Academics’ perceptions of the impact of internal quality assurance on teaching and learning

Internal quality assurance systems are expected to improve the institutions’ core mission of teaching and learning. Using data gathered through an online survey, distributed in 2014/2015, to the teaching staff of all Portuguese private and public higher education institutions, this paper examines the impact of internal quality assurance systems on teaching and learning from the perspective of academics. Findings suggest that Portuguese academics feel that, despite the positive contribution of internal quality assurance towards an increased awareness of teaching quality issues at their institutions, the practical effects of these systems have been more related to increasing bureaucracy than to substantive improvements in teaching and learning. The use of information with a view to improvement and teaching staff involvement in the development of quality assurance were found to induce positive changes in teaching and learning, in academics’ perceptions. Based on the findings, the paper makes recommendations for institutional practice.     

Internal quality assurance systems in Portugal: what their strengths and weaknesses reveal

In Portugal, the agency for assessment and accreditation of higher education has recently included in its remit, beyond programme accreditation, the certification of internal quality assurance systems. This implies lighter touch accreditation and aims to direct institutions towards improvement, in addition to accountability. Twelve institutions have already undertaken the certification, and both self-assessment and external assessment reports are available. Based on the qualitative analysis of the nature of institutional strengths and weaknesses highlighted in these evaluation reports, the paper aims to understand whether the identified strengths and weaknesses are related to procedural and organisational matters or to cultural change (values and beliefs), in turn offering an insight into the quality culture(s) which characterise higher education institutions in Portugal. Findings suggest that the quality culture of the analysed institutions is somewhere between responsive and reactive. Overall, all reports dwell more on the prioritisation of formal and structural procedures, both regarding strengths and weaknesses. External reports point towards more weaknesses related to stakeholders’ participation. Both aspects are more frequent in polytechnics than in universities. These findings suggest that polytechnics are more reactive, whereas universities are more responsive. Therefore, accountability apparently continues to be, for the time being, a more pressing concern than improvement.     

The contribution of vocabulary knowledge and semantic orthographic fluency to text quality through elementary school in Catalan

Building a text is a multidimensional endeavor. Writers must work simultaneously on the content of the text, its discursive organization, the structure of the sentences, and the individual words themselves. Knowledge of vocabulary is central to this endeavor. This study intends (1) to trace the development of writer’s vocabulary depth, their vocabulary fluency in writing, and the features of the text they produce (productivity, lexical richness, and text structure) through elementary school and (2) to determine the contribution of the writer’s performance and the text features to the quality of the text. One hundred and eighty bilingual Spanish/Catalan speakers from first, third, and sixth grade took part in the study. They participated in three researcher-created tasks; a synonyms/antonyms task to orally assess vocabulary depth; a semantic orthographic fluency task to examine their vocabulary fluency in writing; and a text writing task to evaluate text quality. Data was analyzed using structural equation modeling in order to examine the relationship between the target writer’s performance and the text features of the written compositions, and the externally evaluated text quality. Results revealed that both writer’s performance on vocabulary depth and semantic orthographic fluency and text features improved with school level. However, the capacity to establish meaning relations between words contributed more directly to the quality of texts than the speed to find words with a specific phonographic correspondence. External evaluation of text quality was more variable for younger students than for older students and was affected by school level mediated by writer performance and text features.     

Adolescent Mothers and Their Children's Early School Performance

This study examined differences in child-mother interaction, classroom adjustment during kindergarten, and retention in kindergarten between 41 first-born children of adolescent mothers (18 years old or younger at the time of the child's birth) and 88 first-born children of adult mothers (20 to 24 years old at the time of the child's birth). Maternal education was included as a covariate in comparisons. The children of adolescent and adult mothers were generally indistinguishable in areas of classroom adjustment, retention in kindergarten, and child-mother interaction when mothers' education was considered. Results are discussed in terms of implications for research and policy.     

Academics’ and employers’ perceptions about responsibilities for employability and their initiatives towards its development

This paper reports the results of preliminary research into how Portuguese academics and employers perceive the responsibility of different higher education stakeholders—students, teaching staff, higher education institutions, employers, and policy-makers—for developing graduate employability. The study was conducted 8 years after the implementation of the Bologna Process, the reform that placed employability firmly on the agenda of higher education institutions (HEIs) in Portugal. This paper aims to assess the extent to which higher education is held responsible for developing employability, and to characterize the activities undertaken by the two actors to achieve that end. In particular, with respect to academics, we characterize curricular and other changes to study programmes, and, with respect to employers, their participation in activities undertaken by HEIs meant to ease the transition of students to the labour market. The data comes from a survey responded to by 684 Portuguese academics and 64 employers. Academics and employers alike were found to attribute high responsibility for developing employability to higher education, suggesting that the political message of the Bologna Process regarding the relation between higher education and the labour market has been assimilated. However, the activities reported by both types of respondents indicate only an average commitment to developing employability. Here, the low participation of employers in internal institutional activities is noteworthy, suggesting that the recognition of employers as stakeholders in higher education, as advocated by policy-makers, has yet to happen in Portugal.     

