A case study on the incorporation of gender-awareness into the university journalism curriculum in Spain

As in other disciplines, ‘gender mainstreaming’ is becoming an increasingly important principle in Journalism. This implies bringing gender equality into the mainstream of the media industry, by means of an adjustment of the educational issues and the practice related to this profession, which is influential in society. In light of the gap existing in this line of research committed to re-education for change [North, L. 2010. “The Gender Problem in Australian Journalism Education.” Australian Journalism Review 32 (2): 103–115; Adhikary, N. M., and L. D. Pant 2011. “Journalism Education in Nepal: Gender Perspective.” Shweta Shardul 8: 119–123], this paper analyses the curricular integration of gender-related issues into journalism studies, taking as a casestudy the undergraduate programmes of the Spanish public and private universities. The study employs content analysis and qualitative questionnaires to the academic staff. The results prevent from understanding equality as one of the main teaching and learning strategies in journalism studies in Spain, even if the invigorating curriculum reform carried out by these universities leads to posit some positive outcome in terms of a more gender-aware higher education. As discussed in the conclusions, the inclusion of the gender perspective depends on the academic staff’s own initiative, in contrast with the involvement showed by university institutions in promoting parity in many other aspects.     

Stretching Every Dollar: The Impact of Personal Financial Stress on the Enrollment Behaviors of Working and Nonworking Community College Students

ABSTRACT

Using 1,400 survey responses collected from two large urban community college systems in Texas, this study examined how students’ financial habits, stress, and well-being influenced their enrollment behaviors. Working students, compared to their nonworking peers, reported significantly lower levels of overall financial well-being. After controlling for other relevant predictors of persistence, regression results showed that students with lower financial well-being and higher financial stress were more likely to doubt their ability to complete college. Results for the restricted sample of working students revealed a strong relationship between a student’s financial well-being and stress. These students also reported having to reduce their semester course load and/or stopping out for a semester in order to work more hours to pay for expenses. These findings suggest that initiatives aimed at helping students improve their financial literacy and money management skills may be an effective, yet underutilized, way to improve retention rates at community colleges.     

Determinants of School Performance Among Quechua Children in the Peruvian Andes

In the rural Andes of Peru, primary school inefficiency ranks higher than in the rest of the country, with a nearly 50 per cent rate of first grade repetition. In 1993 the investigators administered a battery of four psycho-educational tests to 360 schoolchildren in the fourth and fifth grades at ten primary schools in the Andean region of Huaraz. They also recorded the children's individual characteristics, i.e. family background, nutritional status, and educational attainment, and rated the schools according to educational features such as classroom size, time devoted to learning, and student-teacher ratio. A year later, in 1994, children were re-examined in the schools using the same test battery. All subjects were small for their age, had poor diets, spoke mostly Quechua at home (Spanish in school), lived in a rural environment, and walked considerable distances to school. Regression analyses of the 1993 data indicated that the performance of Quechua children on verbal tests was heavily influenced by family background, while their mathematical competence was related to school experience. On the other hand, improvement in test scores from one year to the next appeared to be strongly related to test performance in 1993 and less clearly to the other recorded variables. Finally, the schools' promotion rates were clearly associated with test scores from the previous year but less clearly with grade repetition rates.     

An international collaborative investigation of beginning seventh grade students' understandings of scientific inquiry: Establishing a baseline

Although understandings of scientific inquiry (as opposed to conducting inquiry) are included in science education reform documents around the world, little is known about what students have learned about inquiry during their elementary school years. This is partially due to the lack of any assessment instrument to measure understandings about scientific inquiry. However, a valid and reliable assessment has recently been developed and published, Views About Scientific Inquiry (VASI; Lederman et al. [2014], Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 51, 65–83). The purpose of this large-scale international project was to collect the first baseline data on what beginning middle school students have learned about scientific inquiry during their elementary school years. Eighteen countries/regions spanning six continents including 2,634 students participated in the study. The participating countries/regions were: Australia, Brazil, Chile, Egypt, England, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Mainland China, New Zealand, Nigeria, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey, and the United States. In many countries, science is not formally taught until middle school, which is the rationale for choosing seventh grade students for this investigation. This baseline data will simultaneously provide information on what, if anything, students learn about inquiry in elementary school, as well as their beginning knowledge as they enter secondary school. It is important to note that collecting data from all of the approximately 200 countries globally was not humanly possible, and it was also not possible to collect data from every region of each country. The results overwhelmingly show that students around the world at the beginning of grade seven have very little understandings about scientific inquiry. Some countries do show reasonable understandings in certain aspects but the overall picture of understandings of scientific inquiry is not what is hoped for after completing 6 years of elementary education in any country.     

La palabra complementada (cued speech). De la percepción visual del habla a la comprensión y producción de la palabra

Los sistemas paraverbales o que acompañan al habla son necesarios a todo hablante «normal». Algunos pueblos, como los latinos (frente a los anglosajones, por ejemplo), hacemos uso generoso y eficiente de ellos. Un trabajo sistemático con ellos ha permitido poner en marcha un método eficaz para la educación del lenguaje oral en niños sordos. En este artículo se expone en detalle el sistema, sus implicaciones y eficacia y los pasos a dar para su aplicación.     

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.     

Changing Patterns in the Middle Management of Higher Education Institutions: The Case of Portugal

Abstact Much of the writing on higher education in recent years has tended to assume that the new management push in higher education is both universal and irreversible. This paper, however, presents evidence from Portugal to challenge that assumption. While elements of the new managerialism are clearly evident in the perceptions and attitudes of academics in charge of the basic academic units (departments/schools and faculties) in the country’s universities and polytechnics, academic management remains faced with a complex, contradictory and conflicting set of demands and expectations which is likely to take a considerable time to resolve.