Developing Generic Competences in the European Higher Education Area: a proposal for teaching the principles of economics

The participation of Spain in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) involves a number of important challenges for academics. Adapting to an educational model that is characterised by competence-based teaching is a difficult task, yet it is of paramount importance in the context of current reforms. In an educational system in which the traditional lecture prevails, learning-centred teaching represents a major cultural change with significant consequences. The objective of this study is to offer economics lecturers some practical techniques for use in the classroom. Specifically, it includes suggestions for the planning, preparation and teaching of lectures, seminars, tutorials, case studies, debates, and computer-based learning. It also provides practical advice on student assessment.     

Idealization in Chemistry: Pure Substance and Laboratory Product

This article analyzes the concept of idealization in chemistry and the role played by pure substance and laboratory product. This topic has evident repercussions in the educational contexts that are applied to the science classroom, which are highlighted throughout the text. A common structure for knowledge construction is proposed for both physics and chemistry with particular emphasis on the relations between two of the levels: the ideal level and the quasi-ideal level. The ideal level is crucial for operations related to theoretical constructions and explanations, whereas the quasi-ideal level is of special importance in the verification of propositions. In chemistry, the ideal level and the quasi-ideal level include the entities, pure substance and laboratory product, respectively. This article provides an in-depth discussion of the concept of pure substance, an idealized entity whose empirical correlate is laboratory product. The study of the link between the two is a very significant part of the problem of the relations between theory and reality in chemistry. These entities are used to analyze and interpret different situations and contexts in research as well as teaching. The article concludes by using classroom examples to illustrate the didactic implications of the issues addressed.     

Is There Any Room for Face-To-Face Teaching in a Digital World? A Proposed Framework for Web Usage

This paper proposes an empirical framework for integrating the Web as a local resource to support teaching activity. The roadmap presented is based on the author's experience resulting from three years use of a personal homepage authored by him within the Intranet University system with outside Internet access. The potential of digital information to enhance student performance is discussed and some guidelines are presented to improve what the author calls 'live experience' of class content themes. The paper ends with a question section to promote discussion about in site teaching, its shape and functionality for the next few years. Y a-t-il encore place pour l’ enseignement frontal dans un monde digitalisé? Cadre de propositions pour une utilisation de l’Internet. Ce papier présente un cadre de propositions empiriques pour l'utilisation du Web en tant que ressource pour l'enseignement. La carte présentée est basée sur l'expérience de l'auteur résultant de trois ans d'utilisation de sa page Web, dans le cadre de l'Intranet de l'Université avec accès à Internet. L'auteur y analyse le potentiel de l'information numérique pour améliorer les performances des étudiants et présente quelques règles générales pour améliorer ce qu'il appelle "l'expérience directe" en classe. Une section réservée aux questions permet de promouvoir des échanges relatifs à l'enseignement prodigué mais aussi à l'aspect et à la fonctionnalité du site. Gibt es einen Raum für direktes Lehren in einer digitalen Welt? Ein Vorschlag für Webnutzung. Dieses Papier schlägt einen empirischen Rahmen für das Integrieren des Web als lokale Ressourcen zur Unterstützung von Unterricht vor. Die vorgestellte Möglichkeit beruht auf der dreijährigen Erfahrung des Autors mit einer selbstverfassten persönlichen Homepage innerhalb des Intranets der Universität mit separatem Internetzugang. Die Fähigkeit mit digitalen Informationen, die Leistungen von Studenten zu verbessern, wird erörtert, und einige Richtlinien werden vorgestellt, um zu verdeutlichen, was der Autor als "live experience" - Inhaltsthemen bezeichnet. Das Papier endet mit einem Frageabschnitt, um für die nächsten Jahre die Diskussion über “in site"-Lehren, seine Form und Funktionalität, anzustoßen und zu fördern.     

Measuring the local economic impact of universities: an approach that considers uncertainty

The contribution of universities to society is due to the effects generated both in the supply and in the demand side, the latter being associated with the injection of demand as a result of the activities these institutions carry out. This paper focuses on the impact of the demand side by designing a methodology based on Monte Carlo simulations so as to introduce stochastic elements in calculating the economic impact of universities. We apply this methodology to the case of Valencian public universities, introducing stochastic elements in all the elements which imply assumptions with uncertainty. The results highlight the importance of considering uncertainty by generating multipliers which can vary around the average value by 18 % in the case of output and employment, and 10 % in the case of income.     

