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Copyright of European Journal of Social Work is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper provides evidence on the differences among Spanish regions, regardless of other factors, in student achievement – in Language, Mathematics, Science and Citizenship – of fourth graders. This is the first paper in Spain that analyses these differences for Primary Education in all Spanish autonomous communities. The data in the Spanish General Diagnostic Assessment of 2009, by means of descriptive analyses and estimation of multilevel regressions, led us to show that, beyond differences between and within schools, variation in student achievement in Spain is even larger between regions than schools. Furthermore, regions with a co-official language produce worse results than others, especially in Science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the global economic crisis, unemployment rates increased dramatically across Europe, especially among the least educated population groups. The picture in Spain in 2012, with unemployment rates running at over 20% and youth employment close to 45%, was discouraging. In face of this situation, the Spanish autonomous government of Extremadura launched a programme specifically aimed at motivating unemployed individuals without a school degree to return to education and earn the compulsory secondary education diploma. This paper applies a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to evaluate the impact of this conditional cash transfer programme using administrative data. The results show that the programme did not increase the likelihood of earning the lower secondary education diploma. This finding is a caveat emptor for governments considering similar policies, and remarks again the importance of testing innovations before generalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Roma, today perceived as the most numerous European minority, face marginalisation and exclusion. Education is considered to be one of the focal points for improvement, and numerous studies have analysed and reported on the educational situation of Roma. Several studies have argued that Romani cultural values are not compatible with institutional schooling and that Romani families perceive schools as an alien institution. Other studies have drawn upon cultural–ecological theory (CE theory), developed by Ogbu and colleagues, and argue that the Romani cultural frame of reference is oppositional to academic success and thus suggest that successful Romani students distance themselves from Romani culture. The paper discusses the application of CE theory in the context of the academic discourse about the educational achievement of Romani students. Drawing on interviews with Spanish Romani university students, the paper argues that Romani students themselves challenge the assumption that educational success leads to cultural alienation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper uses an innovative approach to evaluate educational performance of Spanish students in PISA 2009. Our purpose is to decompose their overall inefficiency between different components with a special focus on studying the differences between public and state subsidized private schools. We use a technique inspired by the non-parametric free disposal hull and the application of robust order- $$m$$ models, which allow us to mitigate the influence of outliers and the curse of dimensionality. Subsequently, we adopt a metafrontier framework to assess each student relative to the own group best practice frontier (students in the same school) and to different frontiers constructed from the best practices of different types of schools. The results show that state-subsidised private schools outperform public schools, although the differences between them are significantly reduced once we control for the type of students enrolled in both type of centres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2012 Spain inaugurated a reform of its higher education financial aid system inspired by three principles: cost-sharing, increasing academic performance and school efficiency. This reform has shifted the aim of the system from equality of access to a type of meritocracy that can be defined as class-biased, as it is only applied to low-income students who require scholarships to fund their university education. After contextualizing this changing Spanish financial aid system, the life-experiences of grant-holders are discussed, based on in-depth interviews with scholarship recipients. Our analysis shows how the hardships and constraints that these low-income students endure during their university education have been toughened after the reform. The paper concludes that the reform increases and naturalizes the social inequalities that traditionally exist between youths of different social classes when planning, accessing and staying in university, as the critical sociology of education has shown recurrently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • We provide some guidelines for practitioners combining data from TALIS and PISA in empirical analyses. • We stress that teacherś data need to be aggregated, thus finding causal relationships is complex. • We find that students whose teachers focus on a few instructional practices obtain better results. Abstract This paper focuses on the potential uses and misuses that can be made with the so-called TALIS-PISA link created by the OECD. This is a recently developed instrument that allows for connecting data about teachers collected in TALIS with studentś data available in PISA. However, the statistical and technical aspects regarding this link between both surveys are far from straightforward. In this paper we explore the main problematic issues of the data fusion process and provide some guidelines for researchers interested in performing empirical analyses using the resulting dataset. Likewise, we illustrate some potential utilities of this dataset through the estimation of different models with the aim of exploring the relationships between teaching practices and student achievement in Spain. Our results indicate that students whose teachers concentrate on a few instructional practices obtain better results than those who have teachers using many different activities within the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Estudios Sobre Educacion is the property of Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Navarra, S.A. