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In this article, we report the results of a study through which we collected English language teachers' needs and wants to design an online language assessment course. Through a mixed-methods approach, we asked 20 teachers from four Latin American countries what they wanted to learn in the course. The teachers wanted a course in which they could address the challenges they faced in assessment; discuss and develop new ways to assess; and learn about authentic, valid, and ethical assessment. Therefore, the findings suggest that the teachers wanted a course that mixed theory, practice, and principles of assessment. Additionally, the course should address emerging topics in English language assessment, namely bilingual assessment and the assessment of learners with special educational needs.

Purpose: This study aims to examine the unique lived experiences of international graduate students in light of COVID-19 and the recent sociopolitical climate in the USA (e.g. Black Lives Matter movement, protests against anti-Asian hate crimes and gun violence). Design/methodology/approach: The authors used an exploratory qualitative design embedded within a constructivist/interpretivist paradigm. A total of 31 international health service psychology graduate students completed an online survey, 17 of whom participated in a 60-min one-on-one semi-structured interview. Findings: Participants reported facing a range of difficulties (e.g. travel ban/inability to spend time with family, visa-related concerns, racism, decreased support) during the global pandemic and the recent sociopolitical climate in the USA. A total of 48 themes were identified and organized into six domains: COVID-19-related stress and worry, experiences of racism/discrimination, coping mechanisms, support received, recommendations for programs and higher learning institutions and advice for other international graduate students. Originality/value: The recent sociopolitical climate in the US exacerbated some of the preexisting inequities for international graduate students due to their international student status and the global pandemic. Although few in number, students also spoke about some positive changes as a result of these major historical and political events. Implications for graduate education, clinical practice and policymaking are discussed.

An earlier diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder might lead to an earlier intervention, yet knowledge and awareness of autism spectrum disorder in Latin America and Caribbean Countries are limited. A later autism spectrum disorder diagnosis has been associated with negative consequences, as it might imply later access to services. This study aims to identify factors associated with the age of autism spectrum disorder diagnosis as reported by 2520 caregivers of autistic children from six Latin America and Caribbean Countries. Results indicate that on average, caregivers were concerned about their child's development by 22 months of age; however, the diagnosis was 24 months later. Current age of autistic individuals, better language abilities, and having public health coverage increased the age of diagnosis. On the contrary, the presence of medical comorbidities, severity level, and type of diagnosis decreased the age of diagnosis. The age of diagnosis of autistic individuals in Latin America and Caribbean Countries corresponded to the start of formal schooling despite a much earlier age of first noticed developmental concern, highlighting the need to reduce this age gap and increase children's probability of benefiting from early intervention. Taken together, autism spectrum disorder personal/clinical characteristics and access to health service are the main determinants for the age of diagnosis.

Purpose: This study aims to identify the strategic leadership and change management used to obtain the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) accreditations as well as the research development on AACSB in the past decade. Design/methodology/approach: This study used a systematic literature review following Petticrew and Roberts' study. The articles were limited to empirical studies published from 2013 to 2022, taken from the Dimensions AI database. Findings: The findings suggested that two leadership styles were used to obtain AACSB accreditation: dominance-oriented transformational and financial leadership, alongside three traits of academic leaders: commitment, engagement and encouragement. Additionally, three change management models/processes were found in the articles: teaching evaluation framework, temporary isomorphism and authenticity. Finally, they discovered that the object of the studies on AACSB accreditation had been narrowed down from the organizational level to smaller objects consisting of schools' identity, teaching, learning and business schools' key players. Research limitations/implications: As this study only used Dimensions AI, potential articles related to the topic outside the database could not be obtained. Thus, it limits the scope of the findings of this paper. Practical implications: This study informs academic leaders in business schools about the role of strategic leadership and change management in obtaining AACSB accreditation. Originality/value: Through a systematic scoping review, this study presented a decade of research development on AACSB in addition to the strategic leadership and change management needed to obtain it.

This research article reports the findings of a study that sought to identify the opinion of students on the curricular relevance in elementary and secondary education in institutions located in Colombian and Venezuelan border contexts. The methodological approach is framed within the quantitative-descriptive paradigm. The conclusions of the study show that the relationship between curriculum, pedagogical practice, student, and context, does not exempt the responsibility assumed by the members of the educational community towards education but allows for generating spaces of agreement where the social and economic context is the most significant bulwark to define the sense through which education will be dynamized.

