Construcción de conocimiento y desarrollo de una mirada profesional para la práctica de enseñar matemáticas en entornos en entornos en línea

Este trabajo sintetiza en tres ámbitos algunos de los resultados de las investigaciones sobre la construcción del conocimiento de la enseñanza de las matemáticas en entornos de aprendizaje multimedia que integran espacios de interacción social en contextos b-learning. Estos ámbitos son (i) el papel de la interacción y la negociación de significados en la construcción del conocimiento; (ii) el proceso de instrumentalización del conocimiento de Didáctica de la Matemática en procesos de formación; y (iii) las características de las estructuras argumentativas en los procesos de aprender a conceptualizar la enseñanza de las matemáticas. Finalmente, se identifican nuevas cuestiones de investigación que emergen desde estas investigaciones.

Competence profile differences among graduates from different academic subject fields: implications for improving students’ education

The aim of a university education is the intellectual development of citizens, and the training of professionals for their subsequent entry into the workforce. However, this entry into the workforce, following the theoretical education usually provided by the university, implies that students have to manage this difficult transition by themselves. Society, in a continual process of transformation, requires of universities that they adjust, adapting the education they offer to comply with the demands of society and the workplace. Socio-emotional skills would seem to have influence predicting professional performance. These skills also influence job-finding and employability. Consequently, providing teachers with an education in socioemotional competences is becoming a necessary task within universities, and the majority of teaching staff consider these skills to be fundamental to the personal and socio-emotional development of students. The objective of our proposed work is to establish the characteristic profile of competences of a sample of teachers in training, and compare it with the competences profile of graduate students belonging to the fields of law sciences, social sciences, humanities, science and technology, and health. Starting from results, implications will be derived for the development of generic competences of socio-emotional type in the framework of the European Frame of Higher Education.

Assessment of Web Content Accessibility Levels in Spanish Official Online Education Environments

Diversity-based designing, or the goal of ensuring that web-based information is accessible to as many diverse users as possible, has received growing international acceptance in recent years, with many countries introducing legislation to enforce it. This paper analyses web content accessibility levels in Spanish education portals according to the international guidelines established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). Additionally, it suggests the calculation of an inaccessibility rate as a tool for measuring the degree of non-compliance with WAI Guidelines 2.0 as well as illustrating the significant gap that separates people with disabilities from digital education environments (with a 7.77% average). A total of twenty-one educational web portals with two different web depth levels (42 sampling units) were assessed for this purpose using the automated analysis tool Web Accessibility Test 2.0 (TAW, for its initials in Spanish). The present study reveals a general trend towards non-compliance with the technical accessibility recommendations issued by the W3C-WAI group (97.62% of the websites examined present mistakes in Level A conformance). Furthermore, despite the increasingly high number of legal and regulatory measures about accessibility, their practical application still remains unsatisfactory. A greater level of involvement must be assumed in order to raise awareness and enhance training efforts towards accessibility in the context of collective Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), since this represents not only a necessity but also an ethical, social, political and legal commitment to be assumed by society.

Changes in how prospective teachers anticipate secondary students’ answers

This study focuses on how prospective teachers learn about students’ mathematical thinking when (i) anticipating secondary students’ answers reflecting different characteristics of understanding and (ii) propose new activities in relation to the classification of quadrilaterals. The data were collected from forty-eight prospective secondary school teachers enrolled in an initial training programme. The results indicate three changes in how the prospective teachers anticipate secondary students’ answers in relation to the role given to a perceptual or relational perspective of the classification of quadrilaterals. These changes are described considering how prospective teachers grasp the students’ understanding of the inclusive relation among quadrilaterals as a conceptual advance. We argue that prospective teachers’ learning was promoted after participating in a structured environment where they had the opportunity to discuss how to recognize the features of student’s understanding.