以能力和竞争力为核心的瑞士职业教育与培训

瑞士职业教育与培训以为学生提供灵活的教育选择和提升路径为基本目标,实行以联邦政府、州政府和职业行业组织三方合作为特征的管理体系,重视以市场为导向的"双元制"职业教育与培训,接受职业教育与培训的学生在学校学习的同时,还和企业签订学徒协议,做兼职或实习.在职业技术学校里的学生在学习技术的同时也能接受普通教育中包含的科目,比例各占一半.在这些战略措施的导向下,瑞士职业教育与培训体系的质量较高,而且对于学生的吸引力也较强.     

Mapping the intermediate: lived technologies of money and value

ABSTRACT

As financial transactions are increasingly digitized, old and new kinds of intermediaries are only expanding in importance. Intermediaries, mediators and brokers sit at critical junctures and operate between diverse financial arenas and pathways. We argue that mapping the intermediate entails identifying how different kinds of actors—human and non-human, objects and interfaces, institutions and practices—delimit or reify but also stitch together and overcome spatial and temporal differences in people's financial lives, while taking on varying burdens of risk. Mapping the intermediate is both an empirical and methodological exercise. Empirically, it requires following the agents and traders, brokers and material objects that facilitate transactions and add, extract, or re-work different kinds of value. Methodologically, intermediaries and the intermediate are not only the objects of analysis but act as analytical tools in their own right, making the process and politics of transactions visible and tangible. Attending to the intermediate in our inquiries around money, currency and new digital financial technologies, thereby, offers new directions for grounding finance in politics and history and better connecting micro and macro and local and global economic processes.     

Reading,spelling and two types of irregularity in word recognition

How do good and poor readers, and good and poor spellers, vary in their decisions about words which have varying spelling-to-sound correspondences? This experiment isolates the effects of visual and phonological characteristics of words with schoolchildren of varying reading and spelling ability, aged between 9 and 11.5 years. Three groups of children were tested: good readers and good spellers, good readers who were poor spellers, and children who were both poor readers and poor spellers. The difference between‘good’and‘poor’was about two years according to the standardised tests which were used. The children performed a lexical decision task, deciding whether each letter-string was a word or not. Response times to three types of words were compared: standard regular words (e.g. SLOT, SPADE), words with common orthography but irregular spelling-to-sound relationships (e.g. HAVE, FEVER), and words with unusual orthography as well as irregular spelling-to-sound relationships (e.g. BISCUIT, ANSWER). The performance of good readers but not of poor readers was impaired on the words which were phonologically irregular (compared with regular words). Poor spellers were worse again on the dually irregular words, although not significantly, while the good spellers performed almost as well on these words as on the regular words. These results have a number of implications: that the regularity effect is phonologically and not orthographically mediated, that good readers use a predominantly phonological strategy in lexical decision while poor readers do not, and that for the best readers/spellers as tested here the orthographically and phonologically irregular words have some sort of special status which allows them to gain fast and accurate responses.     

Specialization and school organization: investigating pedagogic culture

Drawing on Bernstein’s notion of pedagogic culture or the ‘mode of being’ of the school, this paper develops and uses a theoretical framework for the analysis of school organization that draws attention to specialization of instructional practice. An understanding of the ordering principles of the school emerges from the analysis, fundamentally understood as relations of power and control in the school as an organization. The paper considers how the ordering principles of the school are related to differential performance. The framework is deployed in an analysis of six primary schools located in poor communities in South Africa.     

Exploring ICT Integration as a Tool to Engage Young People at a Flexible Learning Centre

The Edmund Rice Education Australia (EREA) Flexible Learning Centres aim to provide a supportive learning environment for young people who find themselves outside of the mainstream secondary schooling system. Drawing on twenty first Century learning principles, the Centres aim to deliver a personalised learning experience with an emphasis on flexibility and individual choice. Provision of a comprehensive curriculum enables young people to make positive future life choices and successfully transition into employment and further training. The aim of this research project has been to work with teaching staff at a Flexible Learning Centre in North Queensland, Australia, to explore the value of integrating ICT in the form of Web 2.0 technologies to enhance young people??s engagement with the subject of science. The findings of this case study suggest that ICT integration is effective in revitalising science education interest for disengaged young people. This may have wider implications in relation to general concerns of declining student interest and participation in science in the secondary years of schooling.     

Early Childhood Housing Instability and School Readiness

This study assesses the consequences of housing instability during the first 5 years of a child's life for a host of school readiness outcomes. Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (n = 2,810), this study examines the relation between multiple moves and children's language and literacy and behavior problems at age 5. The moderating role of poverty is further tested in this relation. The findings show that moving three or more times in a child's first 5 years is significantly associated with increases in attention problems, and internalizing and externalizing behavior, but only among poor children.