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Pixel-Bit, Revista de Medios y Educacion is the property of Pixel-Bit, Revista de Medios y Educacion and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper reports an evaluation carried out from 1999 to 2003 in 55 schools in the Basque Autonomous Community involving more than 10,000 secondary school students. The variables measured include achievement in Spanish, metacognitive skills, learning strategies and variables related to the students' family environment. The measurements were made at three different times in the last year of primary, and second and fourth years of secondary school. The main aim of this research study is to conduct a longitudinal study of the students' achievement using a measuring unit which can be used for the three measurements for all the students. The data reported in this paper focus on proficiency in the Spanish language. Data were analysed using a hierarchical linear model (HLM) with three levels: (1) the three students' measures at three different points in time; (2) individual variables related to the students; and (3) the variables related to the schools. The paper presents a model of change in achievement in Spanish by examining the influence of background variables including socioeconomic status (SES) of the family and the school, gender, and type of school (private or public). The results indicate that there is a linear increase of scores in Spanish along the school grades. D model students with Basque as the language of instruction obtain lower results than the rest of the students. Other variables such as gender, SES (family and school) and metacognition also have a significant effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Educación XX1 is the property of Editorial UNED and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of OCNOS: Journal of Reading Research / Revista de Estudios sobre Lectura is the property of Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Facultad de Ciencias de la Educacion y Humanidades and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the new context of the European Higher Education Framework (Bologna Process), the lecturers must cope with the educational achievement assessment and with an appropriate control of the educational process. In this paper, we present the methodology used in the U niversity of Extremadura to evaluate the educational competences in the real time by means of Socrative (by Mastery Connect) launched in smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc. This study has been carried out with the students of two Faculties: the School of Industrial Engineering and the University Centre of Merida, in the framework of an educational innovation project focused on several technical subjects for the mechanical engineering and industrial design degrees. The result shows that the students have improved their competences and their skills, and also the interest in the core syllabus contents, and a great satisfaction with the introduction of this type of activities as a complement to the lectures. Finally, they value this educational experience by means of a surveying, obtaining marks between 83%-85%of the students that consider it as a "positive" or "very positive" experience. The conclusions of this study show that with the use of this tool (Socrative), the students are more motivated and interested in the content of the subjects, with an improvement of their collaborative attitude in the class. 11 leads to obtain an outstanding performance, with a failure rate that in our case, has been reduced by a 20% from "classical" methodology. In contrast, the implementation of this new technological tool demands a notable effort from lecturers' coordination, besides a supplementary work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the start of the PISA evaluations there have been numerous studies that have metaphorically tried «to separate the gold from the sand», in other words, to derive useful knowledge to guide educational practice and policy from the vast amount of data collected. However, research that uses data mining techniques to extract knowledge from the databases provided by the OECD has been less common. This paper analyses the context questionnaires from a metric perspective using a methodology based on data mining with «regression trees». Its main goal is to discover how much value (how much «gold») is in the items that compose these questionnaires, considering their use as predictors of the performance of Spanish students. The results provide a list of the items selected in the six questionnaires and their predictive value. It also provides a methodological approach to help improve the productivity of educational research derived from PISA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Education Policy Analysis Archives / Archivos Analíticos de Políticas Educativas / Arquivos Analíticos de Políticas Educativas is the property of Educational Policy Analysis Archives & Education Review and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Brocar: Cuadernos de Investigación Histórica is the property of Universidad de la Rioja, Servicio de Publicaciones and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Using a sample of countries with a similar level of development, this paper analyzes the structure of the Spanish system of education. It shows that its lack of differentiation has a negative impact on academic achievement and student retention. It also shows that it negatively affects the demand on vocational education and makes the school-to-work transition difficult. The stylized description of the schooling system is based on various sources of information. Data used in the analysis of the internal efficiency of the system come from the OECD and retrospective surveys of students in higher and vocational education. The analysis of the external efficiency of the system