Sexualities,teenage pregnancy and educational life histories in Portugal: experiencing sexual citizenship?

This article focuses on Portuguese working-class teenage girls’ voices and experiences concerning sexuality and pregnancy. Within a sociological, feminist and educational framework, it explores the girls’ perspective on sexual and intimate citizenship as evidence of fairer forms of regulation of teenage sexualities. Through building life histories of three pregnant and teenage mothers, this article aims to understand how girls rehearse and live out their sexualities and pregnancies as well as listen to their voices and recognise their demand for inclusion and respect. Gender power relations emerge as central in configuring girls’ pathways and shed light on youth pregnancy.     

The visualization of spatial transformations in diagrams of molecular structures

Summaries

English

The investigation sets out to determine in absolute terms the average level of performance of English and Portuguese students in visualizing how diagrams of molecules should be drawn after performing a rotation, reflection or inversion on the molecule itself. A second aim was to determine the factor structure of these tasks. Both aims were investigated using tests comprising samples of items randomly selected from domains of items which operationally defined each task. The results showed that for the students in both countries, the average level of performance on each of these tests was far from satisfactory. The factor structure separated items corresponding to the rotations, reflections and inversions. Within the categories of items corresponding to rotations and reflections, the students from the two different countries give rise to different patterns of loadings for the three different types of rotations and three different types of reflection.     

Information literacy in managers’ education

This research reflects on information literacy (IL) when taking business decisions and, on the education of future managers. We focus on two aspects; characterizing IL skills and their link to academic performance. This research provides interesting conclusions. First, IL may be broken down into various dimensions – access, evaluation and use – and these skills are not independent: our research shows how persons skilled at applying information will lose their advantage if they are not skilled at interpreting or at prior selection. Second, our study also shows how the IL skills have differing effects on the different components of the academic performance.     

Teaching skills to promote clinical reasoning in early basic science courses

Basic and superior reasoning skills are woven into the clinical reasoning process just as they are used to solve any problem. As clinical reasoning is the central competence of medical education, development of these reasoning skills should occur throughout the undergraduate medical curriculum. The authors describe here a method of teaching reasoning skills in a clinical context during a human anatomy course. Anat Sci Educ 3:267–271, 2010. © 2010 American Association of Anatomists.     

Medical Simulation in the Community College Health Science Curriculum: A Matrix for Future Implementation

As the nation's healthcare education system struggles to keep pace with the demand for its services, educators are seeking creative and innovative solutions to meet the needs of a growing number of students. The integration of medical simulation technology into the community college health science curriculum is a creative solution that can meet the needs of healthcare educators and the students they serve, as well as of the healthcare community. This article provides a comprehensive overview of medical simulation, beginning with a review of literature regarding its history and efficacy, continuing with the current state of medical simulation usage, and concluding with implications for practice by offering a matrix for simulation integration and implementation. While Iowa's community colleges are the focus of the current state of usage, the implications for practice are useful to all comprehensive community colleges offering health science education programs.     

The pathways to higher education: lexical availability in adult candidate students and in young first-year students

In the past few years there has been an increase in the number of adult students in higher education courses, many of whom have returned to school after a break. Most of these students do not intend to continue their studies from the point where they stopped; rather, they want to prepare for specific tests in order to have direct access to higher education courses, which in Portugal is a legal option for students over the age of 23. In response to this new cohort, higher education institutions need to find out what kind of students these are, determining their characteristics, capabilities and major problems, if they are to provide them with successful learning opportunities alongside younger students. This article presents a comparative study of lexical competence, focusing on lexical availability, contrasting those adult applicants to higher education who are attending a course preparatory to higher education with first-year students who have just entered higher education. The results show significant differences between the two groups, the adult group in general showing poorer results. Their withdrawal from schooling is clearly reflected in their vocabulary activation with regard to transversal themes. The most salient contrasts are related to the number of words mentioned and the frequency of words in the group, as well as the greater or lesser proximity to the topic of the terms mentioned.     

Mexican Educators Survey on Anatomical Sciences Education and a Review of World Tendencies

Anatomical sciences curricula have been under constant reform over the years, with many countries having to reduce course hours while trying to preserve laboratory time. In Mexico, schools have historically been autonomous and unregulated, and data regarding structure and methods are still lacking. A national survey was sent by the Mexican Society of Anatomy to 110 anatomical sciences educators. The questionnaire consisted of 50 items (open and multiple choice) for gross anatomy, microscopic anatomy, neuroanatomy, and embryology courses in medical schools across Mexico. A clinical approach was the most common course approach in all disciplines. Contact course hours and laboratory hours were higher in Mexican anatomy education compared to other countries, with the highest reported contact hours for embryology (133.4 ± 44.1) and histology (125 ± 33.2). There were similar contact hours to other countries for gross anatomy (228.5 ± 60.5). Neuroanatomy course hours (43.9 ± 13.1) were less than reported by the United States and similar to Saudi Arabia and higher than the United Kingdom. Dissection and microscopy with histological slides predominate as the most common laboratory activities. Traditional methods prevail in most of the courses in Mexico and only a few educators have implemented innovative and technological tools. Implementation of new methods, approaches, and curricular changes are needed to enhance anatomical sciences education in Mexico.     

EDLE: an integrated tool to foster entrepreneurial skills development in engineering education

Academic papers on entrepreneurship in engineers’ education have been growing in the last decades. However, studies on entrepreneurship in engineering have not sought to analyze how entrepreneurship education, in connection to active learning, design thinking, and Bloom’s Taxonomy, inserted in an integrated way, as a tool, might help the process of engineering students’ entrepreneurial skills development. Thus, this study has the goal to propose an integrated tool, linked to the principles of entrepreneurship education, active learning, design thinking, and Bloom’s Taxonomy, to foster engineering students’ entrepreneurial skills development. The tool, called Entrepreneurial Dynamic Learning, is operationalized and validated in a 2-year case study in a Brazilian public university. The study also produces practical implications, and five are highlighted: (1) at the level of governments and policy makers; (2) engineering scientific associations; (3) universities, coordinators, and professors of engineering undergraduate programs; (4) engineering education researchers; and (5) the Brazilian National Confederation of Industry.