‘You can tell kind of about the body’: young children,health, fitness and fatness

Fears of an ‘obesity epidemic’ in New Zealand and elsewhere have led to a growing focus on children’s weight, diet and activities. The aim of this research project was to highlight children’s voices, stepping back from obesity interventions to explore how health and obesity discourses are taken up by young primary school children. Nine 6 and 7-year-olds took part in individual semi-structured interviews which involved play and craft activities to focus discussion. Discourse analysis was used to explore how children talked about bodies, health, fitness and fatness. Children primarily drew on a series of clear-cut dichotomies around good foods and bad foods, and being active, able and fit, as well as constructing health in relation to the body in two distinct ways: fat vs. thin, and big-and-strong vs. small-and-weak. These findings support previous research suggesting that children, from a young age, are taking up narrow corporeal constructions of health in relation to food and fitness ‘choices’, and additionally children assume that these constructions can be ‘read’ off the body. On the other hand, children were also often hesitant, and at times resisted or problematised these straight-forward constructions, occasionally drawing on alternate understandings, including notions of pleasure and practicality, moderation, and being happy and healthy. Future research could explore these ideas further, investigating how children and adults utilise alternate meanings to negotiate the complexity of bodies, health, fitness and fatness.     

A synthesis of research on effectiveness of school-based drug prevention programmes / Claves de eficacia de los programas de prevención de consumo de sustancias en el contexto escolar: una meta-revisión

Abstract

Relevant information on effectiveness of school-based drug prevention programmes is available. Despite this, there is still contradictory evidence that makes it necessary to continue to shed light on this issue. Based on a synthesis research method, the aim of this study was to determine the relevant variables that enhance the efficacy of these programmes and to determine the weight of their empirical evidence. Furthermore, several features of the evaluation designs whose variables had been proven effective were examined. A systematic review of periodical literature was conducted, which led us to extract 1,622 papers, of which 17 studies were analysed. An in-depth analysis of these publications led us to identify 29 key variables associated with the efficacy of the programme, which were ranked according to the weight of their empirical evidence. Moreover, the characteristics of the studies included in the review highlighted the need to improve the rigorousness and quality of the evaluation designs in this field.     

Translanguaging: towards a dynamic model of bilingualism at school / Translanguaging: hacia un modelo dinámico de bilingüismo en la escuela

Abstract

As a response to the trend of using school languages separately, this article puts forward a pedagogical strategy labelled translanguaging which fosters the dynamic and integrative use of bilingual students’ languages in order to create a space in which the incorporation of both languages is seen as natural and teachers accept it as a legitimate pedagogical practice. Thus, translanguaging becomes the process through which bilingual students create meaning while shaping their experiences and increasing their knowledge by using their linguistic and semiotic repertoire without arbitrary separation. After posing the theoretical framework underpinning translanguaging, an experience conducted in a secondary school institute is described, concluding with a specific example of translanguaging in a class activity.     

Relationship between sociometric types and academic achievement in a sample of compulsory secondary education students / Relación entre tipos sociométricos y rendimiento académico en una muestra de estudiantes de Educación Secundaria Obligatoria

Abstract

The aim of this study was to analyse the relationship between sociometric types, behavioural categories and academic achievement in a sample of 1,349 compulsory secondary education students (51.7% boys), ranging in age from 12 to 16 years. The students’ sociometric identification was performed by using the Programa Socio and academic performance was measured by school marks provided by teachers in the subjects of Spanish language, mathematics and average academic performance. The results show that sociometric types were significant predictors of academic achievement, as students who were rated positively by their peers (popular, leaders, collaborators and good students) were more likely to have high academic achievement (in mathematics, Spanish language and average academic achievement) than students rated negatively by peers (rejected-aggressive, rejected-shy, neglected and bullies).     

