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This article presents and discusses the results of a survey carried out in Portugal regarding the school achievement of students taking general and technological courses (in secondary schools) and vocational courses (in professional schools). The study examines the ability of these schools to certify their students in three years, using as variables the course types and the leve! of social development per borough. The results reveal that achievement rates are generally very poor, especially for general and technological courses, and that there is no linear relationship between social development and achievement.

Assessment is a pedagogic too! used systematically by the modem school, for two main reasons: the need to make an estimate of knowledge acquisition, and the need to award certification confirming the knowledge acquired. The standpoints and attitudes of teachers regarding assessment in a number of Latin American countries are presented and discussed in this article, which concludes that assessment is a problematic issue for the teachers.

Given the fact that students are active information processors, we tried to identify their perceptions about evaluation. We tried to study what they think and feel about evaluation practices in schools. Two inquiries were made: a questionnaire and an interview, within a triangulation methodology. These inquiries allowed us to assess the conceptions of the students towards evaluation contents, evaluation procedures, student participation, feelings in different evaluation conditions, factors that affects grading, ideal frequency of testing, evaluation aims and evaluative positive and negative experiences. We tried to establish differences between gender and school failure leveis. The sample was 147 students. The results proved that students perceived evaluation like testing and grading, based exclusively on the teacher responsibility and experienced with negative feelings. The global conception of evaluation do not varies according to the student gender and failure leveis but some particular differences were found.

One of the most representa tive traits of modem times is the influence of science and technology on society. Also with regard to pedagogy, an education theory with a rational basis has been supported, arranged around the notions of explanation, prediction and control. The views opposing the positivist paradigm however, of which the communication theory of Habermas is an example, cal! out for the need for an ethical sense based on the practical, "real world" experience. ln this way, within the scope of contemporary epistemological concerns, this article underlines the importance of the thought of J.Habermas, proposing the creation of a scientific criticism of education, the chief purpose of which is to enlighten and emancipate.

A reflection on several challenges faced by education today, involving the search for meaning in the adventure of being human, the definition of the fundamental learning of the human being, a learning of the meaning of life, and the emergence of the utopian Learning Society. The author concludes expressing his hope that the Learning Society will result in the awakening of a New Humanism.

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This paper deais with the issue of education for citizenship in school settings from a psychological and developmental standpoint, looking forward for the conditions that sustain and promote the education of citizens. We suggest three dimensions of such education - more contact between schools and local contexts, further development of citizenship skills, increase of participation in community life - and we also propose some methodological contributions for the implementation of citizenship education. A complete educational work in this area must finally give a special attention to variables linked to motivations and emotions and not only to cognitive variables.

Neste artigo apresenta-se uma investigação sobre a avaliação da eficácia de um projecto que visa a intencionalização por parte dos professores do Primeiro Ciclo de estratégias que promovam o desenvolvimento de variáveis sócio-afectivas. A metodologia utilizada foi uma metodologia de infusão curricular (os professores trabalhavam a promoção das variáveis afectivas em inter-ligação com as outras variáveis curriculares). Os resultados sugerem diferenças estatisticamente significativas entre o grupo Experimental e grupo de Controlo em todas as variáveis trabalhadas. Apresentam-se os resultados, bem como as principais implicações dos mesmos em termos das políticas educativas e de uma re-orientação da Educação e da Escola.

Studies regarding published educational research and its impact are very scarce in Portugal. Only by the end of the fifties (20th Century), educational research in Portugal started to be recognized as a mean by which educational policies and teacher practices could be changed. ln Portugal there is a great deal of problems in secondary school. ln the last twenty years Portuguese governments have been making ineffective decisions in relation to educational policies. On the other hand, during the last ten years research have been producing studies about secondary school which impact on political decisions is not yet known. The main goal of this study is to survey and analyse research studies on Portuguese secondary education, published between 1971 and 2003. The results presented here are merely centred in student assessment, one of the many themes of educational research. This study has an historical and descriptive nature, with a design that uses both qualitative and quantitative techniques and instruments. The analysis of 46 studies was focused on the issue of the study, population, institutions, methodologies, instruments, layout and date of publishing, on the results and recommendations. Some important results and findings related to educational research made in Portugal in the student assessment area in secondary school are reported in this study.

This article presents and discusses the results of a study carried out in two districts of the Alentejo Central regarding the evolution of the degree of school achievement of students in the third grade of the basic school system in the period of 1995 to 1999.The measure of achievement presents itself through a rate-synthesis built upon the projection of fictitious cohort by transposition a simple rates of the rank of the school population.The disaggregation through school year, district, school typology and sex-gender of the school population lead to the constitution of profiles and to the hierarchic determination of the combined elements as well as to the depuration of coefficients of congruence and their own distances.The results show clearly the indirect relation between the chronological element school year, the achievement and above ali the female over achievement facing the male one and a certain tendency of conglomeration on the levei of the variable typology of the school, leading to grouping the basic schools on one hand and the secondary schools on the one other hand. The progressive slackening of a certain administrative siege facing the automatic progression, the hyper-stable nature of the educational system and the effect of the negative reflux are some of the lines of interpretation and discussion of results that are on debate.

ln this piece of research the authors analyse the underrepresentation of women in management and leadership roles in Macau's schools. The authors identify two kinds of factors they believe are crucial in the study of the above mentioned phenomenon: the societal culture and the intra-organizational cultures that prevail locally in the field of education. Derogatory images of the feminine, which are rooted in the Chinese history and culture, as well as authoritarian and manly styles of educational leadership, are combined to deter the access of women to top places in schools. The authors also believe that the difficulties that the women who aspire to leadership positions in school organizations face can be increased in contexts in which the education is submitted to the market principies and mechanisms.

