Development of human resources in and for bilingual intercultural education in Latin America

Worked as consultant for the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit on the Bilingual Education Programme of Puno (Peru). Professor of Andean Linguistics at the Universidad Nacional del Altiplano. Co-author (with Ingrid Jung) of Las lenguas en la educación bilingüe: el caso de Puno,and compiler of Pesquisas en linguística andinaand Pueblos indios, estados y educación.     

Infants' Responses to Facial and Vocal Emotional Signals in a Social Referencing Paradigm

The independent effects of facial and vocal emotional signals and of positive and negative signals on infant behavior were investigated in a novel toy social referencing paradigm. 90 12-month-old infants and their mothers were assigned to an expression condition (neutral, happy, or fear) nested within a modality condition (face-only or voice-only). Each infant participated in 3 trials: a baseline trial, an expression trial, and a final positive trial. We found that fearful vocal emotional signals, when presented without facial signals, were sufficient to elicit appropriate behavior regulation. Infants in the fear-voice condition looked at their mothers longer, showed less toy proximity, and tended to show more negative affect than infants in the neutral-voice condition. Happy vocal signals did not elicit differential responding. The infants' sex was a factor in the few effects that were found for infants' responses to facial emotional signals.     

A Four Year Follow‐up Study of Low Socioeconomic Status,Latin American Children with Reading Difficulties

This paper presents the results of a follow‐up study of reading difficulties among Spanish‐speaking Latin American children of low socioeconomic background (SES) over four school years. The research started with a group of 93 children with reading difficulties (RD) by 2nd and 3rd grade teachers in four schools and a control group of 63 children without reading difficulties (ND), belonging to the same schools. Both groups were equivalent in age, grade, gender and SES. All children were tested on reading decoding and comprehension, reading and writing pseudo‐words, verbal abilities, visual perception, phonological processing, and the WISC‐R. Neither SES nor IQ accounted significantly for the reading difficulties in the RD group. The most predictive variables of the final reading level in the RD group were phonological processing, verbal abilities, and the initial level of decoding. After four years, 17% of the initial RD children had reached an average level of reading, but 11% of this group remained with severe reading difficulties and may be considered as dyslexic children. The RD children who became average readers were not significantly different from the control group in verbal abilities, nor in phonological processing. Nevertheless, they were significantly different in terms of IQ scores. The neuropsychological characteristics of the children with severe reading difficulties appear similar to those found in children with dyslexia in more developed countries.     

如你所知

After a while you learn the subtle difference Between holding a hand and chaining a soul, And you leam that love doesn't mean leaning And company doesn't mean security.     

Sexual abuse during childhood and adolescence among Nicaraguan men and women: a population-based anonymous survey

AIMS: The objective was to describe experiences of sexual abuse occurring before 19 years of age among men and women in León, Nicaragua and to explore the possible association to later sexual risk behavior. METHOD: A sub-sample of literate urban men and women 25-44 years of age was selected from a representative sample of households in León. After an invitation to a public health event, 154 men (53% of the invited) and 213 women (66% of those invited) participated in giving written answers to an anonymous questionnaire. RESULTS: Twenty percent of men and 26% of women reported that they had experienced sexual abuse. Women had been victims of attempted or completed rape twice as often as men, 15% as compared to 7%. Thirty-three percent of the abuse towards boys and 66% of the abuse towards girls was committed by family members. Women who had experienced attempted or completed rape were more likely to later have had a higher number of sexual partners compared to non-abused or moderately abused women. CONCLUSIONS: Sexual abuse of children and adolescents of both sexes is common in Nicaragua. The results underscore the urgent need to address this serious problem more openly, and to make more resources available for the prevention of sexual abuse and for support to victims.     