Gender in teaching: a literature review

Internationally, both in popular and scientific media, debates occasionally emerge concerning the possible (negative) consequences of feminisation tendencies in the teaching staff. In these discussions, various assumptions about the ‘nature’ of male and female teachers and masculinity and femininity are expressed. Male and female teachers are often presumed to differ in teaching styles, capacities and effects on both the teaching profession and the pupils. The arguments used in these debates only seldom refer to particular theoretical grounds or to empirical evidence. Moreover, apart from Sandra Acker’s essay ‘Gender and teachers’ work’ in 1995 Acker, S. 1995. “Gender and teachers’ work”. In Review of research in education, Edited by: Apple, M. W. 99–162. Washington DC: American Educational Research Association. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], educational research lacks an up‐to‐date review of teacher gender. Therefore, this article aims to provide insight into contemporary theoretical gender perspectives. It also intends to connect these with empirical research that takes teacher gender into account. Most of the research studies referred to in this article do not explicitly state their underlying theoretical principles. Yet, since these studies have distinct research foci, research questions, methodologies and conclusions, they appear to depart from a variety of gender conceptualisations. Therefore, in this article the differences between these conceptualisations will be examined and the divergent theoretical assumptions underlying these studies will be revealed. The two most widespread and disparate perspectives in gender theory are the essentialist perspectives on the one hand and the constructionist perspectives on the other. The differences between them are made up by the degree to which explanations are deterministic and focused on the individual rather than on the social and cultural level. Drawing upon this theoretical contrast, we divided the body of research on teacher gender into two divergent research traditions: sex differences research and gender dynamics research. The research questions, underlying theoretical principles and methodologies of these two traditions are examined.     

Introducing structure management in automatic reference resolution: An XML-based approach

References to parts of structured documents use their structure to locate the piece of document which is the reference target. On the other hand, XML has become an increasingly important language for structured documents. One of its most important related languages is XPath, the language that permits fragments of XML documents to be selected. In this article we present a methodology, and an application case, to automatically extract and solve references to fragments of structured documents. This approach combines structure manipulation and information extraction, to enhance reference extraction tools by improving the precision of the references extracted. We take advantage of XML markup to locate the position within the structure in which the references are found. The use of XPath, one of the most important XML related languages, for reference resolution is original: the resolution tool automatically builds XPath expressions. This proposal is inspired (and implemented) from our work with legislative documents.     

Deans in German Universities: Goal acceptance and task characteristics

Tertiary Education and Management - This paper presents an empirical study which explored how deans at German universities accept their new role as manager, and which factors influence the...     

CHARACTERIZING THEMATIZED DERIVATIVE SCHEMA BY THE UNDERLYING EMERGENT STRUCTURES

This paper reports on different underlying structures of the derivative schema of three undergraduate students that were considered to be at the trans level of development of the derivative schema (action–process–object–schema). The derivative schema is characterized in terms of the students’ ability to explicitly transfer the relationship between a function and its first derivative to the derivative function and the second derivative. This conscious shift of properties of derivatives is differently manifested by the students in the trans level of development of the derivative schema and can be considered evidence of the different characteristics of the thematization of derivative schema. From here we suggest that there are different underlying structures in the constructed schema due to the consciousness in which students use the relations between a function and its derivative.     

Political conversations on Twitter in a disruptive scenario: The role of “party evangelists” during the 2015 Spanish general elections

During election campaigns, candidates, parties, and media share their relevance on Twitter with a group of especially active users, aligned with a particular party. This paper introduces the profile of “party evangelists,” and explores the activity and effects these users had on the general political conversation during the 2015 Spanish general election. On that occasion, the electoral expectations were uncertain for the two major parties (PP and PSOE) because of the rise of two emerging parties that were disrupting the political status quo (Podemos and Ciudadanos). This was an ideal situation to assess the differences between the evangelists of established and emerging parties. The paper evaluates two aspects of the political conversation based on a corpus of 8.9 million tweets: the retweeting effectiveness, and the sentiment analysis of the overall conversation. We found that one of the emerging party’s evangelists dominated message dissemination to a much greater extent.