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Copyright of Revista Horizontes de Linguística Aplicada is the property of Revista Horizontes de Linguistica Aplicada 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.)

Creativity has become an essential curriculum competence, playing a pivotal role in the successful response to the ever‐changing demands of contemporary society. Yet, its complex, dynamic, and multifaceted nature seem conflicted with the predominant quantitative and easy‐to‐replicate curricular goals, resulting in potential incongruence between educational aims, pedagogical activities, and students' creativity development. Aiming to contribute to this debate, we designed a qualitative study, based on a documentary analysis of the Portuguese preschool and basic education‐intended curricula (legislation, legal norms, guidelines, programs, opinions, and recommendations). From an initial set of 194 documents, 20 complied with our selection criteria. Key findings underline the difficulties in outlining a clear and comprehensive definition of creativity as a distinctive dimension of psychological development, with consequences in how creativity‐focused pedagogical activities are applied within the classroom. Although recent educational reforms have attempted to overcome these limitations, they appear restricted to arts and sports subjects. Our results highlight the need to develop curricula anchored in an approach to creativity as a unique opportunity for psychological development. By intentionally promoting creativity in the curriculum, students' sense of agency, identity, self‐knowledge, and determination can be engaged, ultimately enhancing the underlying complexity of their socio‐cognitive emotional structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the Theories of Nuclear Concepts and Threshold Concepts, this paper aims at presenting the results of the cognitive structure of Portuguese students in years 9 (14-15 year-olds) and 12 (17-18 year-olds), concerning the notion of Probability. After having been taught the subject, 344 students were inquired in a first moment, and 325 in a second one. The Pathfinder Associative Networks (PFNETs) thus obtained led to identify the most relevant concepts in the students' conceptual framework, their respective organization and the possible relationship between the Theories of Nuclear Concepts and Threshold Concepts. The results show that both theories are useful tools to organize the teaching practice and a valuable and effective pedagogical framework, which should be taken into account in the teaching and learning processes of Probability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper begins by reviewing European language education policies in higher education and relating these to the bottom-up language provision practices currently applied in higher education institutions. The paper then focuses on a case study at the University of Aveiro (Portugal) that sets out to identify students’ social representations concerning: (i) the importance of integrating foreign language courses into their degree/master/PhD programmes and (ii) the languages they consider to be more important in their academic training and the reasons for this. The findings indicate that the vast majority of responding students consider the integration of language courses in the curricula to be relevant from a doubly pragmatic perspective. Firstly, English is seen as a pathway to employability, mobility and the accessibility of knowledge, while other foreign languages (Spanish, French and German) are viewed as ‘differentiating assets’ in the professional marketplace. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Current analysis is a segment in the investigation for the doctoral thesis titled 'The Teaching of History in the First Cycle of Basic Education: The concept of historical time in children and the contexts for their development' (Solé, 2009), undertaken with children of the 1st CBE (6 - 10 years) in a school in the north of Portugal. The study was conducted with two groups, namely, 1st and 2nd years (24 students) and 3rd and 4th years (25 students) throughout two scholastic years. Current investigation lies within the investigation mode of interpretation, predominantly qualitative (Erickson, 1986) and may be considered a longitudinal case study (Yin, 2003) since it describes the learning and understanding process of historical time by children between the 1st and 4th year of two groups during two years. Following typology by Stake (2000), it may be called an instrumental case study since it shows how children develop the concept of time and the difficulties experienced in the process of teaching/learning and to understand how learning occurs through several strategies and procedures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the changes in value added (VA) of a sample of schools for cohorts of students finishing secondary education between 2005 and 2008. VA estimates are based on distance measures obtained from DEA models. These measures are computed for each pupil in each school, and evaluate the distance between the school frontier in a given year and a pooled frontier comprising all schools analysed. The school VA is then computed by aggregating the VA scores for the cohort of pupils attending that school in a given year. The ratio between VA estimates for two consecutive cohorts, that attended the school in different years, is taken as the index of VA change. However, the evolution of school performance over time should consider not only the movements of the school frontier, but should also take into account other effects, such as the proximity of the students to the best-practices, represented by the school frontier, observed