The purpose of the research was to identify the perceptions and attitudes of university students in the main border and receiving city of Venezuelan migrants in Colombia, to validate the tendency registered in several studies and surveys where discriminatory and xenophobic practices were evident. Through an instrument made up of 35 questions and applied to 216 young people between 16 and 28 years of age, it can be concluded that despite the information they receive from the media, university students understand that the decision to migrate was motivated by adverse situations that Venezuelan people face in their country, putting their survival at risk. This opens the possibility of designing and implementing strategies that promote economic integration, but also cultural integration, based on diversity, respect as a value and recognition of the other not only from the media scenario but also from the communicative action itself.

The world is changing, and university education must be able to adapt to it. New technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotics are requiring tools such as simulation and process control to develop products and services. Thus, control systems engineering schools are adapting to new educational frameworks tailored to deploy promising and feasible new technologies. Herein, we have relied on computer animation-based education and its implementation as an online project-based strategy to attain the objectives and goals of the control systems engineering courses at University of Los Andes, Venezuela. The ControlAnimation library developed in Mathematica program in 2002 has been used as a tool to teach control systems engineering courses since 2008 and with greater prominence since 2020, when the stay-at-home orders due to the COVID-19 pandemic were enacted. Consequently, computer animation-based education has proven its feasibility as an online tool combined with project-based learning techniques, thus allowing students to interact with an animated control system by changing the mathematical model and the design parameters of control laws in a comfortable and somewhat playful way. This enabled new capabilities to study the dynamic behaviors of primordial control systems online. In addition, it allowed students to co-identify and relate in a more intuitive way to the mathematical models and control equations with the physical behavior of the real control systems.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of Open Educational Resources (OERs) has increased due to its advantages for academic activities and educational quality. Hence, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have sought to develop strategies to promote curricular and extracurricular activities that favor developing disciplinary and transversal competencies such as complex thinking and its meta-competencies: critical, systemic, scientific, and innovative thinking, oriented to favor problem-solving among students and the academic community. The main objective of this study was to analyze how using OERs in virtual education can promote the development of complex thinking as a transversal competency in higher education. We analyzed the content of 65 educational projects in a webinar aimed at promoting the adoption of OERs in the professional practice of the educational community. Each project had to comply with specific requirements, from the project's identification and description to measuring and evaluating the results and its impact and added value. Once all the projects were reviewed, the responses were classified into defined categories for better presentation; the sub-competency of complex thinking promoted by each project element was identified qualitatively. The results highlight how an OER can, through concrete activities, elicit complex thinking and its sub-competencies in higher education. The present study adds new evidence to the literature regarding boosting OERs as a tool to develop competencies aligned with UNESCO recommendations and contribute to fulfilling the Sustainable Development Goals in education.

We describe the structure, benefits, and challenges associated with a virtual cultural heritage exchange (VCHE) between undergraduate students in an applied anthropology class and a group of English language learners (ELL). Using qualitative data collection and analysis methods, the project aimed to teach anthropological methods and perspectives to the students while investigating three research questions: Will a VCHE (1) build social bonds and bridges, (2) improve English language acquisition, and (3) raise "heritage consciousness" (awareness and appreciation of, along with an associated sense of agency toward, cultural heritage) among participants? Results support the research questions and show the effectiveness of VCHEs when they are designed to meet the interests and needs of ELL participants and students.

In this paper we analyze the semantic and pragmatic properties of a colloquial interrogative construction attested in European Spanish, which we label invariable "qué" questions (IQQs). In doing so, we contribute to the better understanding of a relatively understudied phenomenon in Spanish, given that IQQs have been mainly approached from a purely syntactic standpoint. We claim that evidentiality and irony play a crucial role in the understanding of IQQs. Because of their special interpretative functions, as well as the fact that they do not appear to have a clear correlate in other languages, we believe IQQs pose a challenge to the second language student, which is why we further offer a step-by-step proposal to introduce IQQs in the Spanish as a second language class.

