Search

A political discourse would comprise terminology related to economic development, social welfare, national identity, international relations, and security. The purpose of this study was to determine the function of political discourse and study its role as a mass media that shapes public opinion, and to prove through discourse that political terminology plays a key role in shaping the country's image. Through a qualitative analysis of speeches, official documents, media coverage, and public statements, a dialectical approach was adopted to enhance understanding of the role of language in shaping perceptions of nations in the contemporary global context. The data mainly comprised secondary data, speeches of political leaders, official documents and media reports. Political archives, media reports and newspaper editorials also supplemented the data about Kazakhstan and its historical evolution. The research findings identified patterns, trends, and differences in the portrayal of a country's image and the strategies used to promote or defend it. It also found the nuanced interplay between political terminology, discourse, and the construction of a country's image. The findings would contribute to a deeper understanding of the role of language in shaping perceptions of nations in the contemporary global context.

Post-secondary institutions are required to complete a variety of quality assurance activities including external program review, a process of inviting external reviewers from outside the institution to provide constructive feedback on all aspects of an academic program. While external program reviews have been completed for decades, there has been little work to ensure that meaningful change occurs as a result. Assessment of outcomes at the department level are limited and research specifically considering external academic program review as a primary quality assurance activity is scant. Each of these limitations is even more significant when considered at the institutional level. From our experience, there is minimal consideration in research or practice to ensure that external review recommendations have an impact on educational planning at the institutional level. To help address this concern, in this paper we describe an approach involving secondary research and thematic document analysis that can be leveraged to enhance institutional decision-making processes by uncovering institutional themes evident across external reviews. We suggest that our approach may be helpful for other higher education institutions striving to make sense of program review recommendations from an institutional perspective.

We analyze here how pre-service teachers explicate their views about the wave-particle duality of photons and what role it plays in their arguments supporting the quantum nature of light. The data for the analysis is provided by 12 written reports about the double-slit experiment with feeble light. The analysis is based on constructing semantic networks corresponding to pre-service teachers' written texts. Contingency-like associative correlation between word-pairs is used to differentiate between word-pairs, where associations of two terms or words is systematic. Such associations indicate connections, which are significant for key term vocabularies in construction of inferences and arguments. Based on that information of the key vocabulary we then construct the structure of pre-service teachers' argument for the nature of the photon and its wave-particle duality, in the form of directed argument graphs (DAGs). The results show that argument structures in four to six out of 12 cases meet the goals set for pre-service teacher education. In these cases, experimental aspects and wave-particle duality play an important role in the pre-service teachers' argument and its structure.

This study examined the relationship between the accuracy of parental reporting of children's sleep duration compared to objectively measured child sleep and tested whether any discrepancies were related to childhood obesity prevalence in a sample of Latinx families (N = 119). A paired sample t-test revealed that parents significantly overestimated their child's sleep duration by 1.33 hours, t(86) = 6.69, p < 0.001. Using a one-way ANOVA, no significant differences were found in children's BMI percentile when grouped by the parent's accuracy of their child's sleep duration F(3, 83) = 0.76, p = 0.52. A potential, although non-significant, trend regarding parent accuracy and child BMI may merit further examination. Future research should seek to determine if the discrepancy in parent reported child sleep duration is indeed linked with increased child BMI and if this knowledge could be used in targeted intervention efforts to reduce childhood obesity.

Background: Interrupted time series (ITS) studies contribute importantly to systematic reviews of population-level interventions. We aimed to develop and validate search filters to retrieve ITS studies in MEDLINE and PubMed. Methods: A total of 1017 known ITS studies (published 2013-2017) were analysed using text mining to generate candidate terms. A control set of 1398 time-series studies were used to select differentiating terms. Various combinations of candidate terms were iteratively tested to generate three search filters. An independent set of 700 ITS studies was used to validate the filters' sensitivities. The filters were test-run in Ovid MEDLINE and the records randomly screened for ITS studies to determine their precision. Finally, all MEDLINE filters were translated to PubMed format and their sensitivities in PubMed were estimated. Results: Three search filters were created in MEDLINE: a "precision-maximising" filter with high precision (78%; 95% CI 74%-82%) but moderate sensitivity (63%; 59%-66%), most appropriate when there are limited resources to screen studies; a sensitivity-and-precision-maximising filter with higher sensitivity (81%; 77%-83%) but lower precision (32%; 28%-36%), providing a balance between expediency and comprehensiveness; and a "sensitivity-maximising" filter with high sensitivity (88%; 85%-90%) but likely very low precision, useful when combined with specific content terms. Similar sensitivity estimates were found for PubMed versions. Conclusion: Our filters strike different balances between comprehensiveness and screening workload and suit different research needs. Retrieval of ITS studies would be improved if authors identified the ITS design in the titles.

