to exclude a less powerful group member. The findings are discussed in relation to intergroup relations in Denmark.