Teachers’ dilemmatic decision-making: reconciling coexisting policies of increased student retention and performance

In recent years, many countries within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development have formulated educational policies aimed at providing better education to more students. However, this may be perceived as constituting dilemmatic spaces, where teachers must make efforts to reconcile coexisting political demands in their everyday work. The purpose of this article is to provide insight into how teachers handle coexisting educational policies of increased student retention and performance. Empirical findings from a one-year field study at a Danish vocational school explore how teachers’ decision-making as response to coexisting demands of increased student retention and performance involves the development of various pedagogical approaches to the students: an active ‘caring’ approach, a passive ‘wait until this class is over’ approach, an active ‘vocational gate-keeping’ approach, and a passive ‘wait and see whether they drop out’ approach. Based on the findings, it is argued that the various pedagogical approaches are developed through social negotiations with leaders, students, and other teachers. Moreover, these pedagogical approaches lead to the development of further negotiated, dilemmatic decisions to be made. Thus, a dynamic approach to teachers’ dilemmatic decision-making is proposed.     

Perceived employability and ability self among Finnish university students

Employability is an increasing concern for university students. Our survey set out to examine university students’ perceptions of their employability and the ways in which these perceptions relate to positions that subsequently connect students to working life: students’ self-representational position or “ability self”, and students’ life-historical positions such as chosen field of study, phase of degree and working life experience. The participants comprised a sample of students (N = 1819) from two Finnish universities, representing diverse fields of study. It was found that apart from the field of study, the perceived proximity to graduation and working life was associated with the perception of employability. Furthermore, a set of self-attributed capabilities was associated with students’ perceptions of employability, particularly extroversion, ambitious competitiveness, mental strength and the desired characteristics of a good employee; however, the attribution of academic skills showed opposing effects. It was concluded that both self-representational and live-historical positions are part of the construction of students’ optimism regarding their employability.

     

Relation of resemblance in information retrieval

A method using the amount of semantic information of query terms as weight in a fuzzy relation of resemblance is presented. The relation can be used to partially order documents in decreasing order of resemblance with the query. Large operational bibliographic data bases are used to test the validity of the approach.     

Hirsch-type characteristics of the tail of distributions. The generalised h-index

In this paper a generalisation of the h-index and g-index is given on the basis of non-negative real-valued functionals defined on subspaces of the vector space generated by the ordered samples. Several Hirsch-type measures are defined and their basic properties are analysed. Empirical properties are illustrated using examples from the micro- and meso-level. Among these measures, the h-index proved the most, the arithmetic and geometric g-indices, the least robust measures. The μ-index and the harmonic g-index provide more balanced results and are still robust enough.     

Evaluating implementation of the International Classification of Functioning,Disability and Health in Portugal's special education law

This paper reports the results of a national two-year project, commissioned by the Portuguese Ministry of Education, to investigate the implementation of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) under Decree-Law 3/2008. The Decree-Law also introduced the principle that the documentation of students' functioning profiles should be the basis for eligibility decision-making – replacing the need of a diagnosis. Of specific interest was the study of the ICF implementation in the assessment, eligibility and intervention processes of students in need of specialised supports. To that end, the study was based on a document analysis of case records of 214 students. The analysis of functioning profiles showed that the ICF use promoted a functional approach in students' assessment. In addition, the use of the ICF contributed to the differentiation of eligible and non-eligible students based on their functioning profiles and addressed the most suitable educational interventions within the Individualised Education Plans.     

Tracing discursive processes of shared knowledge construction in a technology-enhanced higher education setting

This study focused on combining both the group- and individual-level analyses in studying a collaborative activity in technology-enhanced interactions in a higher education setting. The aim was to make visible, with empirical examples, the quality of the students' web-based discussions and trace the route for shared understanding. By quantifying various communicative functions, the analysis provided general knowledge on the quality and purpose of the discussion in the group and highlighted the different functional positions each student had within the group. However, only a detailed interpretative analysis of the relationships between specific thematic contents, communicative functions, and the collaborative features of the discussion, in the temporal frame, made it possible to trace and gain a deeper understanding of the true acts of collaboration. It also highlighted the individual participants' different participatory and discursive positions in the different phases of the task. Over the study, it became evident that any attempts to define a collaborative activity from either the group's or individual's perspective would only result in a partial interpretation of the collaborative enterprise.     

Document retrieval on repetitive string collections

Most of the fastest-growing string collections today are repetitive, that is, most of the constituent documents are similar to many others. As these collections keep growing, a key approach to handling them is to exploit their repetitiveness, which can reduce their space usage by orders of magnitude. We study the problem of indexing repetitive string collections in order to perform efficient document retrieval operations on them. Document retrieval problems are routinely solved by search engines on large natural language collections, but the techniques are less developed on generic string collections. The case of repetitive string collections is even less understood, and there are very few existing solutions. We develop two novel ideas, interleaved LCPs and precomputed document lists, that yield highly compressed indexes solving the problem of document listing (find all the documents where a string appears), top-k document retrieval (find the k documents where a string appears most often), and document counting (count the number of documents where a string appears). We also show that a classical data structure supporting the latter query becomes highly compressible on repetitive data. Finally, we show how the tools we developed can be combined to solve ranked conjunctive and disjunctive multi-term queries under the simple \({\textsf{tf}}{\textsf{-}}{\textsf{idf}}\) model of relevance. We thoroughly evaluate the resulting techniques in various real-life repetitiveness scenarios, and recommend the best choices for each case.     

From digital divides to digital inequality The emerging digital inequality in the Norwegian Unitarian school

This position paper highlights existing and emerging, prospective digital divides in Norwegian schools and asks whether we are now moving from traditional digital divides to digital inequality in our digitized society and schools. Despite very good technology density in Norwegian society and schools in general, there is the reason to pay attention to whether this situation creates new kinds of digital inequalities among already vulnerable pupil groups. Therefore, this position paper focuses on whether under the new Norwegian educational reform. The Knowledge Promotion, it is necessary to consider this issue from another angle because of e.g. the increased status of digital literacy and implementation of ICT-based （Information and Communication Technology） exams in the national curriculum. The position paper focuses on what kind of digital inequalities we see the profiles of and what issues the government has to consider to prevent these tendencies escalating.