Competencies evaluation in engineering programmes

Results are reported in this paper from a study aimed at evaluating significant competencies in final-year students of some engineering programmes in Chile. The study was carried out by a group of eight universities that were interested in exploring ways to assess learning outcomes such as those demanded by the recent Chilean accreditation system. The authors actively participated in all stages of the study, contributing directly to the design, application and results evaluation of some tests. A sample of 150 students was tested, under conditions that guaranteed the comparability of results. In this paper the authors present results relating to the evaluation of effective communication. The study was backed up by a conceptual model and some hypotheses that are explained and discussed in this work.     

Mothers' Perspectives of the Peer-Related Social Development of Young Children with Developmental Delays and Communication Disorders

Mothers' perspectives of children's peer-related social development were obtained from matched groups of young children with developmental delays, communicative disorders, and typically developing children. Structured interviews elicited information on numerous issues including mothers' views of the importance of children's social skills development, rationales with respect to why children succeed or had difficulties on specific social tasks, and the socialization strategies mothers employ to promote children's peer-related social development. Mothers also reported on their efforts to arrange play with peers for their child and the degree to which they monitored that play. Results indicated that mothers rated children's social development as highly important, offered primarily internal rationales (e.g., traits, dispositions) for success or difficulties in achieving social tasks, and endorsed moderate and low power socialization strategies. Differences across the three groups were minimal. Mothers arranged play with peers least often for children with developmental delays and communication disorders, but monitored play more extensively for children with delays. These finding were discussed in terms of mothers adopting a developmental orientation to understand children's social development and their implications for maternal participation in peer competence intervention programs.     

Improving the status and prestige of post-colonial secondary schools in a developing nation: The marketing approach

In many countries of the Third World the structure of secondary education is dichotomized. On the one hand there are traditional grammar schools that predate decolonization, and on the other a new breed of schools has emerged during the period of political independence. Maintaining their traditional reputation for excellence, the grammar schools attract, but are not limited to, students demonstrating the highest levels of academic proficiency. They are the schools where children of the local élite are usually in attendance. The newer post-colonial secondary schools are usually attended by students of lower academic performance, the majority of whom come from lower class families. Post-colonial secondary schools lag far behind their traditional grammar school counterparts in academic performance. In Trinidad and Tobago some serious criticisms have been levelled against the newer post-colonial type of secondary schools. Their reputation and status in the local society have been low, and several efforts at melioration have been attempted by the Government, without much success. The paper therefore attempts three main tasks. It examines some of the major problems faced by post-colonial secondary schools in Trinidad and Tobago, critically reviews some of the efforts made by Government to improve the status and prestige of these schools, and suggests the strategy of marketing educational institutions as a means by which melioristic transformation of these institutions may be achieved. A speculative analysis of certain issues likely to be affected as a result of implementation of the marketing strategy concludes the paper.     

‘The sky is the limit’: higher education,gender and empowerment in the Bedouin community in the Negev in Israel

This article addresses the meaning that female Bedouin from the Negev in Israel give to higher education. I shall focus the discussion on the processes in which personal and social contexts merge into one another. Although there has been an increase in the number of investigations of the ways in which Bedouin women in the Negev in Israel participate in the public sphere, a survey of the literature reveals that no investigations have been conducted on the meaning educated women attribute to higher education during the course of their lives. Through an analysis of ten in‐depth interviews carried out between 1998 and 2001, this article examines issues such as gender, empowerment and social mobility amongst young Bedouin women in Israel.     

Decentralisation And Privatisation Of Education In Africa: Which Option For Nigeria?

Arguing that the politicisation of decentralisation appreciably reduces educational quality and efficient resource allocation and negatively affects matters of equity in and delivery of education, the present study provides a critique of decentralisation and privatisation in education in Africa with special reference to Nigeria. On the basis of the experiences of other nations, the author suggests that both decentralisation and privatisation in education – especially the introduction of user fees – have created a new dimension of educational inequality in Nigeria as well. In this case, it can be seen that indicators of efficiency declined significantly in line with negative trends in national-government appropriations to sub-national governments and the education sector. The author concludes that no linkage can be asserted to exist between decentralisation and educational improvement.     

Examining Intermediate Omitted Levels in Hierarchical Designs via Latent Variable Modeling

This article outlines an interval estimation procedure that can be used in a 3-level setting to evaluate the proportion of outcome variance attributable to the second level of clustering. The method is useful for examining the necessity of including a possibly omitted intermediate level of nesting in analyses of data from a multilevel study, and represents an informative addendum to current statistical tests of second-level variance. The approach is developed within the framework of latent variable modeling and can be used as an aid in the process of choosing between 2-level and 3-level models in a hierarchical design. The discussed procedure is illustrated with an empirical example.