RCAAP Repository

School autonomy is an organizational method inscribed in modern educational policies to improve students’ learning. School self-assessment is an instrument of that autonomy aimed at said improvement, but it’s impact on schools has not kept up to its promise of success. The causes of this fact lay less in the quality of the self-assessment procedures and more on the models of regulation of the educational system. These created an organizational context in which work coordination mechanisms are external to the organization and, therefore, improvement leys elsewhere. Self-assessment can only contribute to organizational improvement when the school is a mature learning organization that has internal mechanisms of work coordination. The paper ends with the presentation of a matrix to analyze and better understand the quality and efficiency of self-assessment processes.

This article presents an exploratory analysis of the political process of implementation of the school self-evaluation, according not only from the law 31/2002 but also from the intensification of the policies of school evaluation in the last two decades. This empirical study is part of a larger research in order to accomplish a PHD in Education, in the Instituto de Educação da Universidade de Lisboa, under the guidance of Professor João Barroso. Developed in the schools and school clusters of the Lisbon and Tagus Valley’s Administrative Region, the research used the school’s external evaluation reports elaborated between 2006/2007 and 2010/2011. Through the content analysis of the external evaluation reports section “self-regulation and improvement capacity”, it was possible to make the description of the self-evaluation’s devices developed in the schools before and during the school’s external evaluation coordinated by the General Inspection of Education. Two main contributes of this study are, in one hand, the idea that self-evaluation processes are determined by the external evaluation and, on the other hand, the opportunity to comprehend the circumstances that promoted the arising of the structured model CAF (Common Assessment Framework).

The study shows the implementation of market vision in the education system of the state of Acre, Brazil. This review policy is the result of constant read-justments of neoliberal policy with severe impacts on the lives of a teacher, in the symbolic field or material, is about the vision that society builds on education and evaluation. The proposed analysis of the literature, built on the historical materialist dialectic approach. Treated issues were raised in two workshops through the focus group technique with two 5 groups of teachers and 9 years of elementary school. The data were interpreted based on the qualitative approach (Ludke & André 1989). The study concludes that this demonstration eff ect makes clear the market size applied to public education process, assuming the competition between states, schools, public and private.

What makes students with different performance profiles learn more? What prevents them from learning? What effects do gender and socioeconomic variables have on students’ performance? These were the research questions of an exploratory study conducted in twenty-one Priority Intervention Educational Territories in the North of Portugal. An open questionnaire has been applied, consisting of seven questions relating to socio-demographic issues (school year, class, age, gender, father’s and mother’s qualifi cations, people they live with) and two open questions that asked the students to write a sentence or a short text of around 100 words according to the following instructions (1) The situations that make me learn the most in the classroom are; (2) The situations that make me learn the least in the classroom are. We were able to collect the answers from 695 students from the 5th and the 7th grades, during the school year of 2012-2013.The main results show that there are gender differences in school success (boys have worse outcomes), that the cultural and social capital have an expressive impact on students’ success, that teachers’ ways of teaching have a capital importance on students’ perception of learning, that the ways of being in the classroom have an expressive impact on learning difficulties and that students’ characteristics and behaviors play a significant role on (non) learning, mostly in the case of students with lower academic achievements.

The Professional Courses are teaching modalities that aim to meet the educational needs of the secondary education as intermediate technicians level III. These courses were included in the public secondary schools by the law article 74/2004 – 26th of March – with the objective to instruct professionals to be able to practice a profession. These are following a pedagogic model in which the lectures are organized in a modular structure.This study focused on vocational education aims to understand the educational failure produced by the students from three prominent public high schools. The student’s academic performance is subject to statistical analysis, plus the study of students and teachers representations about this particular education and development. It was intended not only to identify the contradictions but also the different interpretations and redefinitions of the competence concept within the planning, lecturing and appraisal of the students.The results point towards a superficial understanding and translation of the competence concept which impacts the teacher’s performance. Most of the students, which already come from families with low cultural and economic capital, have their paths determined by several school retentions. The unsuccess considerably aff ects these students during their nine-year compulsory education.

