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This study explores how early childhood education and basic education teachers develop and develop innovations within the decentralised educational system of Finland. The comprehensive dataset of 20 field interviews provides a range of insights into teachers' goals, principles, inspirations and experiences when working with a variety of language-based innovations across Finland. The ecological perspective employed in the study highlights the complex relationships between the different ecosystems of education. With the particular focus on the educator-exosystem relationship, the findings indicate how Finnish teachers respond to the expectation to continuously develop and innovate as key change agents in education. The findings also outline ways in which teachers' development and innovation is fostered and disrupted within the educator-exosystem relationship. This study highlights the importance of pre-service teacher education in preparing teachers to innovate and to develop within a decentralised educational system. Moreover, this study highlights the need to ensure that the professional repertoire of teachers goes beyond pedagogical considerations to include interpersonal, organisational, critical and reflexive skills that mediate and sustain the development of teachers within the wider ecology of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to investigate the ecological system factors that influence discrimination of sarcopenia among older individuals living in contemporary society. Data analysis included information from 618 older adults individuals aged 65 years or older residing in South Korea. To assess variations in ecological system factors related to SARC-F scores, we conducted correlation analysis and t-tests. Discriminant analysis was used to identify factors contributing to group discrimination. The key findings are summarized as follows. First, significant differences at the p

Abstract Background The multidisciplinary and comprehensive nature of children`s oral health with mutual interactions among various determinants makes the area a window of more discussion among oral health policymakers, stakeholders, providers, and other interested parties. This commentary presents a triangle framework of the children`s oral health, including all the above groups, for new discussions in oral health policymaking. Main body Three leading influencers could be recognised in children`s oral health as a triangle despite the contextual differences among the countries. The first angle, Families and community, determine the individual background, demographic, biological, genetic, and psychological factors, as well as community-based and social background, including cultural and socioeconomic factors. The second angle, Oral health providers, includes a variety of determinants from the provider`s perception toward oral health provision of services to availability of dental services, teledentistry and digital technology, surveillance, and monitoring systems for children`s oral health. And finally, as the third angle, Oral health policymakers affect the mechanism for funding dental care and supporting schemes, affordability of oral health services, regulations and standards and public education. Macro environmental policies related to the children`s ecosystem, community water fluoridation, and social marketing for promoting probiotics products` consumption are categorized in this category. Conclusion The triangle framework of children`s oral health presents a big picture of the oral health concept at the multilevel. Although these determinant factors interact with each other, each can have a cumulative effect on children`s oral health; policymakers could try to consider them as a big picture with a systematic approach for better achievement of oral health among children considering the local and national contextual factors of the community.

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To examine the role of neighbourhood, what Bronfenbrenner describes as an element in the exosystem, as a protective asset for adolescents' social and emotional wellbeing. The study used a subset of national data reported by adolescents and their parents from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC). A linear mixed-effect model was used to estimate the association between neighbourhood indicators and trajectories in a measure of social and emotional wellbeing (the SDQ Total Difficulties score) at ages 12–13, 14–15 and 16–17, controlling for age and sex, peer and family relationships and household material resources. The analysis revealed that parents' perceptions of belonging and their subjective assessments of the condition of housing in the neighbourhood, as well as externally sourced data on neighbourhood accessibility and socio-economic status, were significantly associated with adolescents' total difficulties scores over time. The findings revealed the role of neighbourhood level protective assets as a potential influence on adolescents' social and emotional wellbeing. Greater attention should be given to understanding the complex interactions between the resources mobilised by individuals and their families, and the influence of wider environments and social structures on young people's social and emotional wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The multidisciplinary and comprehensive nature of children's oral health with mutual interactions among various determinants makes the area a window of more discussion among oral health policymakers, stakeholders, providers, and other interested parties. This commentary presents a triangle framework of the children's oral health, including all the above groups, for new discussions in oral health policymaking. Main body: Three leading influencers could be recognised in children's oral health as a triangle despite the contextual differences among the countries. The first angle, Families and community, determine the individual background, demographic, biological, genetic, and psychological factors, as well as community-based and social background, including cultural and socioeconomic factors. The second angle, Oral health providers, includes a variety of determinants from the provider's perception toward oral health provision of services to availability of dental services, teledentistry and digital technology, surveillance, and monitoring systems for children's oral health. And finally, as the third angle, Oral health policymakers affect the mechanism for funding dental care and supporting schemes, affordability of oral health services, regulations and standards and public