Many countries, including Italy, are increasingly managing their public higher education systems in accordance with the New Public Management principle that private-sector management practices improve efficiency and quality. A key mechanism has been the introduction of performance-based funding systems designed to reward ‘high-performing’ institutions and incentivise ‘lesser-performing’ institutions to improve. Instead of improving efficiency and quality across the board, however, we argue that performance-based funding systems naturalise longstanding structurally determined inequalities between institutions by recasting national higher education systems as competitive institutional meritocracies in which institutional inequalities are redefined as objective indicators of intrinsic ‘merit’ or worth. We illustrate how performance-based university funding systems naturalise pre-existing inequalities between universities drawing on the case of Italy, a country characterised by longstanding inequalities between its northern and southern regions which demonstrably impact on the apparent ‘performance’ of universities. The concept of institutional meritocracy captures the illusory nature of this performance game. 相似文献
Thermodynamic principles are basic to an understanding of the complex fluxes of energy and information required to keep cells alive. These microscopic machines are nonequilibrium systems at the micron scale that are maintained in pseudo-steady-state conditions by very sophisticated processes. Therefore, several nonstandard concepts need to be taught to rationalize why these very ordered systems proliferate actively all over our planet in seeming contradiction to the second law of thermodynamics. We propose a model consisting of boxes with different shapes that contain small balls that are in constant motion due to a stream of air blowing from below. This is a simple macroscopic system that can be easily visualized by students and that can be understood as mimicking the behavior of a set of molecules exchanging energy. With such boxes, the basic concepts of entropy, enthalpy, and free energy can be taught while reinforcing a molecular understanding of the concepts and stressing the stochastic nature of the thermodynamic laws. In addition, time-related concepts, such as reaction rates and activation energy, can be readily visualized. Moreover, the boxes provide an intuitive way to introduce the role in cellular organization of "information" and Maxwell's demons operating under nonequilibrium conditions. 相似文献
This paper evaluates the viability of using controversies in teaching. An educational project has been elaborated in which some historical-philosophical clashes were introduced into the classical syllabus of physics. The historical-philosophical controversy dealt with here, took place between the French physicists Biot and Ampère in the 19th century and referred to distinct interpretations of the Oersted experiment. This controversy was inserted into the syllabus of the 12th grade of a Brazilian secondary school. 相似文献
Collaboration between Industry and University is becoming more important in order to improve the competitiveness of the research and development activities. Moreover, establishing synergies to bridge the gap between the academic and industrial spheres has demonstrated to be advantageous for both of them.
Nowadays, Industry is moving towards an open innovation structure, in which external agents as universities play a key role. Besides, University is also seeking a more active learning methodology to improve the education of students for the real world. Considering this framework, a special effort should be done to take advantage of the collaborative work between Industry and University.
The aim of this paper is to present the collaborative framework and the benefits obtained of the educational activities as a consequence of the long-term collaboration established between the University of Zaragoza and the Bosh and Siemens Home Appliances Group. The key stones of the collaboration are presented, and the positive outcomes for the students are highlighted. The strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of the proposed program are also discussed. 相似文献
The use of information and communication technologies in higher education is surrounded by contradictory, yet interrelated
themes, that suggest that education is either experiencing a revolution or approaching its own demise. Undoubtedly, technologies
are becoming embedded in academic life but patterns of adoption are more complex and nuanced than polarized themes suggest.
The extreme polarity of a ‘promises and fears’ spectrum is unable to fully account for why this is the case; neither can it
be explained by economics, demographics, or the technology. This article argues that one of the most significant variables
in the deployment of and adaptation to information technologies in the university is academic culture. In other words, unless
we consider academic culture we cannot fully capture the relationship of technologies to education. 相似文献
This article analyses the general characteristics of the construction of the field of history of education in Brazil. To do so, it highlights the existing historiography and aims to describe the process of institutionalisation of this knowledge field, which, in general terms, has been focused on the area of teacher training. Since the nineteenth century, however, it has also been possible to identify systematic historiographical efforts in Brazil that are not directly related to the school system, but rather to the teaching of and research into the history of education within Brazilian universities. The article addresses the organisation of the field, the ways in which it has been structured and the strategies of academic legitimisation employed to achieve this. These include the regular production of dissertations and doctoral theses, the publication of books and journals, academic events and the creation of research groups and scientific associations, through which research findings have found national and international circulation. This set of indicators creates conditions for an understanding of the expansion and reconfiguration of the field of history of education that began in the 1980s, as well as of the challenges this phenomenon presents to current historiography and teacher training in Brazil. 相似文献
In the framework of teacher’s approaches to teaching, this study investigates the relationship between student-related variables (i.e., study time, class absence, domain knowledge, and homework completion), students’ approaches to learning, and teachers’ approaches to teaching using structural equation modeling (SEM) with two independent data samples. The participants were 61 biology teachers and their corresponding 1,518 high school students (12th grade). The first sample was used to fit the model, and the second sample was used to analyze the consistency of the data derived from the first sample. Using a two-level SEM analysis, we established whether the effects found at the individual level varied significantly at class level. The students’ approaches to learning were related to the teachers’ approaches to teaching as a function of the hypotheses established in the model, although the effect size was smaller than expected. However, approximately 48 % of the variance of the surface approach and 46 % of the deep approach sat at class level. At the individual level, the results of this study suggest that students’ approaches to learning significantly explain their teachers’ approaches to teaching and, thus, constitute important contextual variables. At the class level, the way students learn appears to be closely associated with class-related variables. Our data stresses the importance of promoting educational opportunities (e.g., school-based courses) for teachers to reflect upon the teaching methodologies used in class. 相似文献