Government Grants to Private Cultural Institutions–The Effects of a Change in the Italian Legislation

In Italy, the Regular Grant is the most important subsidy to private cultural institutions. Since 1996, law 534/96 has regulated its provision. This law greatly improves on the previous legislation, as it redefines the prerequisites to become a recipient and specifies performance indicators to which the size of the grant must be tied. This paper examines the effects of the introduction of the new law, the characteristics of the government choice process and the redistribution profile of these grants using a variety of estimating techniques on official data gathered for the purpose.     

The National Student Survey: validation in Portuguese medical students

The UK National Student Survey (NSS) is a sound and widely used instrument for assessing students’ academic experiences. We aimed to translate the NSS for Portuguese students and to validate the instrument in a sample of medical undergraduates. The research team translated and adapted the NSS for Portuguese students (NSS-P). The survey was administered on an online platform to 1,256 final-year students at eight Portuguese medical schools. A total of 329 medical students (69.9% female) replied to the NSS-P, a response rate of 26.2%. Confirmatory factor analysis showed that the original six-factor structure had an adequate fit to the data. Adequate internal consistency was observed for all the subscales. Medium to large correlations were found among all the subscale scores and between the subscale scores and the students’ overall satisfaction. Multiple regression showed that the scores on the Teaching, Organization and Management and Personal Development subscales significantly predicted the students’ overall satisfaction. Approximately 64% of the students reported being satisfied with the quality of their courses. Significant differences among the medical schools in their NSS-P scores were found. The NSS-P is a valid and reliable measure for assessing medical students’ perceptions of academic quality.     

"WE ARE ONE BIG, HAPPY FAMILY": BEYOND NEGOTIATION AND COMPULSORY HAPPINESS

A bstract .  Much recent scholarship on changing educational practices in Western families focuses on the idea that negotiation has become the dominant approach to family household management. In this essay, Bruno Vanobbergen, Michel Vandenbroeck, Rudi Roose, and Maria Bouverne-De Bie examine the idea of the negotiation model functioning as a directive. To illustrate this process, they demonstrate how the contemporary vocabulary about parental education affects the construction of parental beliefs and the concepts that define research. The authors first present a genealogy of negotiation by looking at constructions of childhood and parenthood, as well as the educational practices that shape, and are in turn shaped by, these constructions. They then turn their attention to the concept of the autonomous self and its implications for family relations and family household practices.     

Use of the K‐ABC with Children in Zaire,Africa: An Evaluation of the Sequential‐Simultaneous Processing Distinction within an Intercultural Context

There is a continuing need for formalised assessment procedures that can be adapted for group comparisons across diverse cultures to facilitate school and occupational placement, as well as to evaluate the effectiveness of nutritional, education, and medical intervention programs. This study used a direct translation of the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (K‐ABC) to evaluate 130 Zairian primary school children. The distinction between Sequential Processing and Simultaneous Processing abilities on the K‐ABC was generally found to be valid in this sample. The K‐ABC also discriminated effectively among grade levels, differences in health and family environment indicators, and tribal membership. Reasonable test‐retest correlations for the K‐ABC global scales were also found with a subsample of the children. The Zairian children's K‐ABC scores, particularly for the Simultaneous subtests, were markedly lower than the American normative sample. Education and experiential factors inherent in the sub‐Sahara environment may put these children at a significant cultural disadvantage in terms of the skills required for successful completion of K‐ABC items.     

The Relationship Between Tutoring Mode and Learners’ use of Help Tools in Distance Education

This article presents an experimental study demonstrating how 120 learners use help tools in a virtual learning set-up. More specifically, several types of tutoring are investigated to find out the extent of the use of help tools in each. The effects of two independent variables which may have an impact on the behaviour of learners are studied: (1) whether or not they have access to a human tutor (HT) and (2) the tutor’s means of intervention (reactive or proactive). One of the goals of the study is to determine whether these modes of tutoring can influence positively or negatively distance learners’ use of lexical, conceptual, metacognitive and navigational help tools. The results of analysis of variance show that it is useless to prompt (effect of proactivity) learners to use the help that is available to them but that prompting is sometimes more subtle than initially foreseen. It appears that the presence of an HT pushes learners to use help tools, but this effect (of the presence of the HT) is still relatively weak and therefore may not justify the cost of employing a human tutor. It is also important to show the necessary intrinsic quality of the tools made available in order for a given mode of tutoring to have an effect on their use.     

State Support and Creativity in the Arts: Some New Considerations

Neglected aspects of state support for the arts are discussed through posing two questions. First, “What kind of state is providing that support?” The extent and type of public support and its effects on the arts crucially depends on whether the state is centralised or decentralised, and on whether it is authoritarian or democratic. Second, “How is artistic creativity fostered?” ”Institutional creativity” is best supported by attributing a large role to the market and market-like institutions. “Personal creativity” hinges on intrinsic motivation, which may be crowded out by different types of public support. Important consequences for the public support of the arts follow.     

Development of a scale of Sense of Community in university online courses

Creating a sense of community in online classes contributes to student retention and to their overall satisfaction with the course itself. This study aimed to develop a scale of sense of community of students attending online university courses. A series of ordinal exploratory factor analyses were conducted on data obtained from 839 students enrolled in Italian universities. Using an item analysis method, we were able to select the 36 most valid items from an original set of 60 items we had previously defined. These items are distributed across three related factors measuring membership, influence, and fulfillment of needs. This factorial structure replicates the McMillan and Chavis’s model of sense of community, upon the basis of which this scale was developed. The three factors presented good ordinal alpha and adequate convergent/divergent validity coefficients. The scale represents an efficient tool for the design, monitoring, and evaluation of online courses.