education. Macro environmental policies related to the children's ecosystem, community water fluoridation, and social marketing for promoting probiotics products' consumption are categorized in this category. Conclusion: The triangle framework of children's oral health presents a big picture of the oral health concept at the multilevel. Although these determinant factors interact with each other, each can have a cumulative effect on children's oral health; policymakers could try to consider them as a big picture with a systematic approach for better achievement of oral health among children considering the local and national contextual factors of the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the boundary error feedback regulation for a one-dimensional anti-stable wave equation with distributed disturbance generated by a finite-dimensional exogenous system. Transport equation and regulator equation are introduced first to deal with the anti-damping on boundary and the distributed disturbance of the original system. Then, the tracking error and its derivative are measured to design an observer for both exosystem and auxiliary partial differential equation (PDE) system to recover the state. After proving the well-posedness of the regulator equations, we propose an observer-based controller to regulate the tracking error to zero exponentially and keep the states of all the internal loop uniformly bounded. Finally, some numerical simulations are presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed controller. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning about language teacher cognition (LTC) is useful for understanding how language teachers act in the classroom. Employing an ecological framework, this study aimed to explore the factors influencing language teachers’ LTCs at different levels. To this end, qualitative data using semi-structured interviews and observation were collected from 62 (30 males and 32 females) Iranian EFL teachers. The results indicated that, at microsystem level, factors such as teaching equipment and facilities, teachers’ mood and feelings, their job satisfaction, and language proficiency influenced LTC. At mesosystem level, LTC was influenced by teachers’ prior learning experience, the collaboration and collegiality among teachers working in the language institute, teachers’ self-efficacy, and critical incidents that happened when teaching or learning. Additionally, the results indicated that exosystem level factors including teacher appraisal criteria, the teaching program and curriculum, and teacher immunity affected LTC. Moreover, LTC was subject to the influence of the government’s attitudes about ELT and religious beliefs about self and interaction, and friendliness with students at macrosystem level. More importantly, it was found that the factors influencing LTC were interrelated and interconnected and in several cases, LTC was a product of joint effect of several factors at various ecosystem levels. Finally, findings in this study suggest that language teaching programs provide recent educational technology in the classroom, foster collaboration and collegiality among teachers, and clarify teacher appraisal criteria for teachers in order to help create positive language teaching beliefs.

Output regulation problem for a decentralized networked control system under jamming attacks and actuator saturation is solved by state feedback in this paper. A jammer's power allocation strategy aiming at degrading signal-interference-plus-noise ratios and leading to packets dropout in different wireless transmission channels of the decentralized networked control system is derived. In the presence of attack-induced packets dropout, a relation between null controllable region and regulatable region is described. For a plant and an exosystem, an asymptotically regulatable region is constructed based on a null controllable region. At last, an illustrative example certificates effectiveness of the presented techniques. • To derive a robust scheme analysis for the decentralized NCS with actuator saturation, the SINR-based optimal interference strategy is studied for an energy-constrained jammer. • In the presence of attack-induced packets dropout, the relation between null controllable region and regulatable regions is described for the decentralized NCS. • State feedback laws are constructed in delta domain to realize output regulation and maximize the asymptotically regulatable region of the decentralized NCS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social development of the state is connected with the solution of a number of acute social problems, among which the socialization of children with special needs is extremely important. The special needs of the child are deter-mined by social, physical and emotional vulnerability and, as a consequence, the need for special attention and services to enable their potential development. Despite the large number of works devoted to the study of various aspects of the life of children with special needs, it should be stated that in modern scientific researches there is neither systematic classification of the special needs of children, nor their essence disclosure. In the article it is proposed the classification of special needs in the context of the system approach by studying the interaction of the child (as a component of the system) with other systems of different levels and a brief description of them. It is found that at the level of interaction «child – family» (microsystem) it is possible to distinguish the following needs of the child, such as: the need for the presence of one another; need for adoption by parents and siblings; the need for constant emotional support. The needs of the level of interaction «child – the closest environment» (mesosystem) include: the need for adoption; need for self-affirmation; need for qualified medical assistance; need for psychological support. A group of needs actualized by the interaction of «child – out-of-family social institutions» (exosystem) consists in: the need for health care; need for social protection; need for education; material needs. The needs of the level of interaction «child-society» (macrosystem) include: the need for a tolerant attitude of society; need for economic and political support. It is established that the specific needs of children are determined by the lack of personal resources for optimal physical and social and psychological development. The proposed classification will help to determine the means of social support for the identified social category at different levels of interaction with the social environment.

