Children's performance estimation in mathematics and science tests over a school year: A pilot study

The metacognitve ability to accurately estimate ones performance in a test, is assumed to be of central importance for initializing task-oriented effort. In addition activating adequate problem-solving strategies, and engaging in efficient error detection and correction. Although school children's' ability to estimate their own performance has been widely investigated, this was mostly done under highly-controlled, experimental set-ups including only one single test occasion. Method: The aim of this study was to investigate this metacognitive ability in the context of real achievement tests in mathematics. Developed and applied by a teacher of a 5th grade class over the course of a school year these tests allowed the exploration of the variability of performance estimation accuracy as a function of test difficulty. Results: Mean performance estimations were generally close to actual performance with somewhat less variability compared to test performance. When grouping the children into three achievement levels, results revealed higher accuracy of performance estimations in the high achievers compared to the low and average achievers. In order to explore the generalization of these findings, analyses were also conducted for the same children's tests in their science classes revealing a very similar pattern of results compared to the domain of mathematics. Discussion and Conclusion: By and large, the present study, in a natural environment, confirmed previous laboratory findings but also offered additional insights into the generalisation and the test dependency of students' performances estimations.

Paisajes después de la batalla

Sobre la base de un riguroso y sistemático análisis del dossier genético de la novela Paisajes después de la batalla (borradores autógrafos, recortes de prensa, sinopsis), conservado en la Diputación Provincial de Almería, Bénédicte Vauthier se adentra en el taller de escritura de Juan Goytisolo en un estudio genético verdaderamente pionero en las letras hispánicas contemporáneas peninsulares. Después de presentar el estado de los archivos y la peculiar manera de escribir de J. Goytisolo, B. Vauthier vuelve sobre la composición original de Paisajes después de la batalla, analiza cómo el autor incorporó estilísticamente el material ajeno que entró en la composición de la obra (recortes de prensa) o la informó implícita o explícitamente (intertextualidad de Gustave Flaubert, Walter Benjamin, Karl Kraus, Leila Sebbar, Lewis Carroll). Finalmente, en la óptica de una «poética de transición entre estados», B. Vauthier se interroga sobre el sentido de la supresión que Goytisolo operó en la nueva edición de su obra (2006), que se vuelve a publicar aquí respetando esta decisión de «poda». Ilustrados por numerosos facsímiles y autógrafos, los preliminares vienen seguidos de una edición crítica de la novela que permite la localización exacta