Peak-Load Pricing in Higher Education

Increasing enrollments and inflated costs have really created a financial struggle for colleges and universities. Since there is no foreseeable change it seems desirable to aim toward greater efficiency in the use of existing resources. It is shown that the educational plant, except for a short peak period, is largely under-utlizied. The enrollment response to a lowering of tuition is analyzed. It is shown that if the hours of operation were extended, and if a set of differential tuition rates were established, with a relatively higher rate for the peak hours as compared to those off-peak, a more intensive use of resources would be achieved. It is also shown that the proposal is financially feasible.     

Educación formal y acciones de agrupación y memoria en adultos: Un estudio microgenético

Resumen

Se estudió la influencia de la educación formal en el empleo de acciones de agrupación y memoria en sujetos adultos. El trabajo tenía una doble perspectiva, transversal y microgenética. Los sujetos pertenecían a tres niveles educativos y se les estudió a lo largo de cuatro días, en dos pruebas de memorización y recuerdo y una prueba de categorization dirigida intercalada entre las anteriores. Los resultados mostraron la influencia esperada de la escolarización en el empleo de acciones de agrupación y memoria así como cambios a lo largo de las sesiones en el grupo intermedio. La interpretación de los resultados se basó en las nociones de subordinación de acciones mentales y de descontextualización de los instrumentos de mediación.     

Análisis de correspondencias y técnicas de clasificación: Su interés para la investigación en las ciencias sociales y del comportamiento

Resumen

Este artículo introduce en la utilización de dos procedimientos de análisis de los datos (análisis de correspondencias, y técnicas de clasificación), que, aunque tienen sentido por sí mismos, pueden ser utilizados combinadamente en la investigación en ciencias sociales y del comportamiento. Se discuten los orígenes de estas técnicas, su lógica interna y su ámbito de aplicación, presentándose toda su argumentación alrededor de un ejemplo concreto.     

The presence of the British education model in Spain: reception through the Institución Libre de Enseñanza

Spain suffered a severe political and moral crisis in the final years of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth. Pedagogues and politicians belonging to the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (ILE), or those close to it, did not consider it possible to regenerate the country without attending to education and Britain was the model to be followed. Many important figures of the ILE were declared anglophiles and therefore open to incorporating British education in Spain. This research reveals the roots of this preference for Britain on behalf of two of the key figures of the ILE: one of its most relevant founders, Francisco Giner, and his close collaborator, José Castillejo. The article then describes how the educational approach of the ILE found its answers in Britain. The paper ends with some reflections on the scope of the British reference.     

Emigration and education. Galician emigration to America and its impact on the processes of literacy,schooling and civic education amongst the rural and seafaring popular classes

Over the course of the final 30 years of the nineteenth century, and well into the early decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of Galician people migrated to different areas of America. There they found a new world to contend and interact with – a world that was more advanced and developed socially and culturally. From the perspective of a new awareness and heightened by processes of collective organisation, mainly identity-based, many of them set out to help advance the cultural and social development of Galicia through self-organised political, social and educational processes. In this way, during the 1920s, a growing number of primary schools – roughly 300 – all over Galicia felt the influence of the Galician emigrants. This is a genuine phenomenon characteristic of Galician emigration that has not been observed in the collective actions carried out by any of the other European migrant communities.     

A relevance model for a data warehouse contextualized with documents

This paper presents a relevance model to rank the facts of a data warehouse that are described in a set of documents retrieved with an information retrieval (IR) query. The model is based in language modeling and relevance modeling techniques. We estimate the relevance of the facts by the probability of finding their dimensions values and the query keywords in the documents that are relevant to the query. The model is the core of the so-called contextualized warehouse, which is a new kind of decision support system that combines structured data sources and document collections. The paper evaluates the relevance model with the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) TREC test subcollection and a self-constructed fact database.