Civic education and visions of war and peace in the Spanish transition to democracy

Abstract

This article explores visions of war and peace in the education system during the Spanish transition to democracy. During those years, the Spanish state was faced with the challenge of leaving its authoritarian political past behind and forging a democratic civic culture. As the concepts of war and peace are inextricably linked to those of state and citizenship, they are a useful tool with which to examine changes in civic education. A wide variety of educational sources has been explored, with particular attention to the emotional nature of the depiction of both war and peace. This study reveals two opposing styles. The official discourse demonstrated a factual treatment of war and a tendency to concentrate on international bodies and their actions, when it came to fomenting peace. The treatment of peace in the circles of teachers’ local initiatives was different. First, peace was defined not only as the absence of war but also in terms of social equality and solidarity. Second, there was a conscious effort to get the students involved in opposing war, reinforced by emotionally charged messages regarding its horrors.     

Social network perspectives reveal strength of academic developers as weak ties

Social network perspectives acknowledge the influence of disciplinary cultures on academics’ teaching beliefs and practices with implications for academic developers. The contribution of academic developers in 18 scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) projects situated in the sciences are explored by drawing on data from a two-year national project in Australia within a case study research design. The application of a social network lens illuminated the contribution of eight academic developers as weak ties who infused SoTL knowledge within teams. Two heuristic cases of academic developers who also linked across networks are presented. Implications of social network perspective are discussed.     

Teachers as readers: a study of the reading habits of future teachers / El docente como lector: estudio de los hábitos lectores de futuros docentes

Abstract

Previous studies about reading achievement and habits of young people in Spain have systematically ignored the reading profile of Spanish teachers as an explanatory variable. However, teachers’ reading habits might help us to better understand their attitude towards reading and, therefore, their approach to the education of new readers in their classrooms. In this work, the reading habits of future teachers in three public universities have been explored by means of a survey. The results show that these subjects are not closely involved with reading, do not read regularly, do not read a wide variety of reading texts and do not place great value on books, although they do tend to overrate their reading practices. Furthermore, they scarcely visit libraries and mainly read for instrumental reasons, not to enjoy reading for its own sake. The way in which the reading profile of the teachers could affect their students’ education regarding reading is considered and promoting better attitudes and habits towards reading is proposed as a pre-service teacher education goal.     

A physiological,time–motion,and technical comparison of youth water polo and Acquagoal

Abstract

The aims of this study were to provide a profile of young water polo players and to compare technical and tactical aspects, movement patterns, and cardiac loads of youth water polo and Acquagoal codes. Ten young (age 12.3 years, s = 0.6) male water polo players underwent anthropometric (stature, body mass, body mass index, chest circumference, hand breadth, and length), strength, and [Vdot]O_2max evaluations. Friendly youth water polo and Acquagoal matches were arranged to evaluate heart rates and swimming patterns (horizontal and vertical, with and without the ball) of players, and technical and tactical aspects of matches (number of actions, passes, player involved in an action, lost possessions, shots, goals, and the origin and types of shot). Independent of code, matches imposed a high cardiac load on players. Vertical swimming occurred more frequently (P < 0.05) in Acquagoal (71%) than youth water polo (45%). Technical and tactical measures also differed (P < 0.05), with players performing more passes and shots inside the penalty area and showing a higher goal-to-shot ratio during youth water polo than during Acquagoal. These results indicate that youth water polo better resembles the swimming patterns of adult water polo and facilitates the technical and tactical aspects of play better than Acquagoal.     

Leucine metabolites do not attenuate training-induced inflammation in young resistance trained men

ABSTRACT

Leucine metabolites may reduce training-induced inflammation; however, there is scant evidence for this assertion. We conducted a double-blind randomized controlled pragmatic trial where 40 male participants were allocated into 4 groups: α-hydroxyisocaproic acid group ([α-HICA], n = 10, Fat-free mass [FFM] = 62.0 ± 7.1 kg), β-hydroxy-β-methylbutyrate free acid group ([HMB-FA], n = 11, FFM = 62.7 ± 10.5 kg), calcium β-hydroxy-β-methylbutyrate group ([HMB-Ca], n = 9, FFM = 65.6 ± 10.1 kg) or placebo group ([PLA]; n = 10, FFM = 64.2 ± 5.7 kg). An 8-week whole-body resistance training routine (3 training sessions per week) was employed to induce gains in skeletal-muscle thickness. Skeletal muscle thickness (MT), one repetition maximum (1RM), interleukin-6 (IL-6), high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP) and tumour necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α) were assessed at baseline and at the end of weeks 4 and 8. Time-dependent increases were detected from baseline to week 8 for MT (vastus lateralis: p = 0.009; rectus femoris: p = 0.018), 1RM (back squat: α-HICA, 18.5% ± 18.9%; HMB-FA, 23.2% ± 16%; HMB-Ca, 10.5% ± 13.8%; PLA, 19.7% ± 9% and bench press: α-HICA, 13.8% ± 19.1%; HMB-FA, 15.5% ± 9.3%; HMB-Ca, 10% ± 10.4%; PLA, 14.4 ± 11.3%, both p < 0.001), IL-6, hsCRP (both p < 0.001) and TNF-α (p = 0.045). No differences were found between groups at any time point. No leucine metabolite attenuated inflammation during training. Additionally, backwards elimination regressions showed that no circulating inflammatory marker consistently shared variance with the change in any outcome. Using leucine metabolites to modulate inflammation cannot be recommended from the results obtained herein. Furthermore, increases in inflammatory markers, from training, do not correlate with any outcome variable and are likely the result of training adaptations.