This sociophonetic study examines affricate variation through a continuous lens using diachronic data from Caracas Spanish. We investigate the relationship between frication and occlusion period duration in affricate segments across two steps. First, we present a phonetic characterization of the dependent variable and its variants. Second, we examine the sociolinguistic profile of the variants in an oral corpus of Caracas Spanish. Correlation analyses between the frication period, occlusion period, and overall segment duration suggest that frication lengthening is most prominent, which may mean that affricate variation in Caracas is not necessarily a lenition process, but rather a lengthening one. Through a mixed-effects linear regression model, we determine that frication duration is significantly conditioned by social and linguistic factors in Caracas. Longer frication periods are predicted by following high vowels, corpus year, speaker sex, and in word-initial position. These results suggest that traditional affricate lenition may in some cases point to a process of lengthening and retiming that is both socially and linguistically stratified. This paper contributes to the field by providing an acoustic examination of variable affricate production as well as a diachronic sociolinguistic investigation of this phenomenon in the Spanish of Caracas, Venezuela.

There is an abundance of scholarship documenting educators' uses of for-profit social media platforms for professional learning, but little is known about how inauthentic accounts affect those experiences. We studied 83 state-sponsored accounts' interactions with the teacher-focused #Edchat hashtag by analyzing their profiles, profiles of accounts they retweeted, and tweets they shared. We found no patterns of overt state interference in #Edchat; however, state-sponsored accounts amplified other inauthentic accounts, such as those focused on commercial, spam, and self-promoting #Edchat messages. Most state accounts used formulaic methods to create relatable account profiles that may go unnoticed by educators using the hashtag. These findings raise questions for educators and researchers about disinformation, anonymity, attention-seeking, and information glut in social media environments polluted by inauthentic amplification.

The purpose of the study was to evaluate the impact of the financial aid programme aimed at discounting tuition fees at one of Venezuela's first private universities on early and late student departure, both from the degree programme and the institution, as well as on graduation. The propensity score matching was used by calculating the average treatment effect estimator under parametric and non-parametric methodologies such as nearest neighbours, Kernel, or local linear regression. The results indicate that although there is evidence of the programme exerting a positive impact on early student departure to a greater extent (reductions between 8% and 15%), the impact tends to be considerably less when it comes to reducing late student departure (between 1% and 5%), and it had no impact on graduation.

This paper reflects on the problems faced by refugee students during the COVID-19 pandemic (summer semester 2020) as "calouros," i.e. freshmen during their first year, in a public university in Brazil. Through a content analysis of their personal accounts, collected electronically by their teacher of Portuguese for academic purposes (the first author), we describe how five students (a Syrian, two Haitians, a Venezuelan and a Togolese refugees) (re)visit their experiences, in which several dynamics intersect: being 'calouro', being refugee students, learning the shelter language "in loco," and experiencing social distancing due to the closing of universities. Because learning the language of the host country is not the only factor affected by the pandemic, we also observe how language learning (settings) intersect with other aspects characterising the refugee status: housing conditions, availability of learning materials, and the uncertainty attached to the present and future of their own lives and of other family members.

Through her epistolary correspondence and her novel "Ifigenia" (1924), Teresa de la Parra (1889-1936) questions racial stratification systems reminiscent of colonial times and still present in twentieth-century Venezuela. Parra establishes the malleability of racial categories through a moderate racial discourse that intends to re-classify whiteness as the sole marker of economic wealth. Via its young and naïve protagonist, "Ifigenia" depicts how white elites reluctantly adapted to modernity's significant socioeconomic changes, leaving previous racial stratification systems--and their whitening projects--obsolete. Parra's moderate approach to race has been consistently overlooked by numerous scholars who often focus on "Ifigenia's" feminine discourse. However, Parra's novel thrives in the nuanced juxtaposition between racial purity and "mestizaje" that mirrors the tension between Paris and Caracas as opposing geographical and racial spaces. Parra's nuanced discourse reveals a moderate racial theory that underscores the importance of controlled racial mixing and intends to negotiate between a European ideal of racial purity and a Venezuelan "mestizo" reality at the turn of the twentieth century. Ultimately, her protagonist willingly sacrifices herself for the continuation of a national narrative where modernity has enforced an acceptance of "mestizaje."

