Moving beyond the minimum: socially just pedagogies and Asperger’s syndrome in UK higher education

A year‐long longitudinal study was conducted to gain insight into the lives of eight students who had a label of Asperger’s syndrome during their transitions into higher education in the UK. Reflecting on life history data, the findings suggest that universities might actually be maintaining and (re)producing barriers that perpetuate the exclusion and ghettoisation of disabled people. The analysis goes beyond an acknowledgement of institutional disabling practices to pinpoint the subtle impacts of issues of pedagogy, learning, teaching, and assessment. It is argued, therefore, that inclusive education needs to engage more directly with the specific issues faced by learners with the label of Asperger’s syndrome. However, rather than viewing this as an issue of special education for distinctly impaired learners, Asperger’s syndrome must be understood with reference to wider questions of how higher educators respond to diversity and difference.     

Wage determinants among medical doctors and nurses in Spain

This paper examines the determination of wage rates for health professionals using three well known, and commonly used, econometric techniques: ordinary least squares, instrumental variables, and Heckman’s method. The data come from a graduate survey and the analysis focuses on a regional labor market, due to nationwide information on salaries is absent in Spain. After estimating different wage equations, the results suggest that OLS estimates are preferable. The findings show an important wage premium for medical doctors relative to nurses, but also a wage advantage for workers who are civil servants and a gender wage-gap that favors men. Although the expansion of higher education in Spain has reduced social inequalities in access, the main policy implication from this paper is that social class differences can still persist at the degree level—in the choice of degree—if students of higher socioeconomic status get a place at university in a degree of higher earnings, a fact that is corroborated in this study.     

Emigration and education. Galician emigration to America and its impact on the processes of literacy,schooling and civic education amongst the rural and seafaring popular classes

Over the course of the final 30 years of the nineteenth century, and well into the early decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of Galician people migrated to different areas of America. There they found a new world to contend and interact with – a world that was more advanced and developed socially and culturally. From the perspective of a new awareness and heightened by processes of collective organisation, mainly identity-based, many of them set out to help advance the cultural and social development of Galicia through self-organised political, social and educational processes. In this way, during the 1920s, a growing number of primary schools – roughly 300 – all over Galicia felt the influence of the Galician emigrants. This is a genuine phenomenon characteristic of Galician emigration that has not been observed in the collective actions carried out by any of the other European migrant communities.     

A neo-Schumpeterian model of health services innovation

The paper presents and empirically applies a neo-Schumpeterian model of innovation capable of studying interactions between service providers, patients and policy makers, and how these complex interactions determine the timing, direction, and success of innovations in the public sector. The model is tested using a case study that traces the introduction and development of ambulatory surgery in a Spanish hospital. The multi-agent model applies the ideas of Schumpeter to services, encompassing Schumpeter's five types of innovation, and re-introducing the policy-maker as a key agent in the innovation process. The model has a number of advantages over previous, reduced form models. First, it can analyse the interactions between the economic, social and political spheres that make up the complex selection environment of innovations. Second, it captures the recursive impact of radical innovations on agents’ competences and preferences, and their relative power. This brings politics, power, and rhetorical persuasion to the fore. Third, it provides an improved set of definitions for radical and incremental innovation. These are not only important for understanding the sources and drivers of innovation, but also for the accurate measurement of innovation.     

A relevance model for a data warehouse contextualized with documents

This paper presents a relevance model to rank the facts of a data warehouse that are described in a set of documents retrieved with an information retrieval (IR) query. The model is based in language modeling and relevance modeling techniques. We estimate the relevance of the facts by the probability of finding their dimensions values and the query keywords in the documents that are relevant to the query. The model is the core of the so-called contextualized warehouse, which is a new kind of decision support system that combines structured data sources and document collections. The paper evaluates the relevance model with the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) TREC test subcollection and a self-constructed fact database.     

Schooling of Children with Rare Diseases and Disability in Europe

ABSTRACT

Inclusive education of disabled students has been promoted in European disability policies. However, the transition process from more segregated system is slow. The purpose of this study was to provide an insight about different types of schooling of disabled children affected by a rare disease across Europe and to evaluate their and caregivers’ well-being. We analysed data from a cross-sectional study (BURQOL-RD) of persons with rare diseases that cause intellectual and/or physical disability: Prader-Willi syndrome, fragile X syndrome, three types of mucopolysaccharidosis and Duchenne muscular dystrophy. The sample consisted of 359 children aged 6–17 and 269 caregivers from eight European countries. Results showed differences between countries in proportion of students placed in special schools, which are still valid option in countries such as Germany, France or UK. Within the inclusive education modalities, lack of special support for disabled students was observed especially in low-income countries. No association between the type of schooling and quality of life was observed, but the subjective caregivers’ burden seems to be higher in special schools. The study shows existent differences in implementation of inclusive education in Europe. More research is needed in the field of rare disease disability and educational needs.     

Access to post‐compulsory education and training: economic,sociological and political determinants and remaining research gaps

This paper presents a review and assessment of existing theoretical accounts to explain differentials in access to education and training in advanced economies. These theories tend to focus on the analysis of the influence of a set of economic, sociological and political variables on access to education. Existing theories are criticized on two grounds. Firstly, they seldom take into consideration the crucial role of political‐institutional factors, and in particular, welfare states’ actions through direct investment and regulation in shaping access levels. Secondly, they focus narrowly on the analysis of different stages of education and training, and this does not reflect the current policy emphasis on lifelong learning. The paper concludes with an outline of a future research agenda to address these gaps, and also calls for a more rigorous analysis of the weight of the different factors affecting access.     

Portuguese science teachers' education,attitudes, and practice relative to the issue of alternative conceptions

Many studies have shown that students of all school levels hold alternative conceptions that differ from the scientific conceptions transmitted by the school. These results raise some questions about the efficacy of traditional teaching and stress the need for using teaching strategies that explicitly take into account the alternative conceptions that students bring to the science classes. This issue has recently been raised and widely discussed throughout Portugal and the proposals for the new science syllabuses advise teachers to take it into account. However, the number of studies investigating both the teachers' attitudes towards this issue and the use of teaching strategies based on students' alternative conceptions is very limited. This article aims to present the results obtained from science teachers about their attitudes towards students' alternative conceptions and the use of teaching strategies based on these conceptions. The results may contribute to the planning of in-service courses.     

The Socio-Economic Background of Erasmus Students: A Trend Towards Wider Inclusion?

The article focuses on the financial issues and family background of Erasmus students. It examines the costs of Erasmus study periods in the academic year 2004/05 and the socio-economic background of Erasmus students that year, based on over 15000 survey responses. Results are compared with those of a similar survey undertaken in 1998 to track changes over the last decade. The main question that the article addresses is whether international mobility of higher education students within the Erasmus programme has been expanded to more students from lower socio-economic backgrounds during this period. We find that, in spite of still important socio-economic barriers to the take-up of the programme, access has been moderately widened.