In UNESCO's 2021 report, "Reimagining our futures together: A new social contract for education," futures emerge as a key orientation for establishing not just improved educational systems but for creating liberatory worlds for everyone. Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, social and economic instability, and the climate crisis, the future of education, especially higher education, has become highly uncertain. Dominated by "elite futurism", education futures are often dictated by powerful institutions, corporations, and nongovernmental organizations, failing to account for the diverse perspectives and needs of communities. This lack of inclusivity perpetuates conditions of uncertainty and instability worldwide. To address these challenges and foster education futures that prioritize justice and liberation, this article explores the role of radical imagination. While conventional imagination is constrained by discursive enclosures and powerful affective economies, hindering transformative and diverse visions of the future, radical imagination challenges the status quo, seeking to address the root problems of societal norms and ideologies. This article emphasizes the importance of collective processes in radical imagination, promoting inclusivity and diverse perspectives. Importantly, this work isn't simply for students, but must include researchers, educators, and policymakers, challenging their complicity in systems of oppression and divesting from harmful structures. By incorporating "depth pedagogies" that prioritize caring relationships with the natural world and contextual understanding of histories of oppression, education can empower learners to envision and act on alternative futures.

Having contributed to the UNESCO report "Reimagining our futures together: A new social contract for education" as a member of the International Commission and as Chair of the research-drafting committee of this commission, the author now takes the liberty of making some personal notes on the reflections advanced therein. This brief article is divided into three sections. The first presents the main foundations of the social contract of educational modernity (nineteenth century). The second discusses how this contract has to be renewed today. The third advocates the need to value the common in education, based on five main ideas: cooperation (in pedagogy), convergence (in curriculum), collaboration (in teaching), conviviality (in schools), and capillarity (in society). Finally, the epilogue defends the urgency of placing human rights at the center of the process of renewing the social contract for education.

This study shows findings of an investigation into the forms of institutionalizing academic rankings as accountability tools for Brazilian public universities. The absence of institutional conditions which allowed the rise of these league tables in other countries - competitive admission markets and incorporation into public policies - evinces the peculiarity of the Brazilian case. This study examines the institutionalization of academic rankings in Brazil by analyzing references to rankings in the Parliamentary Inquiry Commission on the Administration of São Paulo State Universities, which took place in the São Paulo State Assembly from April 24, 2019, to November 5, 2019. Document analysis was conducted on audios and transcriptions of all 20 Commission meetings and the final report published at the São Paulo State Official Journal. Our findings indicate the idea of ranking performances as evidence of academic quality and excellence, raising questions regarding the rankings and governance structures of universities. Academic rankings have become relevant references to form opinions at the São Paulo State Assembly, prompting universities to actively respond to rankings and holding them accountable for their results.

Efforts to promote disciplinary literacy can help students integrate knowledge with ways of doing and being within disciplinary settings. Yet, effectively facilitating disciplinary literacy, even within an upper-level undergraduate physics course like the one studied here, is surprisingly hard. This article qualitatively analyzes an instructor's responses to student lab reports and finds that his comments to students focused on issues of correctness, often at the expense of larger rhetorical concerns of the text. Analysis also suggests that the instructor was thinking about many rhetorical aspects beyond surface-level errors as he read. Together, these findings suggest that efforts to promote disciplinary literacy, especially related to writing instruction, benefit from recognizing the layered contexts of activity in which writing and responding to lab reports take place. These findings hold value for secondary and postsecondary literacy instruction; in broad terms, this study may serve as a cautionary tale by illuminating the overlapping and competing value systems involved in disciplinary literacy efforts.