Learning about language teacher cognition (LTC) is useful for understanding how language teachers act in the classroom. Employing an ecological framework, this study aimed to explore the factors influencing language teachers' LTCs at different levels. To this end, qualitative data using semi-structured interviews and observation were collected from 62 (30 males and 32 females) Iranian EFL teachers. The results indicated that, at microsystem level, factors such as teaching equipment and facilities, teachers' mood and feelings, their job satisfaction, and language proficiency influenced LTC. At mesosystem level, LTC was influenced by teachers' prior learning experience, the collaboration and collegiality among teachers working in the language institute, teachers' self-efficacy, and critical incidents that happened when teaching or learning. Additionally, the results indicated that exosystem level factors including teacher appraisal criteria, the teaching program and curriculum, and teacher immunity affected LTC. Moreover, LTC was subject to the influence of the government's attitudes about ELT and religious beliefs about self and interaction, and friendliness with students at macrosystem level. More importantly, it was found that the factors influencing LTC were interrelated and interconnected and in several cases, LTC was a product of joint effect of several factors at various ecosystem levels. Finally, findings in this study suggest that language teaching programs provide recent educational technology in the classroom, foster collaboration and collegiality among teachers, and clarify teacher appraisal criteria for teachers in order to help create positive language teaching beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider boundary output regulation for a one-dimensional wave equation with anti-stable term at control unmatched end. The reference signal and (in-domain and boundary) disturbances are supposed to be generated from a finite-dimensional exosystem. We first design a state feedback regulator by the backstepping approach to make the performance output track the reference signal exponentially. Next, with the measured output, we construct an observer for both wave PDE and exosystem. Based on the observer, an output feedback regulator is developed by replacing the states with their estimations. The closed-loop system is shown to admit a unique bounded solution and the tracking error is shown to decay exponentially. Finally, some numerical simulations are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed output feedback regulator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to examine the environment of children from an exosystem perspective in children's selected novels. Research novels, are Memori Atikah (2002), Azrul Wira Anak Laut (2006), Umairah dan Kuda Putih (2008), Suteki De Ne Aleena (2013) and Rahsia Dhia (2014). The environment surrounding children's lives is comprised of systems and regulations designed by humans and organizations influencing the development of children. Based on the environment surrounding children in the novel, exosystem environment is playing an important role in influencing children's psychological development. Thus, this study analyzes the exosystem environment surrounding children's lives in influencing the psychological and academic development of children. Problems involving children are increasingly widespread and the exosystem environment also plays an important role in influencing children. Consequently, exosystem environments need to be emphasized in children's novels to guide parents, in particular, and the general public on the influence of exosystems on the children development of psychological and academic. This study applies one of the principles in Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Theory (1979), a exosystem of analyzing texts. The method used in this study is library method and text analysis. The findings show that exosystem environments consisting of parents and educational systems affect the psychological and academic development of children. Obviously, based on the analysis it shows that the exosystem environment emphasizes environment that does not involve children in making decision but as a consequence of decisions and actions will affect the psychological development of children. In conclusion, the exosystem environment needs to be given attention to producing balanced children in psychologically and academically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research examine about attempted suicide an ecological Bronfenbrenner approach. The purpose of this research is to enhance our understanding about description dynamic attempted suicide. The ecological Bronfenbrenner approach allows exploration of how person whom attempted suicide is determined by multiple factors these are microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, chronosystemdanontogenic system. This research is case study, qualitative method on two young women. Woman who attempted suicide is someone who intentionally injures herself but does not die. The measurement tool used deep interview and observation. The results showed that theecological influenced to decide attempted suicide.

