The Ibero American Network for Research on School Effectiveness and School Improvement: A Way to Increase Educational Quality and Equity

Education systems in Latin America are demanding an improvement in their present levels of quality and equity. In order to achieve higher levels in these fields, decision-taking is necessary in all educational areas, and the theoretical–practical movements of school effectiveness and school improvement (SE and SI) can help in this task. Nevertheless, current research is neither sufficient nor satisfactory, as it is deeply ethnocentric. At the beginning of the year 2000, the Ibero American Network for Research on School Effectiveness and School Improvement (RIEME) was created with the aim of promoting research and communication on these research fields. Among its activities, the following can be mentioned: to promote international research on SE and SI; to develop and maintain a closed e-list and a web page; to organise meetings, training and advise activities, and so forth. RIEME works as a Network of networks, and is widespread in Spain, Portugal and most countries in Latin America.     

Co-designing and piloting an Integrated Digital Literacy and Language Toolkit for vulnerable migrant students in higher education

Education and Information Technologies - This paper presents the process of co-design, co-production, piloting, evaluation and revision of an Integrated Digital Literacy and Language Toolkit for...     

Updating broken web links: An automatic recommendation system

Broken hypertext links are a frequent problem in the Web. Sometimes the page which a link points to has disappeared forever, but in many other cases the page has simply been moved to another location in the same web site or to another one. In some cases the page besides being moved, is updated, becoming a bit different to the original one but rather similar. In all these cases it can be very useful to have a tool that provides us with pages highly related to the broken link, since we could select the most appropriate one. The relationship between the broken link and its possible linkable pages, can be defined as a function of many factors. In this work we have employed several resources both in the context of the link and in the Web to look for pages related to a broken link. From the resources in the context of a link, we have analyzed several sources of information such as the anchor text, the text surrounding the anchor, the URL and the page containing the link. We have also extracted information about a link from the Web infrastructure such as search engines, Internet archives and social tagging systems. We have combined all of these resources to design a system that recommends pages that can be used to recover the broken link. A novel methodology is presented to evaluate the system without resorting to user judgments, thus increasing the objectivity of the results, and helping to adjust the parameters of the algorithm. We have also compiled a web page collection with true broken links, which has been used to test the full system by humans.     

Primary school student and teacher perceptions of competency-based learning / Percepción de alumnado y profesorado de Educación Primaria sobre el aprendizaje de los estudiantes basado en competencias

In the search for an educational system that enables students to achieve the best academic results, it is extremely important to explore the perception of the main educational agents: students and teachers. Therefore, the objectives of this paper were: (a) to analyse primary school student and teacher perceptions of students’ competency-based learning; (b) to assess the possible differences between them; and (c) to test hypothetical models for predicting learning according to their perception. The participants were 8,513 students from 58 schools and 1,010 teachers from 110 schools. Overall, both teachers and students reported high scores of perception. However, the perception of the students was higher than that of the teachers, except for the digital competence. While the results showed differences in perception between both prediction models of competency-based learning, both groups perceived the competences of autonomy and personal initiative, digital competence, social competence and citizenship, and lifelong learning as core elements of their perception. In this regard, initial and ongoing teacher training in innovative pedagogical models is needed to enable the development of these competences, which are predictors of perceived learning.     

Communicating Campus Sexual Assault: A Mixed Methods Rhetorical Analysis

ABSTRACT

This article reports on a mixed methods rhetorical analysis of a data set of news reports on campus sexual assault. A macro-level qualitative analysis of narratives combined with micro-level quantitative content analysis of verb voice offers insight into how news media shapes perceptions of power, blame, and agency in reporting. These findings offer implications for how public actors discuss campus sexual assault and implications for the teaching and practice of research methods in technical communication.     

Gender and Management in HEIs: Changing organisational and management structures

This paper reports on the second phase of a multi‐country study examining cross cultural perspectives of gender and management in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). It examines the broader labour market context and legislative frameworks for higher education in each country and then analyses the literature on women in university management. The paper presents the findings of research with male and female senior managers about their perceptions of women as HEI managers within changing organisational and management structures. It concludes that although HEI’s are now largely aware of barriers to women getting into and on in senior management, they have not addressed the organisational structures and cultures that perpetuate this inequity.     

“Jugos There?” Codeswitching Strategies in Bilingual Picturebooks

Children's Literature in Education -     

Emotional profiles regarding maths among primary school children – A two-year longitudinal study

Learning maths is challenging for many primary school students, and teachers must understand students’ learning and emotional processes specific to learning maths. The current research, grounded in control-value theory, focused on achievement emotions regarding maths. Primary school students (N?=?71) were studied with the primary objective of examining the longitudinal trajectories of achievement emotions of third graders over two years. The Portuguese Achievement Emotions Questionnaire for Elementary Students was administered biannually to assess enjoyment, anxiety, and boredom regarding maths. The results indicate that enjoyment decreased and boredom increased over time, revealing three emotional profiles: positive, negative and moderate. The positive profile showed the highest scores in maths achievement. Profile membership was moderately stable and became increasingly stable and structured. In examining the complexity of students’ emotional profiles and processes, the importance of understanding them to enhance educational support, development, and learning was highlighted.

     

School mathematics registers in a context of low academic expectations

We investigate the different school mathematical discourses that are made available for students who all share an unfavourable social and economical position and experiences of low achievement in primary school, and who have been streamed into three different ability groups at the very beginning of secondary school. Our investigation is built on the premise that schools distribute different forms of knowledge to different social groups and thus provide different opportunities to develop consciousness. We look at teacher–student interactions as expressions of social structure at the micro-level and as constituents of social structure on the macrolevel. Employing analytic tools from social semiotics, we carried out a register analysis of the school mathematical discourse in each stream. We found systematic differences and linked them to the work of Dowling (1998) on the construction of ability and its implications for social hierarchies. As a result, the upper of the three streams was freed from a discourse of low expectations, while such a discourse was reinforced for the lower stream. Finally, we will discuss our findings in relation to the contemporary debate about the role of mathematics education in social stratification.