In Hong Kong, the Education Bureau (EDB) is responsible for the quality assurance of kindergarten education services. EDB inspectors regularly conduct school visits to monitor kindergartens' performance and publish a Quality Review (QR) report for each kindergarten. Given the limited research on pedagogical practices pertaining to physical activities in Hong Kong kindergartens, the current study analyzes the content concerning this learning area in the QR reports. We analyzed 164 QR reports (published between 2017 and 2020) according to four analytic dimensions: (1) Overall presence of content pertaining to physical activities; (2) References to specific forms of physical activities; (3) Positive feedback; and (4) Negative feedback and recommendations. The presence of physical activities in the QR reports was found to be low (5% on average). EDB inspectors alluded to physical activities generically, not specifying the motor skill(s) at hand. Both positive and negative feedback focused primarily on matters pertaining to the time of exposure to physical activities and teachers' pedagogical quality. Our evidence suggests the existence of potential gaps between Hong Kong's kindergarten policies and actual physical activity practices. Further professional development seems necessary to strengthen both teachers' pedagogies and inspectors' understandings of physical activities.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the rapid adoption of remote teaching modalities including "hyflex" where students attend some class sessions in person and some online. Managing the hyflex course requires faculty to quickly generate several reports and to update these reports rapidly when the authorities adjust the rules, students add/drop, or the number of course sessions is changed. The creation of these reports is tedious and error-prone, so they need to be automated. However, the nature of the task precludes traditional Excel programming approaches. We use Excel's new "dynamic array" capabilities (which are available only in Excel 365) to automate the creation and updating of the reports needed to manage the hyflex course. We show how to program the reports, and we discuss the importance of taking an iterative approach to creating effective, error-free cell formulas. To help the reader acquire genuine access to the dynamic array functions, we provide a practical tutorial on the principles and new concepts of dynamic arrays, explain how they relate to legacy array functions, and present selected dynamic array functions including SEQUENCE, FILTER, and XLOOKUP.

The "1919 Report" of the British Ministry of Reconstruction's Adult Education Committee, produced as the First World War was ending, reflects the optimism of its committee about the possibilities for a more socially just and democratic society and its concern to find an alternative to economic deprivation and disenfranchisement. Its central thesis is that adult education is "a permanent national necessity" for an active informed democracy, which should, therefore, be both "universal and lifelong". Despite the report's lukewarm initial reception, its influence on the development of adult education over a century in Britain and in other anglophone countries has been marked. As R. D. Waller argued in 1956, it "is probably the most significant single contribution made to the literature of adult education", certainly in the United Kingdom. It may well also be the first major national report on adult education published anywhere to be grounded in a comprehensive survey of existing provision. This article examines the context of its creation, its core arguments and their strengths and deficiencies, as well as its reception and subsequent impact. The article ends with a consideration of the report's contemporary relevance and how its core ideas of voluntarism and co-construction of knowledge can support democratic renewal through education.

Despite recognition of the value of music in education, the policies of governments have not always been reflected in the provision for music teaching in schools. This article represents a retrospective analysis and review of government policy in relation to the provision of music teachers and teacher training in Australia, with a focus on the government school system in the State of Victoria. This analysis takes account of changing social influences and particularly economic circumstances, and identifies the lessons to be derived from past policies and practices that need to be considered in future policy formation. Music was introduced to school education in Victoria during the 1850s. Over the following decades of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there were several oscillations in government policy that have failed to adequately address adequate provision for music in schools. Drawing on findings from government reports and commissions of inquiry over a period of 170 years, the evolution of music education policy is documented. The value of an historical perspective on issues such as educational policy enables us to gain an understanding of past deficiencies so that we can become more informed and impartial as decision-makers and therefore avoid making the same errors in the future.

How could the technicality arising from eleven percent of students being excluded from a PISA test in Sweden trigger a polarized debate followed by investigations by both the OECD and national authorities? This question is explored in the study by drawing on discursive institutionalism, especially the concept of normative background ideas, communicative discourse, and the "power in ideas". Communicative discourses can be referred to as discourses explained by logics of position and logics of ideas. The normative background ideas are related to a critique or acceptance of receiving a high number of immigrants during a short period of time a few years before the 2018 PISA test was conducted. The concluding reflection poses the questions of at what point it is reasonable for newly arrived students to participate in the PISA test and whether the PISA test really measures the quality of the school system, as suggested by the OECD.

