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.     

Search for autonomy in motor task learning in physical education university students

The study focused on discovering the influence that an autonomous motor task learning programme had on the improvement of perceived competence, intrinsic regulation, incremental belief and motivational orientations. The study was performed with two groups of participants (n = 22 and n = 20) aged between 19 and 35 years. The instruments used were the incremental factor of the Conceptions of the Nature of Athletic Ability Questionnaire (CNAAQ-2), the Goal Orientation in Exercise Scale (GOES), the intrinsic regulation factor of the Behavioural Regulation in Exercise Questionnaire (BREQ-2), the perceived autonomy factor of the autonomy measurement scale (EMA) and the perceived competence factor of the Motives for Physical Activity Measure Revised Scale (MPAM-R). The questionnaires were handed out over 3 months in a weekly session with pre-test and post-test. The results showed that the use of an autonomy-based teaching programme increased perceived competence, intrinsic motivation, incremental ability belief and task-involving motivational orientation.     

Institutional experience of PTH evaluation on fine-needle washing after aspiration biopsy to locate hyperfunctioning parathyroid tissue

Assaying parathyroid hormone (PTH) in the washing liquid after fine-needle aspiration biopsy (FNAB) seems to be a valid approach to locate parathyroid tissue. PTH-FNAB was evaluated in 47 patients with a clinical picture of primary hyper-parathyroidism (PHP) and ultrasonography (US) suggestive of parathyroid lesion. The patients were subdivided into two groups on the basis of the absence or presence of US thyroid alterations. The result of PTH-FNAB was compared with those of cytology, scintigraphy and, in 24 patients, surgical outcome. PTH-FNAB samples with a value higher than that recorded in the serum and higher than our institutional cut-off were deemed to be probable samples of parathyroid tissue. Cytology proved diagnostic for benign thyroid lesions, non-diagnostic for thyroid lesions, hyperplastic parathyroid tissue, undetermined or malignant thyroid lesions and other lesions in 45%, 30%, 17%, 4%, and 4% of cases, respectively. In 47% of cases, PTH-FNAB indicated that the sample had been taken in parathyroid tissue. In patients without US alterations, the diagnostic accuracy of PTH-FNAB was greater than that of scintigraphy. After surgery, comparison between the results of PTH-FNAB and scintigraphy, in terms of positive predictive value (PPV), revealed the superiority of PTH-FNAB; PPV was 94% for FNAB and 71% for scintigraphy, while sen-sitivity was 83% and 69%, respectively. PTH-FNAB evaluation after FNAB appears to be more diagnostic than cytology and scintigraphy. Of all the procedures used, PTH-FNAB appears to be the method of choice when the target is US suggestive and reachable. PTH-FNAB appears to be a useful method of guiding surgical intervention.     

PARTICIPATION OF WOMEN IN HIGHER EDUCATION IN HUNGARY

Mrs. Deri, after stating that in Hungary today there is a satisfactory number of women students in higher education, splits up the total figures for women students at university into fields of study and shows which ones women usually prefer. She then reviews briefly the results of a sociological survey concerning various questions related to women in higher education, before and after graduation, their professional choices and career opportunities

Mrs. Vera Deri is attached to the Pedagogical Research Centre for Higher Education, Budapest, Hungary