Lenguaje y rendimiento escolar: Un estudio predictivo

La incidencia de las competencias lingüistícas del escolar sobre las adquisiciones escolares en las demás áreas del currículum es una realidad que todos los maestros pueden comprobar día a día. En este trabajo se investiga esa incidencia, medida a través de la variable fracaso escolar, y sus resultados podrían permitir extraer algunos principios de intervención educativa precoz en algunos aspectos del lenguaje cruciales para la escolaridad posterior.     

¿Usos cotidianos o usos enlatados? Enseñar y evaluar la lectoescritura a sujetos reales y mentes flexibles

En el campo del lenguaje y la lectoescritura, la renovación educativa parece estar situándose en la batalla por el diseño abierto y la evaluación informal. En este artículo se propone un modelo teórico para la lectoescritura flexible que pueda soportar las posibilidades que se abren y evitar los inconvenientes que amenazan a los actuales métodos informales de renovación a los que está dedicado el tema central de este número.     

Informatica aplicada a la comprensión textual

Uno de los inconvenientes de los programas didácticos que tratan de desarrollar en el alumno estrategias de comprensión lectora es que, dada la estructura grupal de la clase, deben aplicarse colectivamente cuando su propia naturaleza requeriría la aplicación individual. El ordenador puede conseguir aplicar a toda una clase los mismos modelos de comprensión, pero individualizadamente. En este artículo se expone un modelo experimental.     

Learning Processes in Chemistry: Drawing Upon Cognitive Resources to Learn About the Particulate Structure of Matter

This article explores 11- to 16-year-old students' explanations for phenomena commonly studied in school chemistry from an inclusive cognitive resources or knowledge-in-pieces perspective that considers that student utterances may reflect the activation of knowledge elements at a range of levels of explicitness. We report 5 themes in student explanations that we consider to derive from implicit knowledge elements activated in cognition. Student thinking in chemistry has commonly been examined from a misconceptions or alternative conceptions/frameworks perspective, in which the focus has been on the status of learners' explicit conceptions. This approach has been valuable, but it fails to explain the origins or nature of the full range of alternative ideas reported. In physics education, the cognitive resources perspective has led to work to characterize implicit knowledge elements—described as phenomenological primitives (p-prims)—that provide learners with an intuitive sense of mechanism. School chemistry offers a complementary knowledge domain because of its focus on the nature of materials and its domination by theoretical models that explain observable phenomena in terms of emergent properties of complex ensembles of “quanticles” (molecules, ions, electrons, atoms, etc.) The themes reported in this study suggest a need to recognize primitive knowledge elements beyond those reported from physics education and suggest that some previously characterized p-prims may be better considered to derive from more broadly applicable intuitive knowledge elements.     

The reality of virtual worlds: pros and cons of their application to foreign language teaching

This article presents our experience of testing the OpenSim platform as a tool in teaching French to 108 tourism students at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (Madrid, Spain). The article begins with some theoretical reflections on the behaviour of the student when using a virtual platform by means of an avatar, and with our observations of how this doubling of identity is actually the greatest asset of virtual worlds when we intend to apply them to teaching (1. Introduction). Then we move on to present our goals and method of work (2. Aims and methodology) and to analyse the development of the virtual space or sim, setting out the teaching strategies that were employed in each of the islands we created, and which correspond to reading comprehension, listening comprehension and written expression (3. Metaverse design). In order to assess the language learning results, we also devised tests throughout the experiment, which were repeated one month later. The assessment shows that the process of language acquisition is positive (4. Results analysis). Finally, we demonstrate that the rise of virtual worlds has been backed up by psycholinguistic factors, but at the same time their applicability and sustainability depend on technical aspects and very especially on theoretical and pedagogical tenets which are still to be drawn up (5. Conclusions).     

A Study of the Use of Ontologies for Building Computer-Aided Control Engineering Self-Learning Educational Software

This paper describes research on the use of knowledge models (ontologies) for building computer-aided educational software in the field of control engineering. Ontologies are able to represent in the computer a very rich conceptual model of a given domain. This model can be used later for a number of purposes in different software applications. In this study, domain ontology about the field of lead–lag compensator design has been built and used for automatic exercise generation, graphical user interface population and interaction with the user at any level of detail, including explanations about why things occur. An application called Onto-CELE (ontology-based control engineering learning environment) uses the ontology for implementing a learning environment that can be used for self and lifelong learning purposes. The experience has shown that the use of knowledge models as the basis for educational software applications is capable of showing students the whole complexity of the analysis and design processes at any level of detail. A practical experience with postgraduate students has shown the mentioned benefits and possibilities of the approach.     

Classroom Assessment Practices,Teacher Judgments,and Student Achievement in Mathematics: Evidence from the ECLS

In this study we use data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey third- and fifth-grade samples to investigate teacher judgments of student achievement, the extent to which they offer a similar picture of student mathematics achievement compared to standardized test scores, and whether classroom assessment practices moderate the relationship between the two measures. Results indicate that teacher ratings correlate strongly with standardized test scores; however, this relationship varies considerably across teachers, and this variation is associated with certain classroom assessment practices. Furthermore, the evidence suggests that teachers evaluate student performance not in absolute terms but relative to other students in the school and that they may adjust their grading for some students, perhaps with basis on perceived differences in need and/or ability.     

English or Nothing: The Impact of Rigid Language Policies on the Inclusion of Humanizing Practices in a High School ESL Program

This article discusses the results of a qualitative case study that examined how school district language policies impact humanizing practices in a high school ESL program. The theoretical framework builds on Paulo Freire's concept of humanizing pedagogy to explore policy and instruction in a secondary ESL program. Participants of this study include school district officials and high school ESL teachers. Findings indicate that when ESL teachers adhere to rigid language policies, they fail to create humanizing practices in their classrooms. In contrast, when teachers do not hold themselves strictly accountable to the institutionalized discourse of ESL, they are able to enact humanizing practices where students' linguistic and cultural resources are validated as essential for the development of academic resiliency. Paradoxically, even teachers who enact humanizing practices fail to question district language policies that render students cultural and linguistic resources invalid.     

Early Childhood Teachers Reconstruct Beliefs and Practices Through Reflexive Action

Professional development, which results in sustained transformative change, requires that teachers engage in critical reflection regarding teaching practices. In this study, a group of five bilingual and generalist early childhood teachers engaged in a journey in which they elected to try to reconstruct their beliefs and practices about teaching and learning. In response to a school district's needs, these teachers were enrolled as a cohort in an early childhood graduate program that served as part of their professional development endeavor. The teachers used reflection and ongoing dialogue that bridged theory and practice as they raised questions about their daily practices in relation to theoretical perspectives. We provide a glimpse of these teachers' ongoing transformative journeys and provide suggestions for early childhood teachers to engage in sustained professional development.     

Agents control in intelligent learning systems: The case of reactive characteristics

Intelligent learning systems (ILSs) have evolved in the last few years basically because of influences received from multi-agent architectures (MAs). Conflict resolution among agents has been a very important problem for multi-agent systems, with specific features in the case of ILSs. The literature shows that ILSs with cognitive or pedagogical agents are prone to arbitration methods, where as ILSs with reactive agents are much in favor of control mechanisms. For these kind of systems, different control types are proposed based on the different stimuli that these agents will receive. These stimuli are aspects to be evaluated during the teaching/learning process such as: (1) error analysis, (2) learning styles, (3) analogies, (4) social aspects, etc.

The paper reviews several ILSs, related to our work; different control mechanisms are proposed to solve the agents' intervention conflicts. Finally, the use of several mechanisms is exemplified by the results of a specific ILS.