ln this paper we present a case studies focused in an association which was bom in a small village of the coast of Algarve. The activities that this association developed together with the people were conveyed by a spontaneous dynamic with no externa! initiation whatsoever. For a few years a very significant participative phenomenon has been displayed, that triggered a set changes in severa! dimensions of people's everyday lives, improving their life quality. The paper has therefore two main parts: first and after describing some context data and the research methodological design, we narrate the case. Second, we forward some conclusive comments and reflections. We try to point out some elements that help us to clearly understand some characteristics of the local development processes, both to theory and practice. The great majority of the elements we mention have an important non-formal educational value that we want to stress.

The author mantains that the evaluations need to be evaluated. To learn about our mistakes, avoiding further errors. To improve the evaluation practices and get tho know if it has been a thoroughgoing evaluation and if it has respected the ethics. It also pretends to reach a metaevaluation, to discover if the evaluation results can be transfered to other applications. The author adds some methodological suggestions in order to do metaevaluation.

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ln this work an approach is conducted to the application of the lnformation and Communication Technologies (ICT) in education, by the means of a quantitative study in the scholar year of 2003/2004, applied at the 21 schools with 2.nd and 3.rd Cycles of the Basic Education, linked to the Center of the Educational Area of Viseu. This work took place before the introduction the curricular implementation of the discipline of ICT in the 9.th and 10.th grades. Before the presentation of the empiric study, a small review of the actual situation of the relationship between ICT and education is made, being pointed out the relationships that are considered important to promote an effective use of these technologies for the teachers and for the schools. The study is based on the statistical treatment of data, collected by inquiries applied to teachers Directors of Classes and members of the management board, that makes possible a global vision of the state of the schools, the technological means existent, the sensibility and the conceptions of the teachers in face of using ICT, the degree of satisfaction and frequency of utilization, namely in relation to the pedagogical practices and the integration of these technologies at the levei of Curricular Class Projects. Paired with the presentation of results, the main conclusions are registered, being also reported, at the end of the study, some general conclusions.

With this article it is intended to approach the educational project in the double dimension of the organizational intentions and of the practices of is implementation, in way to answer to the following subject: in what way is the educational project a document of strategic administration of the teachers' pedagogic practices? ln spite of the different possible investigation roads, the answer for this interrogation is sought through the analysis of educational projects of five vertical groupings of school of the council of Santa Maria da Feira. ln this article it was ended that, for the different vertical groupings of school, the educational project works as a type of work guidon, that establishes very general objectives to reach, not coming as a true document advisor of the educational action of the school, in general, and of the teachers' pedagogic practices, in particular.

The present study explores fifteen year-old adolescents' narratives and analyzes the causal explanations which underlie their mental representations on peer victimization. ln this study, we use a scriptedcartoon narrative which encompasses a semi-structured interview (see Almeida et al., 2001). The set of cartoons presents a prototypical story of school bullying aiming at eliciting an adequate scenario for the production of personal narratives. It is the narrative process that stimulates the interpretation and inference of causes, emotional attributions and sociomoral reasoning allowing richer explanations for peer victimization. Ali these aspects were codified through a content analysis of individual interviews, based on a coding system previously elaborated following Robert Hinde's relational perspective (1987). Data is discussed taking into consideration the specific goals of this study and, evidencing the need for research that sheds light on what adolescents say, think and how they reason and understand peer victimization in order to help designing future interventions.

This paper starts from a short review of the "Pigmalion effect", a theory presented by Jacobson and Rosenthal in the book "Pigmalion in the classroom". The text explores the possible relation between the effect of social expectations and teen sexual behavior, taking into account the influence of mass media (namely, television) in the socialization of youngsters. Questions like in what way or how far the influence of TV interferes in youngters' decisions, attitudes and behaviors are addressed, specially from the point of view of the expectations generated by publicity and general programming regarding juvenile sexual behavior. The effect of the media in the build up of images of social reality is addressed through the analysis of several research models in the area of communication, with the idea in mind of a relation between levei of culture and capability for discrimination of the transmitted knowledge. Culture takes, in this way, an essential place in the formation of a critic mind. The task of developing the critic mind of youngters in this so called information society is, in this way, of great importance, requiring clear perception of the relation between culture and freedom, and that teen sexual behavior is very much dependent on these matters. So, the matter of the development of the criticai mind in young people in a setting of fundamental cultural development is paramount for the general understanding of the world and for a life of freedom, with responsible and sensible choices. ln conclusion, the roles played by the different social agents that form a dynamic and complex net of relationships (family, school, mass media and the peers) is paramount for the build up of the socializing process.

Darkened by broken life strategies, the contemporary world demands the inscription of transcendence in all dimensions of human existence, beginning by those related with public spheres of action, were it's urgent to promote citizenship dynamics lighted by values as hospitality, responsibility and goodness. It is based on these premises, and considering education as a major anthropological practice, that we see educational tasks as a priority of a compromise with a time of peace, solidarity and justice.

ln this article one expands on the concept of educational productivity and one presents different perspectives of approaching it. Using the trajectorial analysis of school generations on settles indicators of educational efficiency and effectiveness, whose conjugation through relations of product and quotient, leads to a depuration and graphic projection of a synthesis rate of educational productivity.