Repositório RCAAP

The shock waves of the Information Society have reached University and technology platforms have imposed themselves as key supports in the pedagogical transformation and management of the different dimensions of the performance of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). These platforms collect a huge volume of data that has gradually been used for advanced analysis and as a support for informed decision making, in particular through the Learn Analytics systems (focusing on metrics that provide information to departments, teachers and students on issues related to the organization and functions of the courses or students learning activities) and Academic Analytics (directed for the planning of institutional management, to provide the directors and managers with information on financial aspects, human capital or allocation of resources, and may also have a national or international component in comparison of systems). In this paper, we present the state of the art of usage of the Analytics systems in education, with the analysis of practical cases of its implementation, with emphasis on the morphological aspects from access and data preparation to sharing and decision making. At the same time, issues related to ethical aspects are explored, as well as the implications in the organization and culture of HEIs that result from the use of these systems.

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Issues related to indiscipline, bullying and school violence continue to be a concern, challenging schools to build effective solutions for promoting active, receptive, responsive and relational citizenship. Schools need to act in a convergent way with proactive models of indiscipline management with a view to promoting prosocial behavior. In this context, we highlight the participation and involvement of students in decision-making processes as well as in school activities as a determining factor in the construction of a positive, democratic and inclusive school. This article presents the Students’ Assemblies methodology, as carried out in the School Group of Frazão –Paços de Ferreira, in a project to promote positive behavior in the school. Based on the assemblies’ records analysis, we identified the students’ conceptions about discipline and school climate as well as the strategic actions used. The results reinforce actions that promote students’ participation and involvement in the decisions and activities of the school. In fact, we believe that students’ assemblies are a promising approach for promote a positive, participatory and democratic school climate.

Students are who can better tell us about their own experience at school. However, their voices are not always heard and considered when it comes to thinking about improving schools and education. In this text, we present and analyse, on the one hand, the “voices” of kindergarten children, collected through group and individual works, posters and drawings; on the other hand, the voices of students in the second and third cycles of basic education (up to 6th and 9th schooling years, respectively), collected in unstructured group interviews. We asked all of them for their ideas about the future of education. The results may be surprising, given the quality of the reflection and acuity of the analysis, but also because they allow reflect – an exercise that can be useful to all social actors involved in and by the school dynamics – about the life of schools in many of its facets: teachers and pedagogical activity, classes and study visits, educational provision, educational spaces and resources, organization of school activity. In summary, we would say that only with students, and by the way of a dialogued and built together narrative, it is possible to enhance the strengths of the schools and think about alternatives to school processes that have proven to be ineffective.

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Several schools recognize the advantages of cooperative learning and use it as a strategy to promote school success. Our study focuses on a learning project among students belonging to the same class, presenting its main characteristics, identifying students’ perceptions regarding their participation in the project and its functioning and impact on academic results and on the learning environment. The analysis of the obtained data highlights the sociability, the relational horizontality and the trust between the pairs, and it notes the predominance of the content-based learning and of methodologies that favor memorization and training oriented towards the final evaluation.

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This research focused on the dynamics of a triangle: recomposed families, lack of curriculum meaningfulness, causing boredom, as well as violence in an adolescent school, located in Brasília’s periphery, Brazil, with drug and weapon traffic as background. This study has ethnographic features, having lasted over one year of immersion in the field. It employed semi-structured interviews, focus groups, observation and document analysis. Results show that a selective curriculum divided students in winners and losers. Adolescents looking for being protagonists, autonomous and in search of their own identity were compelled to adjust themselves to passive schooling. Most of them declared the impossibility of understanding the contents almost classes had started. Consequently, boredom predominated as an intellectual empty space, filled by violent acts and joking. Around a half of the body lived in a recomposed family. However, data revealed that violence was not a result of this condition. Short time for living together with their parents, as well as inside family aggression led to school violence. The new principal and his team adopted projects and activities for overcoming these problems with relative success, if compared to the beginning of that academic year.

Toe Portuguese "Beiras" constitute an almost unavoidable transit area between Portugal' s northern and south-central regions on one hand and the SpanishNorthern Meseta on the other. Thus, in differenthistorical moments (in the widest sense), it functions as a connecting plate between those regions, whose study is fundamental to the understanding of the interregional interaction and integration processes that are going on. Toe work that has been done regionally during the last two decades allows us to debate some questions regarding the role of power symbolism in the origins and development of local Late Bronze Age communities (Grupo Baiões/Santa Luzia) and their interaction with contemporary "culture groups" from the surrounding areas as well as with the Atlantic and Mediterranean commerce networks of the late second and early first millennia BC. We argue that the adoption and displaying of "foreign symbols of power" are some of the mechanisms responsible for the establishment and enforcing of local elites in an economic network that - we as well argue - is structured as a "wealth finance" system.

Available research on teachers’ education is rich and diverse. In this paper, an overview of main relevant literature in the fields of teachers’ training and curriculum development is presented, also discussing the representations that it reflects of the understanding of higher education teachers for the training of teachers of Music in Portugal: Which role is attributed to the higher education teacher in organizing curriculum and teaching for students of Music? Which are their predominant perceptions about the required knowledge for those students and the ways to construct and mobilize it in the future teachers? The confrontation of data of empirical research with reviewed literature, within a doctoral program of Portuguese Catholic University, indicate the need for training institutions to reinforce in their programs for future teachers of Music, the reflection and promotion of a broader view of professional knowledge of teachers and the specificity of teaching profession.

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In the last few years, several studies have been dealing with the complex dynamic that, in sub-Saharan Africa, relates girls’ school dropout and ignition rituals. Scientific research often explores these elements by integrating the topic of early pregnancy/maternity into the discussions. However, the connection between those dimensions is not clear and more information is needed. As far as we know, in Angola there has been no research exploring perspectives about schooling and school dropout and about experience of initiation rituals (efundula) in young mothers who dropped out of school, whose pregnancy/maternity happened under 18 years of age, after efundula. Our study seeks a first contribution in deepening knowledge in this area, giving voice to the young girls and exploring the meanings that emerge from their experience in relation with efundula, school life and school dropout. The group of participants consists of 10 initiated mothers, aged 16 to 18, who don’t attend school. A qualitative approach was employed. After informed consent, semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted. Interviews were audio recorded and later verbatim transcribed. Data was then analyzed using a semi-inductive approach supported by qualitative data analysis software Nvivo. Part of the participants stated that it was not their decision to participate in Efundula, but they understood its role as “tradition”. School experience is described positively valuing different aspects. Dropout is often described as directly related to pregnancy/maternity, but not to efundula. Direct relation between efundula and pregnancy/maternity is underlying. Most participants report that they do not intend to go back to school. Results point to the need to know more about girls’ school dropout in order to intervene/prevent possible individual and social negative consequences.