Previous studies have suggested the importance of sustainability in all organizations; however, their application to schools as an organization is limited. This study aims to characterize sustainability in primary and secondary catholic schools. The theoretical framework is based on the theories of resources, capabilities and stakeholders because they relate most directly to organizational sustainability. The method consists of three interrelated parts. First, a bibliometric analysis with four clusters was obtained in the first model of understanding (1.0). The second stage consisted of a content analysis, which elicited meanings by screening 2,710 records and deepening 200 research studies with the model (2.0). Then, in the third stage, an exploratory analysis was carried out through interviews with a group of Latin American education experts who manage almost 300,000 students in Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Brazil, and Chile; the data were analyzed using the text mining technique with discourse analysis. The results validated five categories: Management, Campus Operation, Well-being, Education for Sustainable Development, and Associativity. This study concluded that associativity in these Catholic organizations is fundamental to guaranteeing their sustainability over time and that the wellbeing category implies social and political transformation processes. Therefore, it is proposed for future research to measure these categories and systematize them as a model of sustainability management in the school as a whole and as a strategy for managing sustainability processes in the whole school.

The COVID-19 global pandemic presented an unprecedented challenge to the sustainability strategies and initiatives of many nations. In many countries, education strategies and funding were negatively impacted and, consequently, especially vulnerable groups were highly affected, amongst them Indigenous communities around the world. As Indigenous communities were already amongst the most vulnerable before 2020, a strategically and well-planned recovery from this pandemic would be vital to secure their well-being. This article offers reflections on the potential of infusing "Education for Sustainable Development" (ESD) in the classroom, the school and the community as a whole, to deal with known and yet unprecedented sustainability challenges in presenting commonalities of 32 good practice reports from 21 countries collected in advance and during the global pandemic. Authors make the point of considering the pandemic and its widespread impact as yet another sustainability challenge and position "ESD" as a potential tool to achieve quality education and unleash the full potential of education for society when planning recovery efforts in hope for a better future of Indigenous communities in the long term. As the good practices were also included in a report of the "UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to the 48th Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council," focusing on the post-pandemic recovery efforts for Indigenous Peoples, further thoughts on both official reports and their alignment with the overall "2030 Agenda" from an "ESD" perspective are included.

The delayed acquisition of Spanish "ser" and "estar" is generally understood as rooted in the cognitive demands imposed by the integration of semantic-pragmatic and world-knowledge factors associated with their lexical meanings. Here we ask (1) what is the nature of this language world-knowledge integration? and (2) what is the developmental trajectory including its age distribution? We examine Spanish copula production and comprehension in 142 children (age range: 4-12 years) and 26 adults. Using two tasks, sentence-choice (comprehension) and cued-production (production), we test the hypothesis that "estar" use is constrained by an ability to construe an alternative to the copula predication; an ability that develops with life experience. We test "estar/ser" use in two contexts: alternative-supporting, favoring "estar" use; and alternative-neutral, neutral regarding "estar" use, and possibly favoring "ser" use. The results show that for comprehension, children do not reveal adult-level sensitivity to context, exhibiting instead over-selection of "estar" sentences. For production, all children over-produce the "estar" sentence, even after having just chosen the "ser" counterpart. However, in this task, the 10- to 12-year-olds do behave similarly to adults and differently from 4- to 6-year-olds, consistent with our hypothesis. Alternative construal requires exposure to entities and properties in a variety of situations; exposure that older children are more likely to exhibit. Collectively, these results (1) support the properties of "estar" use hypothesized to underlie the language-world-knowledge integration, and (2) delineate a potential developmental trajectory whereby mastery of the copula may not begin to manifest until 10-12 years of age, not because of any one linguistic factor but rather due to specific world-knowledge exposure constraints.

Linguistic and anthropological research has demonstrated that language ideologies play a complex role in contexts of language endangerment, as well as in revitalization initiatives. In this paper, we articulate some central ways in which these beliefs and interests can translate into significant barriers to successful language revitalization. Based on collaborative ethnographic fieldwork with Indigenous languages in North and South America, we propose a model for planning language ideologies as a practice that can be deliberately incorporated into revitalization efforts. Given the urgency of the situation facing many languages, we argue that treating language ideologies as requiring planning is necessary and offer preliminary suggestions about what this planning could look like by analyzing examples around the language ideology assemblages of language teaching and learning.

