Performance-based university funding and the drive towards ‘institutional meritocracy’ in Italy     

José Luis Mateos-González  Vikki Boliver 《British Journal of Sociology of Education》2019,40(2):145-158

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   

Diary-based strategy assessment and its relationship to performance in a group of trainee teachers     

Raquel Gilar  María de los ngeles Martínez Ruiz  Juan Luis Castejn Costa 《Teaching and Teacher Education》2007,23(8):1334-1344

Our work is based on the study of learning strategies used by a group of trainee teachers in a real learning situation, and how this use of strategies influences the results of the learning process. We use a diary as a tool to assess the learning strategies and compare the results obtained with those using an inventory. Our findings indicate that the deliberate use of strategies (measured by diaries) has a positive effect on knowledge acquisition, with the qualitative analysis method of the verbal protocols noted in the diaries proving more valuable than the use of traditional inventories.  相似文献   

Adding automatic evaluation to interactive virtual labs     

Gonzalo Farias  David Muñoz de la Peña  Fabio Gómez-Estern  Luis De la Torre  Carlos Sánchez  Sebastián Dormido 《Interactive Learning Environments》2016,24(7):1456-1476

Automatic evaluation is a challenging field that has been addressed by the academic community in order to reduce the assessment workload. In this work we present a new element for the authoring tool Easy Java Simulations (EJS). This element, which is named automatic evaluation element (AEE), provides automatic evaluation to virtual and remote laboratories built with EJS by using the server application Goodle grading management system (GMS). The integration of both tools entitles a professor to create interactive virtual and remote laboratories and automatically evaluate the work of their students. As a test bed two case studies are presented; a non-linear controller design virtual laboratory used in an advanced control master course and a servomechanism virtual laboratory used in an undergraduate basic control course.  相似文献   

Learning design and learning analytics in mobile and ubiquitous learning: A systematic review     

Gerti Pishtari  María J. Rodríguez-Triana  Edna M. Sarmiento-Márquez  Mar Pérez-Sanagustín  Adolfo Ruiz-Calleja  Patricia Santos  Luis P. Prieto  Sergio Serrano-Iglesias  Terje Väljataga 《British journal of educational technology : journal of the Council for Educational Technology》2020,51(4):1078-1100

Mobile and Ubiquitous Learning (m/u-learning) are finding an increasing adoption in education. They are often distinguished by hybrid learning environments that encompass elements of formal and informal learning, in activities that happen in distributed settings (indoors and outdoors), across physical and virtual spaces. Despite their purported benefits, these environments imply additional complexity in the design, monitoring and evaluation of learning activities. The research literature on learning design (LD) and learning analytics (LA) has started to deal with these issues. This paper presents a systematic literature review of LD and LA, in m/u-learning. Apart from providing an overview of the current research in the field, this review elicits elements of common ground between both communities, as shown by the similar learning contexts and complementary research contributions, and based on the research gaps, proposes to: address m/u-learning beyond higher education settings, reinforce the connection between physical and virtual learning spaces, and more systematically align LD and LA processes.  相似文献   

Molecular thermodynamics for cell biology as taught with boxes     

Mayorga LS  López MJ  Becker WM 《CBE life sciences education》2012,11(1):31-38

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   

Educational opportunities based on the university-industry synergies in an open innovation framework     

Óscar Lucia  José M. Burdio  Jesús Acero  Luis A. Barragán  José R. Garcia 《European Journal of Engineering Education》2012,37(1):15-28

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   

Inequality of opportunity for educational achievement in Latin America: Evidence from PISA 2006–2009     

Luis Fernando Gamboa  Fábio D. Waltenberg 《Economics of Education Review》2012

We evaluate how far away six Latin American countries stand from a normative goal of equality of opportunity for educational achievement in PISA 2006–2009. We work with alternative characterizations of types: gender, school type (public or private), parental education, and their combinations. Following Checchi–Peragine's (2010) non-parametric method, we find that inequality of opportunity for educational achievement in Latin America ranges from less than 1% to up to 25%, depending on the year, the country, the subject and the specification of circumstances. These magnitudes are substantial with respect to what is found in comparator countries. Parental education and school type prove to be important sources of inequality of opportunity, contrary to gender. By means of sensitivity analyses, while most results show small to moderate variation in terms of magnitudes, in ordinal terms (rankings) they remain quite stable. Brazil stands out as the most opportunity-unequal country of the sample.  相似文献   

Towards a multidimensional model for evaluating electronic government: Proposing a more comprehensive and integrative perspective     

Luis Felipe Luna-Reyes  J. Ramon Gil-Garcia  Georgina Romero 《Government Information Quarterly》2012

The use of information and communication technologies has been a key strategy for government reform. It offers diverse benefits, ranging from efficiency and effectiveness to transparency and greater democratic participation. Governments in many parts of the world have invested vast resources into electronic government projects with the expectation of achieving these and other outcomes. However, the results in many cases are limited and there is no comprehensive way to evaluate these initiatives at the aggregate level. A method for measuring and evaluating electronic government that identifies its advances and problems is needed. Previous efforts to do so are limited in terms of scope and dimensions being considered. Based on a review of current literature and the analysis of international best practices, this paper proposes a multidimensional model for measuring and evaluating electronic government. It also includes examples, a proposal of how to operationalize it, and several recommendations for practical use.  相似文献   

Understanding risks,benefits, and strategic alternatives of social media applications in the public sector     

Sergio Picazo-Vela  Isis Gutiérrez-Martínez  Luis Felipe Luna-Reyes 《Government Information Quarterly》2012

Social media such as blogs, microblogs or electronic social networks can transform the ways in which we relate to other people and organizations. Government organizations are experimenting with social media to communicate with their constituents, and many analysts see in these media a powerful set of tools to reinvent government–citizen relationships. In this paper, we present the perceptions of risks, benefits and strategic guidelines about social media applications gathered from 250 public servants from Central Mexico, most of them working in information technology, as web masters or responding to Freedom of Information Act requests. The conclusions of the analysis are 1) that governments' participation in social media may result in improved communication and citizen participation, more transparency, and transfer of best practices among government agencies; 2) that a good implementation strategy is necessary to realize these benefits and to avoid risks; and 3) that the implementation of social media highlights the importance of updating laws and regulations, and of promoting changes in government culture and organizational practices.  相似文献   

On the role of representations and artefacts in knowing and learning     

Luis Radford 《Educational Studies in Mathematics》2014,85(3):405-422

This article provides a critical commentary on the concepts of representation and digital artefacts in Morgan and Kynigos’s article of this Special Issue. To set the context, in the first part, I examine some of the tensions that arose during discussions through the 1980s and 1990s about representation in mathematics education research. Then, I comment on the conceptual differences between Morgan’s and Kynigos’s approaches. These differences point to different epistemological assumptions that lead to different conceptualizations of artefacts in learning processes. In the last part, I argue that Morgan’s and Kynigos’s approaches have the merit of moving the discussion about representations to new theoretical horizons. I suggest, however, that a discussion about representations and digital artefacts requires a thematized account of the manner in which the phenomenological artefact- and representation-mediated knowledge produced by students in the classroom relates to the target cultural mathematical knowledge. Such an account, I contend, requires an explicit ontological conception of knowing and knowledge. I conclude the article with an example in which knowledge is considered as codified movement and knowing as the event of its enactment in concrete practice. Within this Hegelian materialist viewpoint, representations are neither predicated in terms of an adequacy between ideas and their representations nor as heuristic devices in meaning making processes. Representations are rather an integral part of the activity of knowledge presentation.  相似文献