El papel de la memoria de trabajo en la adquisición lectora en niños de habla castellana

Resumen

En este trabajo se abordan cuestiones básicas relativas a la manipulación y retención de la información en la Memoria de Trabajo y su vinculación con la adquisición lectora desde la perspectiva de los modelos interactivos de procesamiento de la información. Se plantean cuatro experimentos aplicados a niños de nivel lector alto y bajo de primero, tercero y quinto de EGB, respectivamente. Los resultados indican que sólo existen diferencias significativas entre grupos de distinto nivel lector en aquellas tareas con mayor implicaión de componentes funcionales, mientras que las diferencias más importantes entre cursos se dan entre primero y tercero, tanto para componentes estructurales como funcionales.     

Short animation movies as advance organizers in physics teaching: a preliminary study

Background : Advance organizers are instructional materials that help students use previous knowledge to make links with new information. Short animation movies are a possible format and are well suited for physics, as they can portray dynamic phenomena and represent abstract concepts.

Purpose : The study aimed to determine guidelines for the construction of an instructional short animation movie, with the role of an advance organizer. A film was created in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the approach, making part of a physics lesson and concerning the subject ‘moment of a force’.

Sample : The study took place in a Brazilian school in the city of Arapoti, in the south region of the country. Thirty-eight students participated, having an average age of 16 and following the third year of high school.

Design and methods : Criteria drawn from a literature review directed the construction of the movie and the lesson. Data were collected using pre- and post-tests; registers of oral comments were also done during the class. The post-test included open-ended questions, allowing students to write remarks concerning the lesson and the animation.

Conclusions : The article describes steps and guidelines to orient the process of designing an animation movie with the role of advance organizer. Data indicated that the movie facilitated the construction of links between pre-existent knowledge and the new information presented in the lesson. The proposed methodology can be considered a valid framework to derive similar approaches.     

Early School-leaving in Spain: evolution,intensity and determinants

Spain has one of the highest levels of early school leaving and educational failure of the European Union. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the anatomy of early school leaving in Spain and its characteristics. In order to do so, in the first part we discuss the measurement problems related with this concept and the evolution of drop-out rates in Spain. We argue that the published figures of early school leaving slightly underestimate the phenomenon, and discuss the impact of the increase in immigration rates on the level of educational failure and its very unequal distribution in terms of gender. In a second part, using data from the Labour Force Surveys of 2000 and 2007, we explore the factors behind educational failure by means of a logistic regression. The results of this model confirm the explanatory power of social reproduction hypotheses, but also show that there are important aspects of the patterns and recent evolution of early school leaving which cannot be explained by a single theoretical approach.     

Cognitive-operative model of intelligent learning systems behavior

In this paper behavior during the teaching–learning process is modeled by means of a fuzzy cognitive map. The elements used to model such behavior are part of a generic didactic model, which emphasizes the use of cognitive and operative strategies as part of the student–tutor interaction. Examples of possible initial scenarios for the teaching–learning process are developed, along with the results provided by the model.     

Connecting school and community with science learning: Real world problems and school–community partnerships as contextual scaffolds*

A challenge facing many schools, especially those in urban settings that serve culturally and linguistically diverse populations, is a disconnection between schools and students' home communities, which can have both cognitive and affective implications for students. In this article we explore a form of “connected science,” in which real‐world problems and school‐community partnerships are used as contextual scaffolds for bridging students' community‐based knowledge and school‐based knowledge, as a way to provide all students opportunities for meaningful and intellectually challenging science learning. The potential of these scaffolds for connected science is examined through a case study in which a team of fifth‐grade teachers used the student‐identified problem of pollution along a nearby river as an interdisciplinary anchor for teaching science, math, language arts, and civics. Our analysis makes visible how diverse forms of knowledge were able to support project activities, examines the consequences for student learning, and identifies the features of real‐world problems and school–community partnerships that created these bridging opportunities. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 38: 878–898, 2001     

Communication systems simulator with error correcting codes using MATLAB

In this work, the characteristics of a simulator for channel coding techniques used in communication systems, are described. This software has been designed for engineering students in order to facilitate the understanding of how the error correcting codes work. To help students understand easily the concepts related to these kinds of codes, a user-friendly interface has been developed using the MATLAB environment, since it provides many toolboxes related to communication systems.