The Early Childhood Education for Sustainability (ECEfS) program is ever-increasingly being promoted in the field of early childhood education. This proposal is articulated with the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals and UNESCO's Education 2030 Agenda, which understands that children may learn and develop competencies on sustainability, be agents of change, and actively contribute to sustainable development. In this regard, the World Organization for Early Childhood Education has insisted on conceptualizing Education for Sustainable Development from the standpoint of three dimensions: sociocultural, economic, and environmental, with multiple efforts to build indicators that allow one to value the educational environment as a promoter of ECEfS, reflected in the Environmental Rating Scale for Sustainable Development in Early Childhood (Siraj-Blacthford, J., Mogharreban, C. & Park, E. (2016). International research on education for sustainable development in early childhood. Springer, Berlin. Doi:10.1007/978-3-319-422008-4). We, therefore, questioned ourselves regarding its relevance for assessing these types of initiatives to validate the indicators encountered in two Latin American countries. A comparative case study was considered the most appropriate method of analysis from the perspective of an international comparison (García-Garrido, Educación Comparada. Fundamentos y problemas, Dykinson, Madrid, García-Garrido, Educación Comparada. Fundamentos y problemas, Dykinson, 1982), taking into consideration two units of analysis (kindergartens selected in Santiago, Chile, and Caracas, Venezuela). The most relevant results showed that there were no significant differences between the two countries. The analysis yielded scores that placed the work of the kindergartens mostly at level 1 in the economic and sociocultural dimensions, and an incipient level 3 in the environmental dimension, which seems to indicate a transition toward greater sustainability in pedagogical work with children.

Mapoyo, a Carib language of Venezuela with only one native language speaker, is very close to becoming dormant. Recent interest in the revitalisation of the language has led to classes being imparted in the elementary school and to teachers trying to learn the language and to reinforce it in the school. However, in 2013 when there were 3 speakers left, variation within and among them has led to uncertainty among the language learners which in turn has led to diminishing use. I argue, based on observations in the community and interviews with the teachers, that a 'standard language ideology' is putting Mapoyo language revitalisation at risk and that therefore any revitalisation project needs to address ideological domains as well as pragmatic concerns.

Since 2015, Trinidad and Tobago experienced an influx of over 40,000 migrants from Venezuela. Having signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, young migrant children are entitled to education in Trinidad and Tobago. However, they face obstacles accessing schooling and social services [UNICEF EC (UNICEF Eastern Caribbean). 2019. "Making Friendly Spaces for Venezuelan Children." Accessed September 14, 2019. https://www.unicef.org/easterncaribbean/media_39482.html]. Broadly, this conceptual study sought to answer one primary question: What are the key issues Trinidad and Tobago's government must address in order to support young children from Venezuelan migrant families in the early years setting? To answer this, data from policy documents, government releases, peer-reviewed articles and news reports were analysed. Six overarching themes emerged from the literature: policy gaps, fear/xenophobia, resource limitations, familial support, political risks and child rights infringements. Recommendations for overcoming challenges are included.

Violent and aggressive behaviors are social and health problems that have grown exponentially in Latin American countries. During the last two years, the COVID-19 pandemic has worsened the situation. In response to these problems, the Association for the Development of Comprehensive Education and Communities (Aseinc) has provided education and training programs for teachers and K-6 students in Venezuela since 2009. Through the years, Aseinc identified the urgent need to support their beneficiaries with tools to "fight" violence. Their response was to create and implement a structured program to reduce violence in schools, promoting a culture of peace and non-violence for children and adolescents that would be transferable to their families and communities. As part of this mission, a multidisciplinary team of professionals from Aseinc created Aulas de Paz in 2019. Initially, all concepts were gathered in an activity booklet that provided socio-emotional skills to teachers and students from vulnerable and rural areas. Aulas de Paz evolved into an intersectoral program and, today, its strategies are included in all educational programs carried out by the organization. The goal is to increase the number of teachers, parents, caregivers, and community leaders who are trained with strategies, dynamics, and activities linked to positive personal and social core values.

