Inclusion and Diversity from Hegelylacan Point of View: Do We Desire Our Desire for Change?

This paper discusses the problem of social exclusion, reported to be intrinsically connected to mathematical teaching from the perspective of Hegel's philosophy and Lacan's psychoanalysis. It provides a characterization of mathematics from a language viewpoint discusses the perennial demand for more mathematical achieving from the perspective of hysterics and obsessive symptoms and shows how desire is linked with the choice of values in assessment.     

School variation in youth transitions in Ireland,Scotland and the Netherlands

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the comparative study of youth transitions. National and international studies have analysed the role of individual and institutional (education and labour market) factors in shaping the transition from school to the labour market. Using data drawn from a cross‐national database of secondary school leavers and multilevel modelling, this paper aims to improve upon the existing research through the analysis of the effect of school factors (as well as individual factors) on pupils' post‐school outcomes. Results show that school variations in pupils' post‐school outcomes are mainly accounted for by curriculum type in the Netherlands, individual factors in Scotland and a mix of individual and school factors in Ireland.     

Phonological abilities and writing among portuguese preschool children

The objective of this study was to identify causal relationships between the development of phonological abilities and progress in writing in preschool children. The participants were 44 children, with an average age of 5 years and 6 months, and whose writing was syllabic with phonetization. The children were divided into three groups. They were subjected to a pre-test and a post-test that were intended to evaluate both their writing and their phonological skills. In between the two tests experimental group 1 underwent a writing training program designed to lead them to produce syllabic-alphabetic/alphabetic writing, while experimental group 2 was subjected to a phonological training program designed to work on phonetic units. The third group served as a control group. The number of letters known and the level of intelligence were controlled. The children in the two experimental groups achieved results that revealed a similar degree of progress (greater than the control group) in both their writing and their phonological abilities.     

Definitions of bullying: a comparison of terms used,and age and gender differences,in a fourteen-country international comparison

The study of school bullying has recently assumed an international dimension, but is faced with difficulties in finding terms in different languages to correspond to the English word bullying. To investigate the meanings given to various terms, a set of 25 stick-figure cartoons was devised, covering a range of social situations between peers. These cartoons were shown to samples of 8- and 14-year-old pupils (N = 1,245; n = 604 at 8 years, n = 641 at 14 years) in schools in 14 different countries, who judged whether various native terms cognate to bullying, applied to them. Terms from 10 Indo-European languages and three Asian languages were sampled. Multidimensional scaling showed that 8-year-olds primarily discriminated nonaggressive and aggressive cartoon situations; however, 14-year-olds discriminated fighting from physical bullying, and also discriminated verbal bullying and social exclusion. Gender differences were less appreciable than age differences. Based on the 14-year-old data, profiles of 67 words were then constructed across the five major cartoon clusters. The main types of terms used fell into six groups: bullying (of all kinds), verbal plus physical bullying, solely verbal bullying, social exclusion, solely physical aggression, and mainly physical aggression. The findings are discussed in relation to developmental trends in how children understand bullying, the inferences that can be made from cross-national studies, and the design of such studies.     

Stimulating resources to cope with challenging times and new realities: effectiveness of a career intervention

A career intervention based on life design approach was devised for a group of young adults at risk for the process of career construction. It was aimed at fostering a series of resources useful to cope with career transitions, to encourage reflection on the future, to identify one’s own strengths, and to plan future projects. Results of the study provided evidence for effectiveness of the career intervention across at several methods of change assessment (statistical significance, clinical significance, and social validity) and highlighted the potential of the career intervention.     

Acceptance of deaf students by hearing students in regular classrooms

Peer relations are of great importance during adolescence. Belonging to a group and feelings of acceptance or rejection by other members are paramount. The article explores the attitudes of 792 hearing students from 10 to 20 years of age in 22 different schools in Spain toward the classroom mainstreaming of deaf students. In general terms, the results, obtained from a scale similar to the Likert and consisting of 19 questions, show that the deaf student is well received socially by hearing classmates. Hearing students in general felt that deaf students might be better looked after at a special school and that deaf students did not work as hard as hearing students. Young female hearing students reported the strongest support for mainstreaming of deaf students. Teachers were perceived as dedicated and patient.     

Teacher judgments and pupils’ causal explanations: Social valorization of effort-based explanations in school context

Achievement evaluation in school contexts may be considered as a kind of social judgment, which is affected by social and moral determinants since it is not merely an estimation of pupils’ accomplishment (Dompnier, Pansu, & Bressoux, 2006; Weiner, 2003). Teachers’ judgments have been investigated starting from the analysis of two theoretical approaches: the norm of internality (Dubois, 2003), and the attributional approach to social motivation (Weiner, 2006). In order to study the social valorization of internal explanations referring to effort in school context, an empirical research has been conducted. Our study investigates how teachers evaluate fictitious pupils, which are supposed to explain events by means of different types of causal explanations. According to our results, pupils providing effort-based explanations receive more positive judgments. Findings are discussed by considering effort as a key principle of school environments.     

The worlds’ game: collective language manipulation as a space to develop logical abilities in a primary school classroom

European Journal of Psychology of Education - This paper presents a Vygotskian research device that focuses on collaborative activities based on the manipulation of linguistic objects in a primary...     

Hindsight bias and developing theories of mind

Although hindsight bias (the "I knew it all along" phenomenon) has been documented in adults, its development has not been investigated. This is despite the fact that hindsight bias errors closely resemble the errors children make on theory of mind (ToM) tasks. Two main goals of the present work were to (a) create a battery of hindsight tasks for preschoolers, and (b) assess the relation between children's performance on these and ToM tasks. In two experiments involving 144 preschoolers, 3-, 4-, and 5-year olds exhibited strong hindsight bias. Performance on hindsight and ToM tasks was significantly correlated independent of age, language ability, and inhibitory control. These findings contribute to a more comprehensive account of perspective taking across the lifespan.     

Computer use in learning about language

This study is part of a research project aimed at studying ways and effects of introducing computer use within a context of linguistic education. Linguistic activities, in which language was treated as an object instead of a means of communication, were carried out through a curriculum unit aimed at developing reflection on language. Within the curriculum a new software has been developed and implemented. The software promotes reflection on language and metalinguistic awareness in a social and educational context in wich «playing with language» is stimulated in children. It requires language comprehension and production, and offers to children (working in groups of three) the open task of composing sentences and stories in a problem solving setting. In this study we collected observational data on children’s interactions with the software and used the data as an ecological measure of children’s metalinguistic development. Positiv effects of the curriculum supported by the computer use were verified through measures of metalinguistic skills, investigated through individual interviews and administered also to a matched control group.