is based on data published by the OECD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we used the data of Mathematics achievements from the sample of 13- year-old Spanish boys and girl who took part in the Second National Assessment of Educational Progress, carried out by the Educational Testing Service. With the aim of identifying variables related to high achievement, our goals are: 1) to analyse whether there are significant differences in 13-year-old Spanish boys and girls in their attitudes towards mathematics, their study strategies, and their performance; 2) to analyse the influence of their attitudes and study strategies on their performance, and to examine whether these relations are the same in boys and girls; 3) to propose a theoretical model that explains the relationship among the variables defined by means of structural equation modelling. The results show that: a) there are significant differences between boys and girls in the variables studied; b) it is not possible to reject the proposed model that relates study strategies and attitudes towards performance in mathematics; and c) the model tends to be stable both among boys and girls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of European Journal of Social Work is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Student dropout in Engineering Education is an important problem which has been studied from different perspectives, as well as using different techniques. This manuscript describes the methodology used in order to address this question in the context of learning analytics. Bayesian networks (BNs) have been used as they provide adequate methods for the representation, interpretation and contextualisation of data. The proposed approach is illustrated through a case study about Computer Science (CS) dropout at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain), which is close to 40%. To that end, several BNs were obtained from a database which contained 383 records representing both academic and social data of the students enrolled in the CS degree during four courses. Then, these probabilistic models were interpreted and evaluated. The results obtained revealed that the best model that fits the data is provided by the K2 algorithm although the great heterogeneity of the data studied did not permit the adjustment of the dropout profile of the student too accurately. Nonetheless, the methodology described here can be taken as a reference for future works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of English as thelingua francain the European Union has elevated the symbolic capital of the language. The symbolic capital has, in turn, heightened the demand for English language learning in the European Union, across all levels of education. These circumstances, in correlation with the idiosyncrasies of the role of Spain within the perceived Western hegemony, have created a particularly unique situation. The recent changes made to educational law in 2013 aggressively promote foreign language learning at all educational levels. Language policies affect not only the official national language, Spanish, but also coofficial regional languages. Also, an increased need to certify language competence has arisen. National institutions in Spain cannot qualify language competence across European borders. However, there are supranational organizations that can. These language exams have thus filled this niche. These certificates are expensive; they expire, and double qualifications already set in the national curricula. This situation creates a paradox in countries like Spain where national curricula are followed to teach but certification of language levels from supranational organizations are used to qualify in academic fields and labor markets. Consequences of Spanish language policies are still unfolding and require thoughtful planning to anticipate the difficulties and to sketch diverse cultures out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late 1990s, Spain has played host to a sizeable flow of immigrants who have been absorbed into the compulsory stage of the education system. In this article, our aim is to assess the impact of that exogenous increase in the number of immigrant students from 2003 to 2009 on grade retention using Spanish data from PISA 2003 and 2009. For this purpose, we use the difference-in-differences method as a dose treatment capable of detecting whether the immigrant concentration has had a significant effect on student performance. Our results evidenced that their arrival does not on average decrease school promotion rates with respect to 2003 and is even beneficial to native students. However, although the concentration of immigrant students at the same school does have a negative impact on immigrant students generating more grade retention, native students are unaffected until concentrations of immigrant students is above 15%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Homework (HW) is one of the most common school-related activities among parents, students and teachers. However, the need to assign HW to students has been extensively debated. The present investigation examines the relationship between specific HW variables (i.e. amount of HW completed, time spent on HW and perceived quality of HW time management) and academic achievement, while controlling for students’ gender and grade level. Participants included 454 students (ranging from 10 to 16 years of age) from three schools in northern Spain. A multivariate analyses of variance and path analyses showed that the amount of HW completed decreased with increased schooling, as did students’ perceived quality of HW time management. Data from hierarchical regression analyses completed by path analyses provided evidence that time spent on HW conjointly with perceived quality of HW time management explains how academic achievement is mediated by the amount of HW completed. These findings deepen the understanding of the complex impact of time spent on HW and on academic achievement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of McGill Journal of Education is the property of McGill Journal of Education and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)