Between 2007 and 2017, El Sistema -- Venezuela's national system of youth orchestras -- enjoyed a seemingly unexplainable meteoric rise, followed by an equally spectacular sunset. Although it would be easy to dismiss this Sistema decade as being no more than a peculiar aberration of music education history, I assert that El Sistema more accurately represents a poignant return -- or ritornello -- to one of the recurring rationales for music education, namely social activism. By situating this brief but notable decade of Sistema enthusiasm amidst a wider historical context of Venetian Ospedali, British Brass Bands, and American Settlement Music Houses, I highlight and critique the use of social activism as a rationale for music education. Ultimately, I argue that the societal importance claimed by El Sistema and derivative music education initiatives is not tenable, especially in consideration of the unremarkable legacies of similar socio-musical endeavours. I also argue that a stronger socio-musical lens would be advantageous for the field of music education to adopt. Thus, in addition to establishing a centuries-long pattern of socio-musical ritornellos, the purpose of this paper is to use a rise-and-fall dialectic to further explore the complexity of music education and its capacity for directly addressing society's inequities.

Dominant discourses promote El Sistema and Sistema-inspired music education programmes as positively transforming young lives through social inclusion and musical excellence. However, critics have raised concerns that the El Sistema model has little support from objective, evidence-based research. To address this issue, the authors conducted a review of peer-reviewed articles published in English between 2010 and 2020, in order to bring together descriptions and findings of research examining El Sistema and Sistema-inspired programmes. Following a scoping review method, the authors identified 30 relevant articles for detailed review. The reported studies were identified to address programme impacts (including musical growth, academic achievement, cognitive development, and social-emotional development) and programme design (e.g., pedagogical approaches, curricular focus, and programme challenges). Reported research methods included randomised control trials, longitudinal randomised studies, qualitative interview studies, a quasi-experimental pre-post design study, and ethnographic studies. Overall, the results of this scoping review strongly suggest that Sistema-inspired music education programmes have great potential for positively impacting students, particularly in terms of musical and social-emotional development, with less convincing but nevertheless reasonable evidence of increased academic achievement and cognitive development. The authors conclude that realising the potential of El Sistema and Sistema-inspired programming requires context- and student-specific teaching, curricula, and community support.

Infanticide and adoption have been attributed to sexual selection, where an individual later reproduces with the parent whose offspring it killed or adopted. While sexually selected infanticide is well known, evidence for sexually selected adoption is anecdotal. We report on both behaviors at 346 nests over 27 y in green-rumped parrotlets (Forpus passerinus) in Venezuela. Parrotlets are monogamous with long-term pair bonds, exhibit a strongly male-biased adult sex ratio, and nest in cavities that are in short supply, creating intense competition for nest sites and mates. Infanticide attacks occurred at 256 nests in two distinct contexts: 1) Attacks were primarily committed by nonbreeding pairs (69%) attempting to evict parents from the cavity. Infanticide attacks per nest were positively correlated with population size and evicting pairs never adopted abandoned offspring. Competition for limited nest sites was a primary cause of eviction-driven infanticide, and 2) attacks occurred less frequently at nests where one mate died (31%), was perpetrated primarily by stepparents of both sexes, and was independent of population size. Thus, within a single species and mating system, infanticide occurred in multiple contexts due to multiple drivers. Nevertheless, 48% of stepparents of both sexes adopted offspring, and another 23% of stepfathers exhibited both infanticide and long-term care. Stepfathers were often young males who subsequently nested with widows, reaching earlier ages of first breeding than competitors and demonstrating sexually selected adoption. Adoption and infanticide conferred similar fitness benefits to stepfathers and appeared to be equivalent strategies driven by limited breeding opportunities, male-biased sex ratios, and long-term monogamy.

In 2023, the African Region experienced yellow fever (YF) outbreaks in 3 countries (of which 2 experienced varied levels of transmission intensity), cases with epidemic potential in 3 countries, and [...]

Leptospirosis, one of the most common zoonoses worldwide, (1,2) is caused by Leptospira spp. In humans, its most severe, multiorgan, potentially fatal form is known as Weil's disease (3). Leptospira [...]

It is five in the morning in the worst of winter, and I wake up to a knock on the door (we bought the house last year, when everyone who [...]