La eliminación de conductas autolesivas en niños retrasados profundos

RESUMEN

Se han empleado muchos procedimientos para la supresión de conductas autolesivas, pero en pocos casos se ha tenido en cuenta dotar al sujeto de un comportamiento más adaptativo. La hipótesis que se propone es que el castigo de las conductas autolesivas no provocará un aumento de los comportamientos adaptados si éstos no forman ya parte del repertorio conductual del niño. Para corroborar esta hipótesis se realiza un estudio en dos fases con niños deficientes profundos con conductas autolesivas utilizando castigo social. Los resultados muestran que la operación de castigo contingente es efectiva en la eliminación de conductas autolesivas, que este tipo de conductas son mantenidas por el medio ambiente y la necesidad de enseñar y reforzar positivamente conductas más adaptadas.     

The politics of school choice in two countries with large private‐dependent sectors (Spain and Chile): family strategies,collective action and lobbying

In many countries choice of school is an increasing concern for families and governments. In Spain and Chile, it is also associated with a long‐standing political cleavage on the regulation of large sectors of private‐dependent schools. This article analyses both the micro‐ and the macro‐politics of choice in these two countries, where low‐status 15‐year‐old students record a significant segregation. At the micro level, some evidence is provided that not only middle‐class skilful choosers but also the political representatives of private‐dependent schools manage to pursue their interests drawing on economic, social and cultural capital. At the macro level, evidence also shows that the lobbies defending private‐dependent schools can use and maintain these power resources. However, in some episodes collective action is an effective power resource for those who campaign in favour of a stricter regulation of these schools, but its influence is much difficult to maintain for longer periods.     

DARING TO GROW OLD: LESSONS IN HEALTHY AGING AND EMPOWERMENT

The capacity to achieve and retain control over one's own life—to make decisions about and exert power over one's situation—is strongly correlated with being healthy. For older persons, there is a real danger that professionals with good intentions will encroach on this control in the name of providing service. We examine the issues of power, control, decision making, and healthy aging from the perspective of educating health care providers. Particular attention is paid to how health care providers see their role in defining older adults as being at risk when they refuse service or take risks that providers define as unacceptable. We raise this issue of appropriate professional control and cite the literature on successful coping to argue for policies and practices that enhance personal autonomy and interdependence as effective vehicles for healthy aging. Lessons from primary health care are applied to healthy aging even in the face of diminished capacities.     

Components, systems and discontinuities: The case of magnetic recording and playback equipment

Using the history of magnetic recording and playback equipment, this paper explores the relationship between incremental improvements in components and technological discontinuities in systems. It finds that improvements in components have been the major source of all discontinuities in the industry. Focusing just on tape-based systems, all of the basic design approaches had been identified by the late 1950s and thus one of the largest technological challenges for firms has been to modify the design in response to improvements in the magnetic recording density of tape. This paper explores this phenomenon by analyzing data on equipment performance and price, and several design choices for the tape-based equipment. It shows how improvements in the magnetic recording density have changed the tradeoffs that exist between price and different dimensions of performance and between various design choices and thus led to about 10 technological discontinuities in magnetic tape system design.     

Controlled evaluation of a multimodal system to improve oral presentation skills in a real learning setting

Developing oral presentation skills requires both practice and expert feedback. Several systems have been developed during the last 20 years to provide ample practice opportunities and automated feedback for novice presenters. However, a comprehensive literature review discovered that none of those systems have been adequately evaluated in real learning settings. This work is the first randomised controlled evaluation of the impact that one of these systems has in developing oral presentation skills during a real semester-long learning activity with 180 students. The main findings are that (1) the development of different dimensions of the oral presentations are not affected equally by the automated feedback and (2) there is a small but statistically significant effect of the use of the tool when a subsequent presentation is evaluated by a human expert.     

Curriculum Change as a Form of Educational Policy Legitimation: the case of Spain

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how the main changes in the last Spanish Educational Reform become new forms of state educational control. The article introduces a specific sociological perspective to analyse these changes in semiperipheral social formations. Macro‐contradictions embedded in the process of mass schooling in Spain draw a framework to understand the context and the logics of curriculum change. The extremely acute state legitimation crisis in semiperipheral societies has effects on the structure and the content of curriculum change. These effects are analysed, on the one hand, at the level of educational policy, and, on the other, at the level of school practices, showing the importance of cultural obstacles for curriculum change through teachers’ beliefs and practices.     

School quality signals and attendance in rural Guatemala

This study analyzes school dropout in rural Guatemala using event history data and unusually detailed data on schools and teachers. Significant results for language of instruction, teacher education and fighting between students demonstrate the importance of accounting for school context influences on an outcome that has, historically, been analyzed mainly as a function of family background. Less support is found for the contention that dropout is lower in schools that are better at maximizing student achievement. Finally, using interaction analysis some of the school effects vary significantly by student gender and ethnicity. The various linkages between school features and dropout highlight the complicated reality of identifying the kinds of features of schools that are valued by poor families.