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This text elects as an object of analysis the Program “Aproximar Educação” (decentralization of educational competencies to the local power) and its execution in the 15 municipalities that were invited by the government to join the program. A brief content analysis of the Ministerial Resolution is done, as well as a generic analysis of the 15 interadministrative contracts of competency delegation, particularizing two of them and trying to analyse the distribution of power between the centre and the peripheries, including the municipality, the municipal council of education and the school grouping. It is sustained that, in the field of the orientations towards action, the political will to institute a new local governance model, which we designate as socio communitarian regulation, is visible, although it cannot be generalized. Some critical discourses that look at this process as a way of contributing to take away the State’s responsibility, of “privatizing” education and of municipalisation are summarily analysed. It can be concluded that the development of this Program has inscribed itself in a paradigm of conflict of visions, powers and counter powers, what contributes to the uncertainty of its future.

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Regardless of the extremely important social work that the school is putting into action through all these years, it is today necessary to (re)think about the public space of education and face it as a project of action strategically shared within the school, families and other social, cultural and political actors that operate in a certain territory that, without neglecting each other’s specific missions and domains are yet able to venture on a commitment which is everyone’s. It is based on this aim that one wants to emphasise the case of the ESPROARTE - Professional School of Art of Mirandela, a visionary and avant garde project, during these 25 years of existence, which has been extended and shared in the surroundings and seen from an entrepreneurial way as well as it has gotten support from the local organizations and, above all, from the municipality that provided the opening of a new cultural cycle, not only in the city of Mirandela but in the entire region.

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This article discusses the process of expansion and redefinition of the objectives of technical schools in Brazil. Th e study shows that the recent changes of technical and technological education bring in its jowls part of expansionary reform of public higher education, already provided for in the Law of Guidelines and Bases (LDB N.º 9394/96), for the debate of the restructuring defocusing in Brazilian public university. However, when performing this process the government created a new modality of institution – Federal Institutes of Education, Science and Technology (IF) with the same prerogatives of universities, technical schools of basic education, of university centers of technological education and training units for young and adults. We concluded that the expansion of higher education to the IF and the flexibilisation of the institutional model is part of the cognitive reordering of the labor force and crumble the training of the worker.

The recent literature has pointed out the existence of fragilities, in the school and learning dimensions, in children and young people in residential care. The current study aimed to analyse and understand the processes of studying and learning in institutions, of 2nd and 3rd cycle and secondary students, examining the role of individual and contextual variables on self-regulated learning processes. The sample included 248 children and young people living in 20 residential care settings from the north of Portugal. The instruments were the following: a personal and academic data instrument, the Inventory of Self-Regulated Learning Processes (Rosário et al., 2010), and an instrument of characterization of the institution. Results showed significant differences in the self-regulated learning, according to gender and grade retention, also emphasizing the importance of self-efficacy, value of learning, and educational aspirations. The study site and study time, as well as the reported difficulties in studying, were relevant in the self-regulated learning processes. The size of the institution did not assume relevance. Implications of these results in promoting better education and learning in residential care contexts are discussed.

The Historic Centre of Porto (CHP) suffered in the 60’s a migratory mass process that resulted in an exponential increase in population density, with serious problems in housing, such as degradation, health and overcrowding. In the following decades, this situation has become worse with the result that many families of the working classes were relocated to public housing. Th e work presented here was developed with a group of former women living in the CHP, precisely in the area of Sé, which underwent this process of relocation, but maintain a strong connection to the zone, and their social practices fed at this location although they no longer live there for over 10 years. In order to understand this connection to that territory, which appears beyond the physical realm and acquires a symbolic dimension (habitus), we tried to identify here the cultural identity production practices built from the social relations of these women. Based on their testimony, we analyzed the ties of solidarity, pride and their love to this territory, participation in local associations or other local living centers, participation in popular and community celebrations and participation in social networks.

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