How Do Children Acquire Early Grammar and Build Multiword Utterances? A Corpus Study of French Children Aged 2 to 4

In the last 50 years, researchers have debated over the lexical or grammatical nature of children's early multiword utterances. Due to methodological limitations, the issue remains controversial. This corpus study explores the effect of grammatical, lexical, and pragmatic categories on mean length of utterances (MLU). A total of 312 speech samples from high‐low socioeconomic status (SES) French‐speaking children aged 2–4 years were annotated with a part‐of‐speech‐tagger. Multiple regression analyses show that grammatical categories, particularly the most frequent subcategories, were the best predictors of MLU both across age and SES groups. These findings support the view that early language learning is guided by grammatical rather than by lexical words. This corpus research design can be used for future cross‐linguistic and cross‐pathology studies.     

Routine leisure activities: opportunity and risk in adolescence / Rutinas de tiempo libre: oportunidad y riesgo en la adolescencia

Abstract

In order to differentiate between types of routine leisure activities and to evaluate their corresponding protection/risk value in adolescent development, we performed a study with a sample of 218 adolescents between the ages of 12 and 14 years by asking them to fill out a grid that analysed their daily routines. The results are presented here. They were required to account for each hour of a weekday by specifying whether they were awake or asleep, the place they were at, who they were with, and what type of activity they were engaged in. A group of these adolescents (N = 59) were considered to be at risk (they formed part of a social integration and marginalization prevention program), whereas the rest (comparison group) were their classmates. A multiple correspondence analysis was performed, revealing the existence of four adolescent typologies according to daily routines. The analysis showed that the routines incorporating a greater variety of leisure activities, as well as more creative, organized, and supervised activities, were associated with adolescents who possessed a more normative development, whereas more monotonous, unstructured and unsupervised activities tended to be characteristic of adolescent development at risk.     

SOMETHING UP THE SLEEVE: FRAUD IN EDUCATION,OR THE LEARNING OF CORRUPTION

This article deals with the low profile issue of educational fraud. The author defines educational fraud in terms of a range of illegitimate practices in which students engage in order to inflate their recorded levels of academic performance. Four subtypes of fraud are identified. The cultural and social correlates of fraud are then considered. This discussion leads to suggestion that fraud may in certain circumstances be fostered by the hidden curriculum. The paper concludes with a consideration of the implications of educational fraud and an exploration of some possible means by which it could be combatted. Central issues here are (1) the links between fraud and dominant forms of educational evaluation which stress outcomes over process, and (2) the relevance of fraud to notions of citizenship and citizenship education.     

Changing the teaching/learning procedures in physics for agricultural engineering. A case study

The subject ‘Physical Fundamentals of Engineering’ for agricultural engineers in the University of Extremadura has long had high rates of students not attending classes, not presenting for examinations and, finally, failing the subject. During the 2007 and 2008 courses, the teaching/learning procedures were strongly modified. Analysis of the proportion of students taking final examinations and of the final marks shows that the new procedure leads to a satisfactory progress in most of the objectives, including a general improvement in their marks and pass rates. In particular, it was found that the new procedure needs to be maintained by the teachers for at least two courses for the greatest success.     

The return of the prodigal son: the experience of support agents on their return from Teachers’ Centers to school

This paper presents the results of a two‐year qualitative inquiry, carried out in Spain, on a rather neglected side of external support to schools: the personal and professional experience of external support agents when they go back to teaching. These ex‐advisers are career teachers who return ‘home’ to school after having left it to serve for some years in Teachers’ Centers, which in Spain are the institutions in charge of school support and in‐service teacher training. During their stay there, the ex‐advisers have developed a new discourse on teaching, on school organization and on teacher training that, on their return, they have to contrast with their everyday life in schools. To explore this process, the conceptions, perceptions and visions of these professionals, has a high potential to throw some light on school support, in‐service teacher training and the construction and reconstruction of different professional identities within our educational systems.     

A Mirage of Change: Visibility of Politicians on TVE during the 2015 and 2016 General Elections

ABSTRACT

The use of strategies to enhance the media visibility of politicians intensifies above all at election time and their focus is chiefly television due to the fact that it still has the greatest power to sway voters. Thus, based on a content analysis of the evening news on Televisión Española (TVE) and 18 semi-structured in-depth interviews with professionals working at the Spanish public broadcaster, the airtime that politicians were given was established to assess whether it had fulfilled its obligation as regards independence and pluralism at two crucial moments for Spanish politics: the period prior to the election calls, the pre-campaign periods and the official campaigns before the general elections held on 20 December 2015 and 26 June 2016. Both were unique in their own way: on the one hand, the debut of new political parties with the potential to win a large number of seats in Parliament; and, on the other, despite the fact that in just six months the party in power had lost its absolute majority and there were still no visible signs of change at TVE, it is still worth examining the variations in news treatment prior to both elections.     

Real time observer and control scheme for a wind turbine system based on a high order sliding modes

The introduction of advanced control algorithms may improve considerably the efficiency of wind turbine systems. This work proposes a high order sliding mode (HOSM) control scheme based on the super twisting algorithm for regulating the wind turbine speed in order to obtain the maximum power from the wind. A robust aerodynamic torque observer, also based on the super twisting algorithm, is included in the control scheme in order to avoid the use of wind speed sensors. The presented robust control scheme ensures good performance under system uncertainties avoiding the chattering problem, which may appear in traditional sliding mode control schemes. The stability analysis of the proposed HOSM observer is provided by means of the Lyapunov stability theory. Experimental results show that the proposed control scheme, based on HOSM controller and observer, provides good performance and that this scheme is robust with respect to system uncertainties and external disturbances.     

Distributed data-driven UAV formation control via evolutionary games: Experimental results

This work proposes a novel data-driven distributed formation-control approach based on multi-population evolutionary games, which is structured in a leader-follower scheme. The methodology considers a time-varying communication graph that describes how the multiple agents share information to each other. We present stability guarantees for configurations given by time-varying interaction networks, making the proposed method suitable for real-world problems where communication constraints change along the time. Additionally, the proposed formation controller allows for an agent to leave or enter the group without the need to modify the behaviors of other agents in the group. This game-theoretical approach is evaluated through numerical simulations and real outdoors experimental results using a fleet of aerial autonomous vehicles, showing the control performance.     

The Training of School Support Agents: A Case Study from Spain

This article deals with issues involved in the training of school support agents for school improvement tasks and purposes. We describe and analyze a specific training programme that was carried out in Madrid, Spain, from 1990 till 1992. Apart from dealing with its initial objectives and assumptions, the article explores the institutional, cultural and personal factors that played a major role throughout the implementation of the programme; finally, it attempts to give an account of the problems involved in the reconstruction of the theory and practice of external support through the in‐service training of school support agents.