Comparative education in Spain in the 21st century

ABSTRACT

The current process of globalisation has led to a convergence of international and Spanish concerns regarding teaching and research issues in the area of comparative education. Both in their teaching and their research work, the academics within the Spanish comparative community display a notable – and typically Hispanic – heterogeneity. This includes their use of epistemologically diverse frameworks and paradigms as well as their penchant for intellectual and teaching traditions built upon a wide-ranging, diverse gnoseological foundation. Along with research agendas focused on topics well within the orthodoxy and tradition of the field, Spanish comparative work has also tackled subjects long advocated by the late-modern agenda such as post-colonialism, the world ‘disorder’ and refugees and hospitality pedagogy. The community's engagement with and analysis of the cultural reality of Latin America stands out as a specific feature of Spanish comparative studies. While the works published in the Revista Española de Educación Comparada (REEC) (Spanish Journal of Comparative Education) attest to the theorisation and markedly interdisciplinary nature of the analyses carried out by many of our academics, the authors of this essay argue for the inclusion of teleological perspectives. Only by incorporating the viewpoints offered by these teleological disciplines will we be able to stand up to the sterile, eminently relativist tendencies of post-modern epistemology.     

Lessons from the famous 17th-century paradox of the Chevalier de Méré

We take advantage of a combinatorial misconception and the famous paradox of the Chevalier de Méré to present the multiplication rule for independent events; the principle of inclusion and exclusion in the presence of disjoint events; the median of a discrete-type random variable, and a confidence interval for a large sample. Moreover, we pay tribute to our original bibliographic sources by providing two computational tools to facilitate the students' insights on these topics.     

Higher socioeconomic status is related to healthier levels of fatness and fitness already at 3 to 5 years of age: The PREFIT project

This study aimed to analyse the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and fatness and fitness in preschoolers. 2,638 preschoolers (3–5 years old; 47.2% girls) participated. SES was estimated from the parental educational and occupational levels, and the marital status. Fatness was assessed by body mass index (BMI), waist circumference (WC), and waist-to-height ratio (WHtR). Physical fitness components were assessed using the PREFIT battery. Preschoolers whose parents had higher educational levels had lower fatness (P < 0.05). BMI significantly differed across occupational levels of each parent (P < 0.05) and WHtR across paternal levels (P = 0.004). Musculoskeletal fitness was different across any SES factor (P < 0.05), except handgrip across paternal occupational levels (P ≥ 0.05). Preschoolers with high paternal occupation had higher speed/agility (P = 0.005), and those with high or low maternal education had higher VO₂max (P = 0.046). Odds of being obese and having low musculoskeletal fitness was lower as SES was higher (P < 0.05). Those with married parents had higher cardiorespiratory fitness than single-parent ones (P = 0.010). School-based interventions should be aware of that children with low SES are at a higher risk of obesity and low fitness already in the first years of life.     

Perceptions regarding open science appraised by editors of scholarly publications published in Spain

Pillars of open science are often included within the editorial policies of scholarly journals, including policies on open access publication, availability of underlying research data, preprints and open peer review. The aim of this paper is to examine and analyse perceptions and editorial practices related to open access, preprints, open research data and open peer review, from the perspective of editors of scientific journals published in Spain, to gain an insight into editorial policies related to open science. Results and data were obtained by a combined method of online interviews and an online questionnaire. The online survey was sent to editors from journals indexed in the Dulcinea directory, which at the time of the study included 1875 academic journals. A total of 420 responses (22.4%) were obtained. The results indicated that 92% of the journals were open access journals, 2% of the journals conducted open peer review, 15% of the journals had instructions to allow archiving preprints, and out of 375 responses, only 59 journals (16%) reported having a policy on underlying research data. Based on these results, there is a trend in favour of open access, but the perceived barriers to open peer review outweighed the advantages. There is also some reluctance to allow preprints to be made available. This concern might be because editors want authors and readers to read and cite the contents published in their journals, rather than their preprint versions.     

Web-Based Virtual Lab for Learning Design,Operation, Control,and Optimization of an Anaerobic Digestion Process

Journal of Science Education and Technology - Virtual labs have proven to be very versatile and valuable for providing realistic experience for students in STE (Science, Technology, and...