What if privatising higher education becomes an issue? The case of Chile and Mexico

Over the last 30 years, Chile and Mexico have been implementing neoliberal policies to reform their higher education systems. This report compares the development and impact of those policies within three main areas in both countries, namely: (1) trends and characteristics of the growing private higher education sector, (2) commercialisation and business-like trends that private academia is experiencing and, finally, (3) it discusses how all this has created tensioning situations with assessment and accrediting agencies to ensure quality in their private higher education systems. This study shows that private higher education is facing the following challenges in both nations: (1) an uncritical implementation of neoliberal policies, (2) that there is a very unregulated legislation that has allowed many private institutions to profit within loopholes in the law, (3) that quality has become a central concern and some of the mechanisms applied to correct it have not been effective, showing a lack of a comprehensive system of quality assessment, and (4) that enrolment has grown but with several mismatches that challenge the initial goal of advancing economic development through human resources capacities. Alternative policies are discussed.     

Comparative education and education sciences: Variations on an old theme

where he teaches comparative education. Until 1988, President of the Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE). Member of the World Council of Comparative Education Societies and Vice-President of the Spanish Comparative Education Society. Publications include: Fundamentos de Educación Comparada (1982, 1986), Problemas mundiales de la educación (1982, 1986), Sistemas educativos de hoy (1984, 1987), Primary Education on the Threshold of the Twenty-first Century(published in Spanish and French; 1986 and 1987) and Pedagogía prospectiva (1989). He has published numerous articles in scholarly journals of various countries.     

News from the Funding Front: Upcoming Opportunities,Proposals Welcomed

Many life sciences faculty and administrators are unaware of existing funding programs and of the strategies needed for writing an educationally related proposal. We hope to remedy this problem by making the life sciences audience aware of two National Science Foundation programs underutilized by the biology community.This column has been a welcome opportunity to keep the CBE—Life Sciences Education readership aware of national efforts to improve undergraduate education in the life sciences and of ways to become a part of that effort (Woodin et al. 2009 , 2010 , 2012 ; Wei and Woodin, 2011 ). Throughout the years of engagement in the Vision and Change initiative, from the summer of 2007 to the present, the three primary agencies involved, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), have continually maintained a dialogue with participants through formal and informal conversations, workshops, and meetings. Our shared focus has been on how the life sciences community itself can change biology undergraduate education in order to better reflect and respond to the current educational environment, including the

• rapid advances in the discipline,
• new educational technologies and platforms becoming available,
• evidence developed through research on effective practices in undergraduate education, and
• challenges of accomplishing the necessary changes with the resources available.

As the participants have talked and the funding agencies have listened, it has become clear that many life sciences faculty and administrators are unaware of existing funding programs and of the strategies needed for writing an educationally related proposal. In this column, we hope to remedy this problem (in part) by making the life sciences audience aware of two NSF programs particularly relevant to Vision and Change that appear to be underutilized by the biology community. These are:

• Transforming Undergraduate Education in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (TUES) program (anticipated Spring of 2013 release), and
• Undergraduate Research Coordination Networks–Undergraduate Biology Education (RCN-UBE) program (next deadline is June 14, 2013).

     

Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations

This paper relates and analyses the experience of various Brazilian institutions organized in a consortium with the aim of providing integration and unified access, via a web gateway, to full-text electronic theses already available at different Brazilian universities. The rise and impact of free electronic academic publishing on scientific communication and the development of science is analyzed. The results of a pilot programme, developed under the coordination of IBICT, as well as technical and technological aspects of information system models adopted, are presented. Aspects such as metadata sets and formats, protocols for automatic gathering of metadata, union catalogue databases, user interfaces and integration with other Brazilian STI systems, are analyzed. Finally, future developments and the enlargement of the Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations are discussed.     

Herramientas de autor para el desarrollo de software educativo

La gran muralla del ordenador para los educadores ha sido que imponía el juego que Goethe achacaba a los matemáticos: lo traducen todo a su idioma y ya se trata de algo distinto inasequible para la generalidad de los mortales. La informática separaba a los educadores de la informática. Los lenguajes «de autor» que traducen las posibilidades del ordenador a pautas de acción expresadas en códigos sencillos y naturales y que sirven para producir cursos, lecciones o didácticas fácilmente, permiten por primera vez que el educador pase a ser protagonista y no el anfitrión de una visita inoportuna, del papel del ordenador en educación.