How and with what accuracy do children report self-regulated learning in contemporary EFL instructional settings?

European Journal of Psychology of Education - This study aimed to understand how children reflect about learning, report their regulation of learning activity, and develop their performance in...     

Student Guidance and Attention to Diversity in the Processes of Quality Assurance in Higher Education

The main objective of this article is to analyse the importance given to student guidance and diversity in the standards and criteria used in the quality accreditation and evaluation processes in Europe and the US. Agencies selected in this study are the members of ENQA (European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education), EQAR (European Quality Assurance Register for Higher Education) and regional and programme accrediting organisations in the US that are recognised by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA). The data were analysed by means of qualitative and content analysis of the principles, standards and criteria published in the guidelines of the respective agencies. The results of this study reveal that guidance and attention to diversity are included in the quality evaluation guidelines for university study programmes and for higher education institutions in different ways. The main conclusion is that most guidelines include general criteria about guidance and diversity. In order to assist HEIs in the way to plan this support, guidelines should include specific criteria for the provision of academic, career and personal guidance within general student support services. Additionally, criteria should specify the actions to be taken and the resources to respond to diversity.     

Interaction of Theory,Research, and Applications in the Work of Super: An International Perspective

This article describes Super's contributions through the interaction of theory, research, and practice. The author reviews this interaction in the work of Super from an international perspective, particularly as reported in his major publications. Finally, some concluding remarks are presented about the impact of his work in many different countries and the legacy of his approach.     

A place for arguing in engineering education: a study on students’ assessments

This paper focuses on the issue of how engineering programmes demand and/or promote argumentative reasoning, which is a subsequent aspect of curricular development. This was the main objective of the project on which this paper reports. This is to say that the focus is on assessment as a way to establish to what extent argumentative reasoning is demanded and mobilised in teaching and learning processes. This aim was achieved using a sample of assignments developed in courses in different Bologna undergraduate programmes at the Engineering School at the University of Porto, during the first semester of the academic year 2009/2010. Whereas problem solving in engineering constitutes a structural element in the curricular organisation of the engineering programmes and is strongly related to argumentative skills, it was possible to conclude that students demonstrate and explain extensively, but do not argue, possibly because their teachers do not invite them to do so in assessment situations.     

Distant cities,travelling tales and segmented young lives: making and remaking youth exclusion across time and place

A substantial body of research suggests that incipient moral anxiety is growing in relation to excluded youth, and is manifestly cross-national in nature. While these anxieties are often assumed to be most evident in recent times, historians of childhood and youth persistently remind us of the long history of anxiety recorded in the public record about disadvantaged urban youth [e.g. Gleason. 2013. Small Matters: Canadian Children in Sickness and Health, 1900–1940. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press]. However, the degree and nature of local differentiation in the forms of moral anxiety being generated have yet to be systematically researched in relation to youth exclusion in diverse city spaces. There is also limited research on how senior members living in the same city spaces, many of whom were excluded as young people, remember and re-represent – through individual and collective memory – what it was like to be young in the past [Cubbit. 2007. History and Memory. Manchester: Manchester University Press]. Drawing on cross national studies and diverse sources, including oral history accounts, media representations, and interviews with young people, this article explores the perspectives of low-income young people living at the fringe of two different urban centres and who identified as having experienced varying degrees of educational and/or social exclusion. We argue that such multi-layered analyses challenge the binaries often invoked about inclusion, exclusion and marginalised youth, particularly concerning questions about history, memory, and the bordering and classification practices of individuals [see Balibar. 2009a. We, the People of Europe?: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; Rumford. 2011. Citizens and Borderwork in Contemporary Europe. London: Routledge]. More specifically, the article analyses representations of exclusion, in the present and past, in reference to what Balibar, We, the People of Europe?: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, has termed ‘borderwork'. Overall, we argue that narratives of risk, forms of border anxiety [Newman. 2006. “Borders and Bordering: Towards an Interdisciplinary Dialogue.” European Journal of Social Theory 9 (2): 171–186] and the consequent moralising claims made about economically disadvantaged youth are crucial in understanding how youth exclusion is represented and remembered, and made and remade across time and place.     

The European Project Semester at ISEP: the challenge of educating global engineers

Current engineering education challenges require approaches that promote scientific, technical, design and complementary skills while fostering autonomy, innovation and responsibility. The European Project Semester (EPS) at Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP) (EPS@ISEP) is a one semester project-based learning programme (30 European Credit Transfer Units (ECTU)) for engineering students from diverse scientific backgrounds and nationalities that intends to address these goals. The students, organised in multidisciplinary and multicultural teams, are challenged to solve real multidisciplinary problems during one semester. The EPS package, although on project development (20 ECTU), includes a series of complementary seminars aimed at fostering soft, project-related and engineering transversal skills (10 ECTU). Hence, the students enrolled in this programme improve their transversal skills and learn, together and with the team of supervisors, subjects distinct from their core training. This paper presents the structure, implementation and results of the EPS@ISEP that was created in 2011 to apply the best engineering practices and promote internationalisation and engineering education innovation at ISEP.     

Gender Politics and Conceptions of the Modern Teacher: Women,identity and professionalism

The main purpose of this paper is to critique the concepts of 'teacher professionalism' and 'professional identity' as they are currently manifest in the field of teaching and teacher education from two related feminist perspectives. In the first instance, feminist critiques of liberal democracy are drawn upon to expose the gendered assumptions which underlie dominant conceptions of the 'professional' teacher. Particular attention is paid to the now dominant view of the teacher as a rational and instrumental actor, and its gendered dimensions are explored. Second, the gender dualisms which reside at the heart of the concept 'teacher professionalism' are identified and discussed. The discussion is then widened to examine the role of gender politics in shaping the epistemological premises upon which teacher professionalism is developed and its more formative role in the exploitation of women teachers' labours. Drawing upon examples of current feminist research and my own preliminary empirical data, the paper concludes by presenting an alternative conceptual framework for assessing the gendered nature of identity formation in teaching.