This study used a single-case design to investigate the effectiveness of Daily Behavior Report Cards (DBRC) in addressing elementary school children's disruptive behavior. The study, conducted in a German elementary school, involved ten second-grade students identified by their teachers as exhibiting disruptive behaviors. The procedures included training teachers in the implementation of DBRC, setting specific behavioral goals for each student, and using the Direct Behavior Rating (DBR) to assess General Disruptive Behavior (GDB) and Specific Goal Behavior (SGB). The DBRC was implemented over 120 days, with daily monitoring and feedback provided to students. The results demonstrated a significant reduction in both variables. The data analysis was conducted using regression-based analyses and the Non-Overlap of All Pairs (NAP). This study confirms the effectiveness of DBRC in mitigating disruptive behaviors and achieving specific behavioral goals, thereby contributing valuable insights into the application of this evidence-based intervention within the German elementary school system. It also highlights the utility of the single-case design in educational research.

This article is the result of research carried out by a group of activists who advocate for the rights of children with disabilities. They are exploring new approaches to both school counselling and the fight against segregation in order to improve the situation of children in the Spanish education system. It focuses on how the psychoeducational report is a key tool for legitimising school segregation, and how deconstructing it is essential for building inclusive schools. The data analysed were collected from 100 people from all over Spain who took part in a Participatory Action Research project focused on emerging narratives on inclusive schooling. The aim of the project was to gather accounts of the experiences of pupils, families, and activist professionals who are engaged in a determined struggle to make schools inclusive. Participants were able to share their experiences, conduct their analysis through assemblies and cooperative groups, and use networking to transform existing policies, cultures, and practices. The information obtained indicates that the labels used by current psychoeducational reports are based on a clinical model and are focused on children's deficiencies. They provide limited knowledge about the individuals involved and exercise strong social and symbolic control over them and others.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between written and oral reasoning in an undergraduate chemistry laboratory course as part of an argument-based inquiry approach, which is also a generative learning environment, known as the Science Writing Heuristic (SWH). The study employed the data-transformation variant of convergent design of mixed-method research. Data sources included 180 laboratory reports from nine Pre-service Science Teachers (PSTs) and 20 video recordings across two semesters. Using Walton's argument schemes, PSTs' development, utilisation and correlation of written and oral reasoning and an argument cycle of premise-justification-conclusion were examined. A Friedman test and a Spearman-Brown correlation were conducted for statistical analysis. The results revealed that there is a positive correlation between written and oral reasoning. While the quality of PSTs' written reasoning significantly increased from the first time phase to the following time phases, this pattern was not observed in oral reasoning. An argument cycle of premise-justification-conclusion occurred in each phase of oral arguments. However, this cycle did not occur in every facet of the SWH process across all time phases in written arguments. The study suggests that pre-service science teachers should be provided with learning environments that will allow them to make external evaluations and engage in talking, reading and writing activities for learning purposes.

Reported hate crimes in the United States have increased rapidly in recent years, alongside an increase in general racial animus. Scholars have shown that the larger sociopolitical environment can directly impact the campus climate and experiences of all students, particularly students of color. However, little is known about how reports of hate crime incidents relate to college enrollment levels of students of color. This lack of evidence has especially troubling implications for Black people, the most frequent targets of reported hate crimes. This paper helps to fill in that gap by exploring the association between the number of reports of hate crimes within states and Black students' college enrollment. We examine a comprehensive dataset of institutional enrollment and characteristics, reported hate crimes, and census data on state racial demographics from 2000 to 2017 using several techniques, including institution fixed effects. We find that a1 standard deviation increase in reports of state-level hate crimes predicts a 17 to 22 percent increase in Black first-time student enrollment at historically Black colleges and universities. As the number of reported hate crimes is almost assuredly an undercount of the actual number of incidents, we explore the implications of what these results mean.