Purpose. The purpose of this article is to propose a solution for conflict resolution in a bioecological system.Background. In 1979, Bronfenbrenner introduced his bioecological theory of human development which suggested that children are immersed in four integrated systems that affect student behavior and success in public schools. More than thirty years later, the bioecological system has experienced several changes, most notably in the structure of the family and changes in the culture. Conflict can lead to tragedy but intervention programs have seen some success when any one of the four systems is positively affected. Winning Colors® can be an effective tool to teach conflict resolution and communication leading to situational leadership, team building, conflict resolution, and improved communication in any inter-personal situation. Winning Colors® uses four color cards with corresponding behavior strengths that can be understood by children and adults in a short period.Aim. In this article, we explain how Winning Colors® program that has been used to teach conflict resolution and communication to thousands of learners.Conclusion. Winning Colors® can be implemented to teach conflict resolution and communication across the bioecological system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, output regulation for linear delta operator systems subject to actuator saturation is investigated by state feedback. The relation between the regulatable regions and the null controllable region is described in this paper. A set of all initial conditions of a plant and a exosystem is called asymptotically regulatable region for which output regulation is possible. An asymptotically regulatable region is characterized according to a null controllable region of an anti-stable subsystem of the plant. Feedback laws are constructed to solve the problems on output regulation. A numerical example is given to illustrate the effectiveness and potential for the developed techniques. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, the authors consider the consensus output regulation problem for a class of non‐linear multi‐agent systems with subsystems have the same relative degree. The multi‐agent system is heterogeneous that means subsystems may have different dynamics. The author's goal is to design a dynamic controller such that the outputs of subsystems follow a desired trajectory which is the output of exosystem. A recursive procedure and internal model are employed to achieve this goal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study considers the output regulation problem of switched discrete‐time linear systems via dual design of error feedback and a switching law. The authors consider the case that the states of both the controlled system and the exosystem are unavailable. Also, no solvability of the output regulation problem for each subsystem is required. They only use the available information provided by the measured output tracking error to design the switching law and controllers to solve the output regulation problem of the switched system. In addition, they adopt different coordinate transformations instead of common coordinate transformation and they study the case that the exosystem is a switched system which can make the tracked trajectories more sophisticated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the problem of dynamic modeling and the optimal recoil control of a deepwater drilling riser system subject to the friction force of drilling fluid discharge. First, based on the whole fluid column model of the friction force and the curve fitting method, a linear exosystem model is established to describe the dynamic properties of the friction force, where the friction force of drilling fluid discharge is formulated as an output of the exosystem. Then a recoil dynamic model of the drilling riser in the event of emergency disconnection is proposed to describe the recoil response characteristics. Third, an optimal recoil control scheme with discharge feedforward compensation is developed to refrain the recoil response of the riser system. The existence and uniqueness conditions of the optimal recoil controller are derived, and the gain matrices of the controller can be obtained by solving an algebraic Riccati equation and a Sylvester equation. It is found through simulation results that the proposed optimal recoil controller with feedforward compensation can reduce recoil response of the riser system significantly. Moreover, the proposed controller outperforms the existing optimal recoil control scheme in the sense of the quadratic performance indices of the riser system. • An exosystem model of fluid discharge friction resistance on the riser is developed. • An optimal recoil control scheme with feedforward mechanisms is proposed. • The proposed scheme is effective to suppress recoil response of the riser system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the input disturbance suppression problem for nonlinear Port-Controlled Hamiltonian (PCH) system and presents a number of new results on the controllers design via the internal model approach. Different from the existing results on this topic we consider two cases. Firstly, the case of the disturbance generated from a linear Hamiltonian system acts through a channel other than the input channel is studied by adopting a method of decomposing the control into two parts and designing an internal model to zero the effect of the exogenous disturbance. Secondly, the case of the disturbance generated from a bounded nonlinear exosystem is studied by presenting a procedure of designing a nonlinear internal model to cancel the effect of the disturbance under two fundamental assumptions. Moreover, to further improve the suppression, a more effective internal model is also designed under less hypotheses. Finally, as