The body donation program at the Federal University of Health Sciences of Porto Alegre: A successful experience in Brazil

The use of dissection to study human anatomy is the foundation for educational excellence among future health professionals, as it offers an ideal opportunity to learn the body's morphology in three dimensions while also providing students with a more humanistic education. The shortage of bodies for dissection, combined with the Brazilian population's lack of knowledge concerning the possibility of voluntarily donating their own bodies, led to the creation of the Body Donation Programs for Education and Research in Anatomy at the Federal University of Health Sciences of Porto Alegre (UFCSPA). The program is based on three pillars: Informing the general public about the program, donor registration, and donation itself. Since the creation of the donor program in 2008, there has been an increase in both the number of donations made during donor's lifetime and the number of bodies received by the university. There has also been a shift in relation to the origin of these bodies, as before the creation of the program most bodies were unclaimed cadavers, while today most of the bodies are sourced from voluntary donations. The initial results regarding the public's acceptance of the possibility of making body donations have been encouraging, as shown by the annual growth in donor registrations. Consequently, the quality and quantity of the material available for educational purposes have greatly improved. Anat Sci Educ. © 2013 American Association of Anatomists.     

Developing and Validating a Science Notebook Rubric for Fifth-Grade Non-Mainstream Students

We present the development and validation of a science notebook rubric intended to measure the academic language and conceptual understanding of non-mainstream students, specifically fifth-grade male and female economically disadvantaged Hispanic English language learner (ELL) and African-American or Hispanic native English-speaking students. The science notebook rubric is based on two main constructs: academic language and conceptual understanding. The constructs are grounded in second-language acquisition theory and theories of writing and conceptual understanding. We established content validity and calculated reliability measures using G theory and percent agreement (for comparison) with a sample of approximately 144 unique science notebook entries and 432 data points. Results reveal sufficient reliability estimates, indicating that the instrument is promising for use in future research studies including science notebooks in classrooms with populations of economically disadvantaged Hispanic ELL and African-American or Hispanic native English-speaking students.     

Reading levels of Spanish deaf students

THE READING LEVELS of a population of 93 Spanish deaf students were examined. All study participants had prelingual profound hearing loss; their ages ranged from 9 to 20 years. All were enrolled in compulsory education during 2002-2003 in the Canary Islands (Spain). They were evaluated with sentence and text comprehension subtests from the Evaluation of Reading Processes of Primary Education Students, whose Spanish acronym is PROLEC (Cuetos, Rodríguez, & Ruano, 1996). A questionnaire on reading attitude was also used (Espín, 1987). Study results were consistent with those of previous research: Deaf students, at the end of their primary school education (mean age 13 years), have reading levels similar to or lower than the reading levels of hearing students at the onset of primary school education (mean age 7 years). These deaf students also have an indifferent attitude toward reading.     

Children’s education and mental health in Spain during and after the Civil War: psychiatry,psychology and “biological pedagogy” at the service of Franco’s regime

Abstract

This article analyses the child psychiatry and psychology developed during the Spanish Civil War and immediate postwar period. The aim is to demonstrate that, despite the existence of a certain degree of disciplinary continuity in relation to the pre-war period, both disciplines were placed at the service of Francoism. This meant that the association of psychology and psychiatry with pedagogy in order to educate/cure children played a key role in legitimising the child intervention policies of Franco’s regime, and this strategy was best reflected in Vallejo Nágera’s proposal regarding “biological pedagogy”. Finally, it analyses how psychiatry and psychology were used outside the school context to re-educate and control an infant population trapped between two worlds as the result of the Civil War.     

The challenges of a high-performance student athlete

To become a top athlete requires time, commitment and carefully planned training. Optimum adaptation to training requires the careful balancing of stress and recovery. The student athlete has to balance all these demands with the additional requirements of an academic programme. This can bring unique stresses and challenges. This research aims to investigate the challenges of combining high-level sport with academic demands. Nine elite student athletes (three females, six males) took part in semi-structured interviews around how the student athletes balanced their training and sporting demands with the academic demands of their course of study. The interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed using grounded theory. The results suggested that the athletes had each developed their own distinct approach towards training management. Most of the subjects had experienced setback in their study and athletic performance due to overtraining or burnout. The findings highlight the need to empower and educate not only the athlete but also the coach on the impact of overtraining. Key findings from this study were the need for open coach–athlete communication, in-depth planning and the need for adequate recovery.     

The Collective that Didn't Quite Collect: Reflections on the IALS

The concept and methodology of IALS obviously represent progress for literacy research. Nevertheless, this survey presents serious limitations. It prioritises the handling of data-based information as opposed to experiential and contextualized information, ranking at a higher position those who handle the first kind of information. The survey ignores how people solve problems in their life context. The competence of people cannot be understood merely through outside observation and a questionnaire situation. In the case of Poland, the interpretation of data manifests an ethnocentric Western attitude, tending to reduce cultural differences to a cultural deficit. Two IALS-inspired surveys conducted in Spain and Portugal mixed quantitative and qualitative methods in order to take into account the social relations in their cultural context. This article questions the role of research, which cannot be limited to the objectivation of reality, but should help to transform and improve it. The alternative model proposed is named "investigation action."     

The development of mental rotation abilities through robotics-based instruction: An experience mediated by gender

The research literature on the topic of “spatial ability” reveals that it has a major influence on achievement in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Additionally, previous studies indicate the existence of a gender gap in spatial ability in favour of males. Mental rotation, one subskill of spatial ability, is an area in which gender differences are greater. At the same time, educational robotics is seen as one of the more promising technologies in educational contexts for the future. We conducted a quasi-experimental study with 142 seven- and eight-year-old students aimed at analysing whether robotics-based instruction may produce greater learning gains on mental rotation abilities compared to traditional instruction. The intervention was developed in the context of map-reading tasks, which are part of the curricular content in Mathematics and Social Sciences at this age. The results showed that for males, the robotics-based instruction promoted a significantly greater improvement in students’ mental rotation abilities compared to the control group. By contrast, no significant differences were observed for females. Although this study provides empirical evidence of the potential of robotics-based instruction, future studies need to deeply analyse the existence of gender differences in the learning gains obtained through educational robotics.