La incidencia de los valores culturales en el voluntariado: el caso de Europa

La realidad del voluntariado es sumamente compleja hasta el punto de que resulta complicado definir y caracterizar el trabajo voluntario, dada la gran variedad de interpretaciones, motivaciones, variables sociodemográficas y aspectos culturales que configuran el perfil de los voluntarios. El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar la influencia conjunta de algunas variables sociodemográficas, así como de los valores culturales de índole secular o tradicional, sobre el perfil de los voluntarios en Europa. Además, se investiga qué variables orientan a los voluntarios hacia un determinado tipo de voluntariado u otro. Para ello se ha aplicado principalmente una metodología de regresión logística a partir de la información disponible en la European Value Study. Los resultados obtenidos ayudan a establecer una caracterización del voluntariado en Europa, y confirman la influencia de los valores culturales, en primer lugar, en la realización o no de trabajos de voluntariado, y en segundo lugar, en la elección que hacen estas personas del tipo de actividad con la que están comprometidos. Al analizar dos tipos de voluntariado de motivación supuestamente muy diferente, se concluye que existe un grupo de valores que influyen en ambos, aunque el sentido y la intensidad en la que lo hacen sea diferente; por otra parte, algunos valores tienen influencia o no en la realización de trabajos de voluntariado, dependiendo del tipo específico al que nos refiramos.

Competence in research planning in the fourth level of Spanish Secondary Education: a case study

In the last years, “Inquiry-Based Science Education” methodologies (IBSE) are being recommended by European institutions in order to improve the competence levels and the attitudes towards science of primary and secondary school students. Therefore, the aim of this study is to test the effectiveness of an IBSE methodology, the Methodology of Problem Solving as an Investigation (MPSI), for the teaching-learning process of planning of experiments in the fourth level of Spanish Secondary Education. By means of the students’ solutions for a series of open problems, the progress in the learning of the competences related to the planning of experiments has been analyzed, along with the influence of the methodology on the development of these competencies. The results show a students’ command from higher to lower levels on: emission of hypothesis, design of the experiment, qualitative analysis, identification of variables and reformulation of the open problem. Furthermore, the Methodology has contributed to an improvement of the scientific competence in the area of planning experiments.

Source Provenance of Pre-Historic Granitic Grindstones: The Case Study of the Cogotas I Archaeological Site of Arroyo Mucientes/San Lázaro (Castronuño, Valladolid) and a Proposal on the General Methodological Flow Process

The occurrence of hand grindstones at the Cogotas I archaeological sites is considered to be a common feature. Given that a distant-provenance raw material is frequently involved, determination of its source is a basic factor in the search for a better understanding of resource management and for any Political Economy approach. To progress in these directions an overall study should be planned, using selected grindstones with a view to covering diverse sub-zones of the Cogotas I dispersal area, especially because of its considerable distance from the granite basement source. Such a study may today includes diverse analytical procedures combining successive geographic, petrographic, mineralogical and geochemical criteria. To check the plausibility of the proposed methodology, a preliminary test has been carried out on two granite grindstones, obtained at the archaeological excavation at the Castronuño (Valladolid) Cogotian site, which is fifty km away from an inferred source area that was presumably located at Peñausende (Zamora). The result obtained validates the proposed operational process, yielding a generalizable knowledge to other similar situations.

Item and task difficulty in a B2 reading examination: perceptions of test-takers and CEFR alignment experts compared with psychometric measurements

The article presents a study of a CEFR B2-level reading subtest that is part of the Slovenian national secondary school leaving examination in English as a foreign language, and compares the test-taker actual performance (objective difficulty) with the test-taker and expert perceptions of item difficulty (subjective difficulty). The study also analyses the test-takers’ comments on item difficulty obtained from a while-reading questionnaire. The results are discussed in the framework of the existing research in the fields of (the assessment of) reading comprehension, and are addressed with regard to their implications for item-writing, FL teaching and curriculum development.