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.     

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.     

Completely illiterate adults can learn to decode in 3 months

The purpose of this case series was to explore whether adults who did not have the opportunity to acquire reading skills during childhood are able to do so rapidly if trained with an adequate literacy program. After 14 weeks of training with a new, optimized, literacy course based on cognitive research, six out of eight participants became able to read words they had never encountered, hence demonstrating that they were definitely engaged in decoding processes that allow autonomous reading. Moreover, they showed enhanced phonemic sensitivity and phonological memory. The latter finding implies that functional changes can take place rapidly outside the reading domain even when reading is acquired in adulthood. Thus, there is no major plasticity impediment preventing rapid eradication of illiteracy in adults.     

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.     

Discussion of the Controversy Concerning a Historical Event Among Pre-service Teachers

As part of a teacher training project, 16 future chemistry teachers participated in a dramatisation activity (a mock trial of the Fritz Haber case), in which they discussed a controversy concerning an event from the history of science: the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Fritz Haber in 1918. Preparations for the role-play activity, the dramatisation of the mock trial, and the subsequent discussions were video-recorded. We also collected the written material produced by the pre-service teachers and the reflective journals they produced during their involvement with the activity. This article discusses the contributions of such an experience to future teachers’ knowledge on aspects related to both nature of science and argumentation, as well as to their views on their future actions related to authentic teaching of and about science. The results show that such contributions were meaningful.     

Letter names, phonological awareness and the phonetization of writing

Following several studies on the relationship between phonological awareness, children’s knowledge of letter names and their understanding of the alphabetic code, we pose the hypothesis that children’s knowledge of letter names may contribute to their analysis of the oral segments of words, thereby enabling them to produce writing in which some of the sounds are represented by appropriate letters. The participants were 80-syllabic 5-year-old kindergarten children, who were assigned to 2 experimental and 2 control groups and submitted to phonological and letter knowledge tests. We asked the children in the experimental groups to write a set of words in which either the initial sound (Exp. G. 1) or the middle sound (Exp. G. 2) coincided with the name of a letter known by the child; the children in the control groups were asked to write a set of control words. The results show that the introduction of facilitating words prompts syllabic children to produce writing in which some of the sounds are represented by appropriate letters; Exp. G. 1 gave better results than Exp. G. 2. Finally, there is a positive relationship between the results achieved by children in phonological and letter name tests and the number of sounds they write phonetically.     

Peer bullying,self-serving cognitive distortions and school moral climate perception in Spanish and Dutch secondary school students / Acoso escolar,distorsiones cognitivas en beneficio propio y percepción del clima moral escolar en estudiantes de secundaria de España y Holanda

Students’ role in traditional bullying and cyberbullying was investigated in relation to self-serving cognitive distortions (SSCD), perception of school moral climate and bullying observation. Participants were secondary school students from Spain (n = 568; 286 girls) and the Netherlands (n = 421; 223 girls). The results demonstrated that in both country samples, bullies and bully-victims had higher levels of SSCD. Both Spanish and Dutch students who were directly involved in traditional bullying situations showed more negative perceptions of the school moral climate. In cyberbullying situations, bystanders scored higher on school moral climate perception than bullies and bully-victims. Furthermore, school moral climate perception was negatively associated with traditional bullying observation in the group of victims, and with cyberbullying observation in the case of victims and bystanders. The present findings suggest that future research should focus on the cause-effect relations of these factors, which could include measuring the effects on bullying prevalence of an intervention aimed at SSCD reduction in bullies and bystanders and the improvement of the school moral climate.     

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.     

Adapting instruction to address individual and group educational needs in maths

This study, combining classwide curriculum-based measurement and peer-mediated instruction, used a single-subject research design to address the effectiveness of two grouping adaptation strategies (heterogeneous small-groups versus peer tutoring) to accommodate individual and group differences in learning. Academic performance in the domains of number and arithmetic skills of 19 low, average, and high achieving first-grade linguistic minority pupils was measured by recording scores over 12 weeks and across multiple observations. The results revealed a significant increase in number sense and arithmetic skills when pupils worked in pairs. Whole group, ability group, and individual comparisons for each dependent variable were made. Results are also discussed in terms of an attempt to craft strategies for including academically diverse pupils in mainstream classrooms.