The Emergence of a ‘New Orthodoxy’: public debates on women's capacities and education in Portugal, 1880‐1910

The paper examines the emergence of the new definitions of women's position which constituted a ‘new orthodoxy’ at the turn of the nineteenth century in Portugal. ‘Women's nature’ and the ‘aims of women's education’ were the most debated issues. Different ideological positions were identified. The examination of these debates and of the emerging ‘new orthodoxy’ illustrates women's transition from ‘private’ forms of patriarchy to ‘public’ forms of patriarchy. It also demonstrates that this transition became an arena of contestation and negotiation, in the specific conditions of Portuguese society.     

The relationship of teacher ratings of executive functions to emergent literacy in Head Start

Reading and Writing - The purpose of this study was to investigate the concurrent relationships between selected teacher-rated executive function (EF) and a comprehensive array of emergent literacy...     

Fostering Distributed Science Learning Through Collaborative Technologies

TACTICS (French and Spanish acronym standing for Collaborative Work and Learning in Science with Information and Communications Technologies) is an ongoing project aimed at investigating a distributed community of learning and practice in which information and communications technologies (ICT) take the role of collaborative tools to support social construction of knowledge. This community is composed of researchers, graduate students, and high-school teachers and their students, from six schools and four universities in Canada and Mexico. It set out in fall 2000 to develop a community around the general topic of integrating concepts in science school subjects. Once a prototype community is established, it can become a terrain where different aspects could be studied. Subsequently, researchers could gradually take a back seat allowing as well as ensuring the autonomy of the school members involved and, thereby, the viability of the learning community. The set up of the proposed prototype distributed science learning community was therefore an essential yet far from trivial first step. This paper discusses the process of setting up the community and the lessons learned.     

Systemizing and the gender gap: examining academic achievement and perseverance in STEM

For years, a popular explanation for women choosing to abandon studies in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) has been their lack of aptitude. This study challenged that notion by integrating theories of cognitive style, academic emotion, self-efficacy, and motivation to explain students’ academic achievement and perseverance in STEM when transitioning to college. A sample of 1597 high school and junior college students participated. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were first conducted to validate a reduced version of the cognitive style questionnaire. Structural equation modeling revealed that the cognitive style known as systemizing indirectly predicted STEM achievement and persistence by way of intrinsic motivation, learning anxiety, and self-efficacy, providing a new perspective for re-examining the gender gap in STEM.

     

Sport education-based irregular teaching unit and students’ physical activity during school recess

Abstract

The aim of the study was to compare the effect of a Sport Education-based irregular teaching unit on the high-school students’ physical activity (PA) during school recess. A sample of 91 adolescents (45 girls) aged 13–16?years old met the exclusion criteria. The six classes were cluster-randomly assigned to the Irregular Sport Education group (Sport Education methodology with competitions in recess), Traditional Sport Education group (Sport Education methodology with competitions in Physical Education lessons), or to the control group (non-intervention). The students’ PA during school recess periods were objectively assessed by GT3X accelerometers. The results of the repeated-measures nested analysis of variance showed that the Sport Education-based irregular teaching unit significantly improved the students’ PA during recesses (p?<?0.001). The competitions phase of the Sport Education model performed at school recesses seems to be a valuable strategy for increasing students’ PA contributing to the achievement of the daily recommendations.     

‘Question Moments’: A Rolling Programme of Question Opportunities in Classroom Science

This naturalistic study integrates specific ‘question moments’ into lesson plans to increase pupils’ classroom interactions. A range of tools explored students’ ideas by providing students with opportunities to ask and write questions. Their oral and written outcomes provide data on individual and group misunderstandings. Changes to the schedule of lessons were introduced to explore these questions and address disparities. Flexible lesson planning over 14 lessons across a 4-week period of high school chemistry accommodated students’ contributions and increased student participation, promoted inquiring and individualised teaching, with each teaching strategy feeding forward into the next.     

New, technology-based firms in small open economies—An analysis based on the Finnish experience

This paper analyses the roles and impacts of new, technology-based firms (NTBFs) in a small open economy, with empirical data from Finland. It is suggested that in small open economies, NTBFs may fall into a resource trap, which might result in their being relatively less growth oriented than NTBFs in countries where the domestic market is larger. Consequently, in small open economies, the systemic impact of NTBFs could be emphasised rather than their organic growth in terms of the employment that they create.     

Exploring the Functionality of Visual and Non-Visual Strategies in Solving Rotation Problems

This article deals with the solving of rotation problems, and shows that there is an alternative to using mental rotations or their encoding into verbal terms: namely using geometrical properties. The idea is consistent with the theory which distinguishes between visual and analytical individuals, but uses the construct strategies instead of the construct preferred processing mode. Moreover, contrary to many researchers who refer to this distinction, but who often use it to classify students, this researcher introduces a new parameter, namely the nature of the task. The article presents the analysis of the functionality and effectiveness of the different kind of strategies as a function of the task's characteristics. The research, dealing not with individual traits but with solving strategies, offers information that could be helpful for the improvement of geometry teaching.