This longitudinal study serves as a model for examining and understanding the role of editing and its contributing factors in writing center tutorials. The study quantifies the frequency of and time devoted to editing in over 4,000 writing center tutorials and finds these quantities differ in statistically significant ways when broken down by user groups (gender, student standing, course level, and primary language); tutoring modes (face-to-face, synchronous-online, and asynchronous); and time of student visit relative to project due date. Analysis identifies contributing factors that influence frequency of and time spent on editing in tutorials by these groups, including group membership and their associated editing practices and tutorial habits. The study's findings fill an important gap in our understanding of what takes place in writing center tutorials and have significant implications for tutor training and marketing of writing center services.

Using software to teach statistical inference in introductory courses opens the door for methods and practices that are more conceptually appealing to students. With an increasing number of fields requiring competency in statistics including data science, natural and social sciences, public health and more, it is crucial that we as instructors deliver the basic concepts of statistics effectively. In line with guidelines presented in the GAISE College Report, this article demonstrates intuitive approaches to teaching proportion and mean inference that take advantage of statistical software and emphasize conceptual understanding. The article recommends putting aside asymptotic-based methods for proportion inference and using the exact binomial method. Regarding mean inference, we propose a more contextualized and simplified process that uses the distribution of the sample mean directly and avoids standardized statistics such as z or t. In both the proportion and mean inference contexts, we discuss the benefits of the proposed approaches and provide detailed examples that demonstrate the methods using the Rguroo statistical software.

This paper explores social inclusion approaches implemented by ten secondary schools in Victoria, Australia, to support refugee students' well-being, as articulated in their policies, reports, and other published documents. Using an exploratory, qualitative research design, we found that all schools employed a holistic approach to implementing social inclusion programs for refugee students. This paper reports on the best practices and unique examples of social inclusion programs from all schools involved in the study.

Purpose: The implementation and reporting of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) is one of the emerging challenges for higher education institutions (HEIs), but the lack of well-defined reporting structures and topics for this sector makes it difficult to map and evaluate HEI performance in relation to 2030 Agenda. This study aims to assess the SDG performance and reporting by the 13 HEIs that integrate the Times Higher Education Impact Ranking (THE_IR), from the perspective of the five pillars of the 2030 Agenda in the Portuguese context, where research on this topic is quite scarce. Design/methodology/approach: Considering the THE_IR methodology, an SDG reporting assessment framework with 85 key topics has been developed to search for in the institutional reports of the 13 studied HEIs. For each topic, depending on the number of institutions that disclose it, a reporting index (RI) has been calculated, which was used to compare the level of reporting between the different SDGs and pillars. Findings: Concerning HEIs' SDG performance in the THE_IR, the People pillar was the one with the most HEIs ranked, followed by the Prosperity pillar. The Planet pillar was less highlighted. SDG reporting varied widely among Portuguese HEIs. The SDG RI presented a mean value of 43.1%. The Kruskal-Wallis test revealed that the RI for the Planet pillar (RI = 23.6%) was statistically and significantly lower than those for the People and Prosperity pillars (RI = 48.6% and 53.5%, respectively). The results thus demonstrated some conformity of the SDG reporting with Portuguese HEI performance in THE_IR. Aside from Goal 5, the SDGs 4 and 3 stood out in the first four positions of the HEIs in the THE_IR. Goals 3 and 4 were also the most disclosed in institutional reports. Originality/value: This study proposed and applied a new SDG reporting assessment framework for HEIs, contributing to better evaluation of the inclusion of important SDG-related topics in their institutional reports.

Contribution: A competency assessment framework that enables learning analytics for course monitoring and continuous improvement. Our work fills the gap in systematic methods for competency assessment in higher education. Background: Many institutions are shifting toward competency-based education (CBE), thus encouraging their educators to start evaluating their students under this paradigm. Previous research shows that structured assessment models are fundamental in guiding educators toward this adoption. Intended Outcomes: An assessment model for CBE that is easy to adopt and use, while facilitating the application of learning analytics techniques. Application Design: The new framework considerably extends a prior model we proposed three years ago. Two engineering competency-based courses used the framework for assessment. Assessment rubrics were prepared and used for evaluating and collecting the students' data progressively, thus enabling the use of learning analytics for decision-making. Findings: Thanks to the model: 1) students received a detailed report of their achievements, including a thorough explanation and justification of the evaluation criteria and 2) instructors could improve the course and provide objective evidence of their actions to quality assurance agencies. As a result, the framework is presently being used in 15 courses taught at eight different university degrees at the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaiso (PUCV).

