RETHINKING THE FINANCING OF POST‐COMPULSORY EDUCATION

Throughout the world, the financing of education is in a state of crisis, a condition made even more acute by the simultaneous appearance of a doctrinal crisis with regard to the ends and the utility of education. For European higher education, the situation calls for the diversification of funding mechanisms. The public authorities which up until now have born most of the burden of higher education financing must transfer a goodly portion of the burden to users, i.e., students and parents, and to the private sector. Various methods for financial diversification are explored as well as different formulae for user‐financing.     

Undergraduate engineering—a comparative study of first year performance in single gender campuses

The Jerusalem College of Technology is an institution for higher education in Israel, where the majority of the students study towards an undergraduate degree in Engineering (Electronics, Applied Optics, Computers, etc.). The studies are held on three different campuses, one campus for men and two for women. We describe the organization of the Foundation Year (i.e. the basic first year courses), and discuss the similarities and differences between the male and female populations, with respect to their learning skills and performances.     

Facilitating preservice teachers’ development of mathematics knowledge for teaching arithmetic operations

Mathematical tasks, centered on arithmetic word problems, are discussed as the basis of an approach to facilitate preservice elementary teachers’ development of mathematical knowledge for teaching arithmetic operations. The approach consists of three groups of tasks that allow students to reflect on their initial knowledge, explore arithmetic word problem situations from multiple perspectives, and apply their resulting knowledge, respectively. Findings from the investigation of the approach indicate that the tasks can provide an effective and meaningful basis to help preservice teachers to develop deeper understandings of the arithmetic operations and their relationships and pedagogical-mathematical knowledge for teaching the arithmetic operations conceptually.     

ICT-aided engineering courses: a multi-campus course management

Jerusalem College of Technology (JCT) is a multi-campus institution with identical syllabi for courses in every campus. Moreover, learning at JCT requires at the same time synchronous and asynchronous learning and teaching. For some introductory courses in Mathematics for Engineering students, websites have been built and now upgraded in order to fit the requirements due to multiple campuses. The original triple function model ‘homepage-tutorial-mailing list’ had to be modified in various directions, in order to fit the students' needs and the central role of the course coordinator. We discuss here the structure and management of the websites and the contribution of these supplementary materials towards teaching efficiency and towards students' better learning skills.     

Multilevel Analysis of Multiple-baseline Data Evaluating Precision Teaching as an Intervention for Improving Fluency in Foundational Reading Skills for at Risk Readers

In this article, multiple-baseline across participants designs were used to evaluate the impact of a precision teaching (PT) program, within a Tier 2 Response to Intervention framework, targeting fluency in foundational reading skills with at risk kindergarten readers. Thirteen multiple-baseline design experiments that included participation from 35 kindergarten students were included in the current analysis. By combining data from a series of multiple-baseline studies using a multilevel model, we analyzed outcomes to determine an estimated treatment effect. The results indicate that across participants and across studies, PT showed an average increase of 15 correct responses in foundational reading skills per minute. This immediate influence on rates of core reading skills was statistically significant. Moreover, the treatment had a significant positive effect on the time trend indicating that rates in foundational reading skills increased more across time during the treatment phase compared to the baseline phase. The study provides evidence that the obtained rates in foundational reading skills at the end of the intervention were retained after removing the intervention. From the outcomes of the multilevel model, PT can be considered as a promising Tier 2 intervention to increase reading fluency with individuals who are at risk of reading failure.     

Social insertions and representations of oneself and young people: Apprentices and high school students

What does the category or the term “young people” evoke for teenagers who identify themselves in terms of their social group memberships? On the basis of two studies we were able to demonstrate that whereas for apprentices (positioned between school and the world of work) youth is defined in terms of various activities — one is young by virtue of what one is doing, for those pursuing studies in senior high school (the “lycéens”), one is young by virtue of how one thinks. In addition, while apprentices tend to value the group, high school students value the individual above all else.     

Gold Medals and White Economy: Winter Olympic Games and the Making of the French Elite (1959–2013)

In 1959, a new organization was created in France under the name of ‘the Pool of the Providers of the French Ski Team’. Its aim was to support the national team with money, human resources, and specific equipment. It included some of the major national ski and footwear industries for which international competitions were seen as both a place to improve their products and a way to promote their image. The Pool helped both the national team and the French ski industry to become world leaders within 10 years. This success, however, was fragile. On one hand, the constitution of the Pool resulted in a system that was a cartel, a monopoly, and a tool for economic patriotism. On the other hand, it surfed at the border of amateurism at a time when skiing was still an amateur sport at the Olympic Games. Soon after the Games of Grenoble these two limits led to a deterioration of the relationships between the Pool and the ski federation, which incidentally resulted in a major crisis for French skiing in 1973. The Pool then opened its doors to foreign companies in the late 1970s, replacing sport patriotism with economic nationalism.