East Asian pop culture and the trajectory of Asian consumption

This article focuses on Chua Beng Huat’s work on the East Asian pop culture that became more prominent in East and Southeast Asia from the 1990s, when the circulation of multilingual and multi-format pop culture started to exceed linguistic, ethnic and national boundaries. It argues that Chua’s work indicates that the pop-cultural production and innovation that support the globalisation and regionalisation processes in East Asia need not be national in origin but can hail from different national origins – and this despite the existing political realities of the region and its history of political fractures. Chua Beng Huat cautions, though, that the national popular can also be marshalled to defeat the border-crossing potential of an inter-Asian pop culture. What is the “Asia” imagined or being represented in such cultural production? Chua’s work is also distinctive in that it deals with the political and economic conditions that underpin mainstream pop consumption as a socio-cultural phenomenon, instead of examining consumption as identity politics. The article concludes by noting the significance that Chua as an institutional builder has played in enabling the study of East Asian pop culture in the region.     

Cross-cultural influence on communication effectiveness and user interface design

The objective of this study was to investigate the impact of cultural diversity on communication effectiveness with different communication styles and to apply the results in the field of user interface design for computer-based communication systems. The scope of this study was limited to the relationship between context and verbal/nonverbal communication, and also the relationship between power distance and communication interaction. The results indicated that high context people (HCP) had better communication effectiveness in comprehending nonverbal clues than low context people (LCP), while LCP had better communication effectiveness in verbal communication than their counterparts. It was also found that high power distance people (HPDP) could not communicate as effectively as low power distance people (LPDP) during communication with interaction, but there was no significant difference between HPDP and LPDP in dealing with communication without interaction.     

Sur l'Acquisition des structures numériques en fin de 3ème

Sans résuméRésultats d'une enquête effectuée en mai-juin 1973 par une équipe de l'IREM de Strasbourg dans les classes de 3ème du Bas-Rhin.L'équipe comprenait quatre membres de l'IREM:Mathématiciens:—Mademoiselle Anne Scherpereel—Monsieur François PluvinagePsychologues:—Mademoiselle Catherine Bloch—Monsieur Raymond Duval.     

Cinema Demand in Spain: A Cointegration Analysis

In this paper we explain the decline in cinema attendance in Spain since 1968. We use a cointegration analysis to estimate an individual demand function for cinema, with annual data and in terms of average attendance per inhabitant. We find that cinema is a luxury good and that its demand is elastic with respect to its price. We also show that television acts as a deterrent with regard to cinema attendance. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Writing instruction for social justice: an investigation into the components of a teacher preparation course

Future teachers must notice, navigate, and address ideologies in order to counter inequities in the literacy classroom. This article presents the findings of two teacher educators who have taken up the call to critically reflect on their own underlying beliefs and discourses regarding writing instruction. Through an education design framework, they analysed important components of the course, arguing for a higher degree of visibility of the ideologies and social forces that impact writing instruction. They found that despite encouraging a fairly complex and all-encompassing view of learning to write to the future teachers in their course, the creativity discourse was present passively and the socio-political was downright absent, despite clear social justice aims in the course. They discuss how well-established discourses can serve as gateways to embed the socio-political into the course and address more granularly the question of exclusion through selected mentor texts.     

Multivariate Meta-Analysis as Structural Equation Models

Multivariate meta-analysis has become increasingly popular in the educational, social, and medical sciences. It is because the outcome measures in a meta-analysis can involve more than one effect size. This article proposes 2 mathematically equivalent models to implement multivariate meta-analysis in structural equation modeling (SEM). Specifically, this article shows how multivariate fixed-, random- and mixed-effects meta-analyses can be formulated as structural equation models. metaSEM (a free R package based on OpenMx) and Mplus are used to implement the proposed procedures. A real data set is used to illustrate the procedures. Formulating multivariate meta-analysis as structural equation models provides many new research opportunities for methodological development in both meta-analysis and SEM. Issues related to and extensions on the SEM-based meta-analysis are discussed.     

Motivational Profile and Academic Achievement Among Students Enrolled in Different Schooling Tracks

From the contextual perspective, researchers argue that the relevance and weight of motivational variables of students' functioning vary depending on different dimensions related to individual, cultural or situational characteristics. The first objective of this study examined this contention by comparing self-perceptions of competence, learning goals and judgments of usefulness of school subjects as motivational determinants of high school students' commitment and achievement according to their assignment to their learning abilities. The second objective was to compare how these variables related to academic commitment and achievement according to the type of student and two school subjects. Two-hundred-and-twenty-six high school students from a same school participated sixty-one were learning disabled students, 60 were high achievers and 105 were average students. Findings suggest that the relevance of the motivational variables did not vary much across either the type of student or the school subjects. They also support Bandura's view about the primary role of self-perceptions of competence in students' academic commitment and achievement.     

The Introduction of Portfolios in Higher Education: a comparative study in the UK and the Netherlands

This article describes a comparative study of the introduction of student portfolios in two departments of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands and Nottingham Trent University in the UK. Portfolios are designed to facilitate effective management of lifelong learning, to provide a record of achievements and to encourage self-reflection by students.
The justifications for the portfolio initiative are different in the two countries. At the Vrije Universiteit, the initiative arose within the University but is being implemented by individual faculties. There is no standard model of implementation. At Nottingham Trent University, portfolios are being introduced as a response to a government directive, as part of a lifelong learning portfolio that each individual will carry forward into their working life. The University's response to this imperative is top-down and a University-wide model is being sought. The department model is one of several models that are being evaluated for this purpose.
This research project investigates whether these alternative starting points lead to differential responses from student users or not. Data are drawn from quantitative (questionnaires) and qualitative (interviews with managers, consultants and teachers) sources. Similarities and differences in students' responses to the portfolio exercise are identified and discussed in terms of factors such as the way the portfolios are introduced, the incentives offered to complete them, the role of the lecturer and peers in the monitoring of study progress, the quality of self-regulative skills, and students' learning expectations.