an useful application, a corollary is presented by applying these results on PCH system to general nonlinear affine system. Simulations of a third-order synchronous generator model with disturbance generated from a nonlinear exosystem show the effectiveness of the designed internal model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY Given a measured scalar signal generated by an unknown linear exosystem with simple eigenvalues on the imaginary axis whose order is unknown, we address the problem of designing a robust adaptive exosystem of fixed order that is able to reproduce the measured signal within an error. The magnitude of such an error clearly depends on the unmodeled dynamics and vanishes if the order of the adaptive exosystem is greater than or equal to the order of the unknown exosystem. Adaptive exosystems are useful for prediction purposes, to generate successive time derivatives of the measured signal for control purposes (PID, model predictive control and feedback linearization) and in the design of regulators. The posed problem can also be interpreted as an adaptive synchronization problem in the presence of high frequency unmodeled dynamics for linear systems. It can also be viewed as the design of an estimator of m frequencies, amplitudes and phases by processing a signal constituted by the sum of r ≥ m sinusoidal terms. The posed problem will be solved by using the theory of robust adaptive observers and the key concept of persistency of excitation. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research is part of the Ecological Approach to Human Development (Bronfenbrenner, 1987) and it includes the school shift variable within its context. This is a comparative, descriptive, fieldresearch with a non-experimental cross-sectional design. The purpose was to contrast a set of sociodemographic variables (maternal education level, socioeconomic level and nutritional status) in 301 students of the first stage of Basic Education in a public school in the State of Miranda, Venezuela. For this purpose, a comparison between two groups from the same cohort (academic year 2005-2006) but from two different school shifts (morning and afternoon shift), was made. The data were analyzed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS).A comparative study between the groups was made (t-test for related samples and the Wilcoxon signed-rank test). The results analysis revealed statistically significant descriptive differences between the groups in relation to the anthropometric variables of weight and Mid-Upper Arm Circumference (MUAC), maternal schooling and socioeconomic status. To conclude, the contexts for psychological development in the morning and afternoon shifts are different. The school shift system must be considered a sociodemographic, exosystemicvariable for development and it is advisable to include it in educational research in the Venezuelan context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research shows parental monitoring is associated with less substance use, but these studies have some limitations. Many examine older adolescents from White, Euro-American heritage, and cross-sectional studies are unable to test if parental monitoring decreases substance use over time. We address these limitations with longitudinal data of 2,034 primarily Latino preadolescents in Phoenix, Arizona, USA in 2004-2005. We use multilevel regression with multiple imputation of missing data. We find parental monitoring has beneficial, longitudinal effects on youth's substance use and related intentions, norms, and attitudes. Effects are invariant to gender or Latino ethnicity, except in the case of marijuana. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper, a nonlinear robust regulator, based on fuzzy techniques, is proposed as an alternative procedure design to guarantee stability for a wider range of variation in both the exosystem and the immersion. This robust regulator is a fuzzy error feedback controller which relies on the existence of an internal model, obtained by finding, if possible, an observable immersion of the exosystem dynamics, which allows to generate all the possible steady state inputs for the admissible values of the system parameters in order to track and/or reject time-varying references and/or disturbances, while maintaining the stability conditions of the system. Finally, the proposed fuzzy controller scheme is compared with traditional techniques through a case study to test the robustness properties in the face of parameter uncertainties and changes on load disturbances. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this paper, we consider boundary output regulation for an Euler–Bernoulli beam equation which can describe typically the flexible arm of robots. The reference signal and disturbance are generated by a finite-dimensional exosystem. The measurements are angular and angular velocity of the right end where the control is imposed. However, the performance output is on the left end which is non-collocated with control, a difficult case in practice where the control takes time to perform its force from the right end to the left. The objective is to design an output feedback controller to regulate the displacement of the left end to track the reference signal. We first design a state feedback regulator to make the performance output track the reference signal exponentially. An observer is then constructed to recover the state, with which, an output feedback regulator is designed by replacing state feedback with its estimation. The closed-loop system is shown to admit a unique bounded solution and the tracking error converges to zero exponentially. Some numerical simulations are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed output feedback regulator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]