The policy of school autonomy and the reform of educational administration Hungarian changes in an East European perspective

The paper presents the background, the main elements and the contradictions of the reform of educational administration in Hungary in the late '80s in a Central and East European perspective. It also tries to provide an analysis of the challenges that have emerged with the political changes of the '90s. The introductory part of the paper analyses the differences between policies of decentralization in Eastern and Western Europe. In the second part, the most important changes introduced by the 1985 Hungarian Education Act are summarized, and the policy background of these changes is presented. It is assumed that the policy behind the decentralization measures had a negative character: it intended more to abolish the existing structures of control than to establish new ones. In the final part of the paper those factors are presented which may play a role in the future for or against the policy of decentralization.

---

Zusammenfassung Dieser Artikel befaßt sich mit Hintergrund, Hauptelementen und Widersprüchen der Reformen der ungarischen Bildungsverwaltung in den späten 80ern aus zentral- und osteuropäischer Perspektive. Er versucht außerdem, die Herausforderungen zu analysieren, die mit den politischen Änderungen der 90er Jahre einhergingen. Der erste Teil des Artikels untersucht die Unterschiede in der Dezentralisierungspolitik in Ost- und Westeuropa. Der zweite Teil faßt die wichtigsten vom ungarischen Bildungsgesetz von 1985 eingeführten Änderungen zusammen und geht auf den politischen Hintergrund dazu ein. Es wird vermutet, daß die Politik hinter den Dezentralisierungsmaßnahmen negativen Charakter hatte: man wollte eher die bestehenden Kontrollmechanismen abbauen als neue einführen. Der Schlußteil des Artikels stellt die Faktoren dar, die sich in Zukunft positiv oder negativ auf eine Politik der Dezentralisierung auswirken könnten.

---

Résumé Cet article présente le contexte, les éléments majeurs et les contradictions de la réforme de l'administration de l'éducation introduite en Hongrie à la fin des années quatre-vingt dans la perspective de l'Europe centrale et de l'Est. Il tente, par ailleurs, d'analyser les défis qui ont émergé avec les changements politiques apparus dans les années quatre-vingt-dix. L'introduction de l'article analyse la différence entre les politiques de décentralisation en Europe de l'Est et de l'Ouest. La deuxième partie renferme un résumé des changements majeurs introduits par la loi sur l'éducation hongroise de 1985 et une présentation du contexte politique de ces événements. L'auteur prétend que la politique sous-jacente aux mesures de décentralisation avait un caractère négatif: elle visait davantage à abolir les structures de contrôle en place qu'à en établir de nouvelles. La dernière partie de l'article présente les facteurs pouvant jouer un rôle à l'avenir pour ou contre cette politique de décentralisation.

     

Towards a controlled vocabulary on software engineering education

Software engineering is the discipline that develops all the aspects of the production of software. Although there are guidelines about what topics to include in a software engineering curricula, it is usually unclear which are the best methods to teach them. In any science discipline the construction of a classification schema is a common approach to understand a thematic area. This study examines previous publications in software engineering education to obtain a first controlled vocabulary (a more formal definition of a classification schema) in the field. Publications from 1988 to 2014 were collected and processed using automatic clustering techniques and the outcomes were analysed manually. The result is an initial controlled vocabulary with a taxonomy form with 43 concepts that were identified as the most used in the research publications. We present the classification of the concepts in three facets: ‘what to teach’, ‘how to teach’ and ‘where to teach’ and the evolution of concepts over time.     

The Latin American studies association vs. the United States: The verdict of history

This paper grew out of a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for College Teachers, “Social Problems: The Constructionist Stance”, held at Southern Illinois University in 1992. The author thanks Professor Joel Best, director of the seminar, for his encouragement and suggestions.     

Sources of shifts in pre-service teachers’ patterns of attention: the roles of teaching experience and of observational experience

A key requirement of successful initial teacher education is the development of professional vision, which includes shifting attention to features of the situation relevant to the specialized goals of teaching. Existing research hints at the value of targeted video-based courses in the development of professional vision, but often raises questions about the sources of shifts in the pattern of attention. We argue that existing work makes it difficult to distinguish whether shifts seen across video interventions are the results of the intervention, teaching experience, or methodological issues with the unbalanced use of videos in the data collection in these studies. Our first study suggests pre-service teachers’ teaching practice experience does not notably affect attention, but that choice of video does. Our second study addresses the methodological issues and suggests that we may discount different or unbalanced videos as a source of the shifts in the pattern of attention. Finally, by introducing a new synthesis of the results in the literature, we identify a previously hidden key distinction between studies and suggest reasons why different studies have shown different results in this area.     

What kind of nonformal education? Comments on the Coombs report

The first article of our autumn issue of 1973 (Vol. III, No. 3) entitled Should One Develop Nonformal Education was a large extract of a report¹ by Philip H. Coombs and his colleagues at the International Council for Educational Development (ICED) to Unicef. The Mexican group, Fomento Cultural y Educativo, A. C., which offers us here its thoughts on the report, is concerned with planning and introducing new educational models.The members of the discussion group were Eduardo Lastra, Vicente Arredondo, Ernesto Camou and Enrique González Torres.     

Analysing Some Characteristics of Teaching Practice in Hungary

Practicum as an essential step of teacher education knows several interpretations in the Hungarian experience. Among the various models, two are analysed here: (a) the traditional University Training school system and (b) a system based on partnership with several schools in Budapest. Though responsibilities given to mentors in the two models differ considerably, both show mentor's role as crucial.     

Students’ Perceptions and Emotions Toward Learning in a Flipped General Science Classroom

Recently, the inverted instruction methodologies are gaining attentions in higher educations by claiming that flipping the classroom engages more effectively students with the learning process. Besides, students’ perceptions and emotions involved in their learning process must be assessed in order to gauge the usability of this relatively new instruction methodology, since it is vital in the educational formation. For this reason, this study intends to evaluate the students’ perceptions and emotions when a flipped classroom setting is used as instruction methodology. This research was conducted in a general science course, sophomore of the Primary Education bachelor degree in the Training Teaching School of the University of Extremadura (Spain). The results show that the students have the overall positive perceptions to a flipped classroom setting. Particularly, over 80 % of them considered that the course was a valuable learning experience. They also found this course more interactive and were willing to have more courses following a flipped model. According to the students’ emotions toward a flipped classroom course, the highest scores were given to the positive emotions, being fun and enthusiasm along with keyword frequency test. Then, the lowest scores were corresponded to negative emotions, being boredom and fear. Therefore, the students attending to a flipped course demonstrated to have more positive and less negative emotions. The results obtained in this study allow drawing a promising tendency about the students’ perceptions and emotions toward the flipped classroom methodology and will contribute to fully frame this relatively new instruction methodology.     

The influence of university students’ learning beliefs on their intentions to use mobile technologies in learning: a study in China and Spain

Educational technology research and development - As an emerging learning method, mobile technologies allow students to gain knowledge via both formal and informal learning. In spite of the...     

Significant learning in catholic religious education: the case of Temuco (Chile)

ABSTRACT

The object of this article is to reveal the teaching strategies used by teachers for religious education in Temuco, Chile. The paradigm used was qualitative and the design was a single interpretative case study. The data were collected by semi-structured interviews with pupils and religious education (RE) teachers. The results show convergences of successful strategies, such as the use of conversations to form opinions related with the pupils’ everyday interests. We conclude that significant learning for catholic religious education in schools (CRES) includes teaching strategies associated with individual and collective reflections and conversations on topical social issues. Thus, religious education may enable us to advance towards a pluralist approach to the teaching of religion.