Do anti-immigrant sentiments track into Danish classrooms? Ethnicity,ethnicity salience,and bias in children's peer preferences

Denmark's commitment to childhood characterized by equality, democracy, and social cooperation stands in stark contrast to public discourse about immigrant children, who are sometimes branded with negative stereotypes and cast as the cause of school problems. This study examined ethnic-group membership, ethnicity salience, and peer preferences of 399 children in 21 classrooms in two Danish cities to explore whether anti-immigrant sentiments tracked into classrooms, socially marginalizing minority children, and whether any such disadvantages derived from ethnicity salience, in-group favouritism and/or out-group bias. Researchers introduced an index to control for class differences in the relative number of ethnic minority and majority children and analyzed both child as chooser and child as chosen dynamics. They found that minority/majority status was associated with in-group preference, social preference, and social status, disadvantaging minority children, especially in the smaller city. Salience was associated with minority status only. In-group preference did not correlate with out-group bias. Findings revealed potential risks and protective factors for minority children. Evidence contradicted stereotypic characterizations of minority children.     

Monolingual Document Retrieval for European Languages

Recent years have witnessed considerable advances in information retrieval for European languages other than English. We give an overview of commonly used techniques and we analyze them with respect to their impact on retrieval effectiveness. The techniques considered range from linguistically motivated techniques, such as morphological normalization and compound splitting, to knowledge-free approaches, such as n-gram indexing. Evaluations are carried out against data from the CLEF campaign, covering eight European languages. Our results show that for many of these languages a modicum of linguistic techniques may lead to improvements in retrieval effectiveness, as can the use of language independent techniques.     

Are we looking through the same lens? Principal recruitment and selection

This article reports a study designed to identify the factors that both hiring bodies and applicants believe are most important when making decisions about principal selection, appointment and acceptance. Based on a quantitative study involving the four main groups of players in the principal selection process, we confirmed a four-factor structure. In order of importance the four factors were, Generic Managerial Skills, Communication and Presentation Skills, Experience and Credence, and Religious Affiliation and External Connection. The fourth factor is rarely mentioned in the literature. The findings indicate a shift in the role expectation of principals from educational leaders to administrative managers. Findings also challenge the use of interviews as the sole principal selection mechanism.