This essay recontextualizes the Yale Report of 1828, arguing that the report's advocacy for classical liberal education should be understood alongside the racial concerns of its authors, some of whom were well-known colonizationists who viewed African American education as a threat to New Haven's social and economic stability. The Yale Report's vision for leadership and economic success not only excluded African Americans by default, but created a lasting binary that defined Black educational opportunities in the nineteenth century and beyond. The essay considers the near overlap between the writing of the Yale Report and the failed proposal to establish an African American men's college in New Haven in 1831, placing the document within a key period in the history of American higher education in which education became highly commodified and racialized. Building upon scholarship on the Yale Report that has already considered its neorepublican aims, this essay opens the possibility of viewing the document beyond its immediate concerns with curricular reform and contemplating the elusive connections between American higher education, race, and power.

Purpose: Reading disability (RD) is frequently associated with deficits in auditory processing (i.e., processing speech and non-linguistic sounds). Several hypotheses exist regarding the link between RD and auditory processing, but none fully account for the range/variety of auditory impairments reported in the literature. These impairments have been primarily summarized by qualitative reviews and meta-analytic evidence for most auditory processing impairments is lacking. Method: We conducted a PRISMA-compliant meta-analysis quantifying the degree to which individuals with RD are impaired on four categories of auditory processing abilities: frequency discrimination, intensity discrimination, duration discrimination, and gap detection. This methodology was accepted and executed as a Registered Report. Results: Auditory processing impairments of medium to large effect size were present in RD vs. typical groups for all categories: frequency (g = 0.79), duration (g = 0.80), and intensity discrimination (g = 0.60), as well as gap detection (g = 0.80). No differences were found across task designs (i.e., testing methods). g g g g Conclusion This meta-analysis documents a large, multiple-domain non-linguistic, auditory processing impairment in RD. Contrary to previous studies, we found a significant deficit in intensity discrimination. The impairments described here must be accounted for by future causal hypotheses in RD and suggest that auditory processing impairments are broader than previously thought.

Rhetorical figures of speech provide important analytical frames to chart how arguments operate within genres and within genre ecologies. Varieties of the figure prolepsis allow for the rendering of future time or fact in the present, which can be a powerful rhetorical inducement toward social and political action. In this article, we examine how anticipatory arguments drawn from complex data shape a key genre for public and policy-facing work on the climate crisis--the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Synthesis Report's (SYR) Statement for Policy Makers (SPM). We examine how the rhetorical figure of prolepsis operates within this genre to understand the anticipatory arguments and logics emerging from the synthesis of scientific findings and their reporting. Pairing figural studies and Rhetorical Genre Studies, we further offer an approach to investigate how these patterned operations of language might intersect in their rhetorical workings.

We analyze diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) reports from the top 20 "Fortune" 500 companies to particularly examine how these companies use visual design and representation to present an aspirational future that valorizes their current DEI efforts. We contend that if large corporations have the ability to affect outcomes among employees, stakeholders, and citizens, then educators have an obligation to prepare students to be well positioned to make change and to participate in conversations about change.

As the demand for business intelligence (BI) professionals continues to grow, educators need to calibrate their instruction to accommodate the demand of practitioners for specific technical skills while also providing college students with a broader foundation that includes a general understanding of BI concepts and problem-solving skills that are applicable across disciplines. This paper describes a pedagogical method called report-oriented learning which seeks to combine the established methods of problem-based learning and case-based learning. Report-oriented learning requires students to reflect on the knowledge gained during the conceptual parts of the course and use critical thinking and storytelling skills as they prepare and present several comprehensive reports in class. We applied the report-oriented method in a business intelligence course that consists of four instructional approaches: (1) section preview, (2) lectures and quizzes on basic concepts, (3) application of concepts and development of practical skills with hands-on projects, and (4) comprehensive reflection and inquiry in the form of reports. We surveyed students with anonymous questionnaires in the report-oriented BI courses from 2021-2023. The results indicate that the method was effective and perceived by students as having improved their critical thinking and practical skills related to the application of BI techniques and the professional presentation of their findings.