over time. For that purpose we developed an enhanced Malmquist index to evaluate the evolution of school performance over time. One of the components of the Malmquist index proposed measures VA change, and the other measures the ability of all school students to move closer to their own school best practices over time. The approach developed is applied to a sample of Portuguese secondary schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The validity of two measures of English reading comprehension was examined across three different groups of English language learners (ELLs; 64 Portuguese, 66 Spanish and 65 Cantonese). All three groups were achieving within the average range in second grade. An exploratory principal components analysis of reading skills was carried out to determine which skills were related to two commonly used tests of reading comprehension, the Woodcock Language Proficiency Battery's test of Passage Comprehension (WLPB-PC; Woodcock, ) and the Gray Oral Reading Test-4 (GORT-4; Wiederholt & Bryant, ). The factor solutions were different for the three language groups but showed many similarities in that the GORT-4 and WLPB-R tests of reading comprehension fell on the same factor within each group. Hierarchical regression analyses examining relationships among vocabulary, decoding and reading comprehension showed that language group membership did not significantly predict performance on either measure of reading comprehension. Differences that arose are likely due to issues with task validity and not ELL status. Limitations and future research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A great deal of research in history education has focused on students' ideas about the concepts and methodology of the discipline, which is seen as central to consistent development in historical thinking. Recently, studies of adolescents' conceptual frameworks have highlighted some concerns about the coherence and substance of pictures of the past - where concepts of a second order nature should be solidly embedded - constructed by students. Within the scope of the HiCon Project (Historical Consciousness - Theory and Practices II) the present paper explores Portuguese pupils' conceptual frameworks of peoples' movements and interactions over time. The participants were 47 pupils aged 12-13, attending year 7 in a Portuguese school. They were challenged to consider two accounts focusing on early movements of people around the globe or toward their country's territory, and to continue the narrative up to the present time. Data were analysed in a qualitative, inductive approach. Pupils' accounts suggest that most of their ideas are just present-centred or focus on a fragment of the past, and human movements and actions are often explained by everyday assumptions; a few pupils, however, gave a tentative, complete picture of the movements of people with diverse motives, strategies, and outcomes on a timeline or in an emergent narrative. Finally, the paper presents a brief discussion of the results and related history teaching issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the home literacy practices of Portuguese-English bilingual children raised in Portugal. The ethnographic research was inspired by experience with bilingual families, whose children were all of school age, so acquisition of literacy in English as the non-school language had surfaced as an issue. The research opens up new ground on exactly how siblings shift the language balance in the home and build bridges or barriers to language acquisition. The research explores whether parents are able to promote both languages in the home due to the cross-cultural experiences of siblings in the home and community and whether there are additional issues where there is a single parent with the minority language. My research findings demonstrate that in the Portuguese-English bilingual families there may be conflicts due to the arrival of a younger sibling and a language shift towards Portuguese, or older siblings may act as mediators of both languages in the home and support the younger sibling's emerging biliteracy. My research indicates that shared sibling support needs to be learnt, encouraged and supported in home literacy practices, rather than parents expecting such support to appear naturally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the role of academic preparation and learning strategies in the prediction of first-year Portuguese college students' academic achievement, considering students' sex and academic field attended. A sample of 445 first-year college students (68.5% female) from the University of Minho (25.8% enrolled in economics, 35.3% in science/technology, and 38.9% in humanities degrees) participated in the study. Students answered a questionnaire on learning strategies in the classroom at the end of the first semester, which consisted of 44 items organized in five dimensions: comprehensive approach, surface approach, personal competency perceptions, intrinsic motivation, and organization of study activities. Academic achievement (grade point average at the end of first year) and academic preparation (students' higher education access mark) were obtained through the academic records of the university. Results showed that academic preparation was the strongest predictor of first-year academic achievement, and only marginal additional variance was explained by learning strategies as assessed by the self-reported questionnaire... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Portuguese Journal of Marketing / Revista Portuguesa de Marketing is the property of Revista Portuguesa de Marketing / Portuguese Journal of Marketing 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.)