Students’ transition from elementary to high school and changes of the relationship between motivation and academic performance

336 students, 186 girls and 150 boys were met at the end of the school year, both at grade six and at Secondary one, in order to examine the impact of the transition from elementary to secondary school on various motivational variables. Analyses showed changes in self-efficacy beliefs and learning goals, whatever students’ level of achievement and gender. However, self-efficacy beliefs appeared as the most powerful predictor of academic performance at both school levels. In addition, the pattern of relations between academic performance and the variables examined was relatively similar at both times of measurement. The discussion focuses on changes in self-efficacy beliefs and learning goals and on their relations to academic performance.     

Education and inequalities in rural Vietnam in the 1990s

This article examines the determinants of children's schooling during the 1990s in rural areas of Vietnam. It focuses on the impact of family attributes on the likelihood of children remaining in school or leaving during the primary and secondary school years. Using data from the Vietnam Living Standard Survey (VLSS) of 1992–93 and 1997–98, the authors apply the survival analysis technique to follow a group of 3301 children aged between 6 and 13 over a 5-year period. In addition to the characteristics of the children and their families, they consider community attributes as larger contextual variables that also affect children's school leaving. Overall, they found very significant socioeconomic differentiations between families with respect to schooling, which puts economically disadvantaged children at risk for having their schooling interrupted at a young age. The results also indicate that for girls, compared with boys, the likelihood of staying in school is more responsive to household and community characteristics.     

Teachers' views on citizenship education in secondary education in The Netherlands

In 2005 the Dutch Minister of Education proposed making it compulsory for all schools in The Netherlands to stimulate active citizenship and social integration. Teachers must give these educational goals a tangible form in their practice. What are the teachers' views on citizenship education? Concepts of citizenship education and the teacher's role in it may differ widely, and very different perspectives on values and value development are possible. This article addresses how teachers view citizenship education. We present the results of a survey conducted among a representative sample of Dutch secondary schools. The results show that teachers make clear choices in the importance they attach to certain values. Teachers want students to acquire skills to analyse, communicate and reflect on values, and they want to stimulate the development of certain values. The chosen values relate to different types of citizenship. School level, school subject and the age of the teachers make a difference to the importance teachers attach to different values.     

Role Distance in Question: When it is No Longer Participating But Winning Which is Important

The purpose of this study, which follows on from previous work, is to show in what ways sport has surreptitiously changed and become more complex, to the extent that its functioning only imperfectly responds to one of the basics of sport as envisaged by Elias: role distance. That is the propensity of the participants to avoid being caught in the game, which is only a game, defining in this way the social distance which classes sports performers and the relationship of their practice to the contingencies and material necessities of life. The choice of this focal point is another attempt to understand what happens when sport, by transforming itself, becomes more than sport or even another type of sport. In other words, here we wish to discover what makes Elias' model incomplete. Although sport is supposed to contribute to the pacification of social relations, there are still a large number of elements, which in sporting practice, and in its most recent developments, cannot be explained by the theory of the ‘civilising process’.     

A right to be heard: learning from learners with additional needs in literacy

This study aimed to explore the consultation experiences of pupils who have additional needs in literacy. An opportunistic sample of eight schools – four in Northern Ireland and four in the Republic of Ireland – were chosen by the researchers; selected pupils were receiving additional literacy support. Focus group discussions and arts‐based creative methodologies were used through which visual and verbal stimuli supported and extended the narratives of the children. The findings showed that pupils have a capacity for self‐reflection and metacognitive talk around literacy. They had a keen awareness of their specific difficulties and the reading strategies they use. However, they wished for greater choice in how literacy support is organised and for more information about individual reading targets and scores. There was a great desire among pupils for consultation at meetings concerning their progress. Involving pupils in planning and evaluating their literacy learning needs as a fundamental right raises questions about teachers’ current protectiveness of pupils with additional needs.     

A survey on evaluation of summarization methods

The increasing volume of textual information on any topic requires its compression to allow humans to digest it. This implies detecting the most important information and condensing it. These challenges have led to new developments in the area of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR) such as narrative summarization and evaluation methodologies for narrative extraction. Despite some progress over recent years with several solutions for information extraction and text summarization, the problems of generating consistent narrative summaries and evaluating them are still unresolved. With regard to evaluation, manual assessment is expensive, subjective and not applicable in real time or to large collections. Moreover, it does not provide re-usable benchmarks. Nevertheless, commonly used metrics for summary evaluation still imply substantial human effort since they require a comparison of candidate summaries with a set of reference summaries. The contributions of this paper are three-fold. First, we provide a comprehensive overview of existing metrics for summary evaluation. We discuss several limitations of existing frameworks for summary evaluation. Second, we introduce an automatic framework for the evaluation of metrics that does not require any human annotation. Finally, we evaluate the existing assessment metrics on a Wikipedia data set and a collection of scientific articles using this framework. Our findings show that the majority of existing metrics based on vocabulary overlap are not suitable for assessment based on comparison with a full text and we discuss this outcome.     

Math Performance and Academic Anxiety Forms,from Sociodemographic to Cognitive Aspects: a Meta-analysis on 906,311 Participants

Educational Psychology Review - The relationship between anxiety and mathematics has often been investigated in the literature. Different forms of anxiety have been evaluated, with math anxiety...