Complexidade textual e progressão escolar em dois registos : um estudo de correlação baseado em um corpus quasi-longitudinal

Tese de doutoramento, Linguística (Linguística Educacional), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Letras, 2016

Reducing task’s redundancy – the strategy of Faculty of Pharmacy Library to centralize all scientific research

Introduction – Based on a previous project of University of Lisbon (UL) – a Bibliometric Benchmarking Analysis of University of Lisbon, for the period of 2000-2009 – a database was created to support research information (ULSR). However this system was not integrated with other existing systems at University, as the UL Libraries Integrated System (SIBUL) and the Repository of University of Lisbon (Repositório.UL). Since libraries were called to be part of the process, the Faculty of Pharmacy Library’ team felt that it was very important to get all systems connected or, at least, to use that data in the library systems. Objectives – The main goals were to centralize all the scientific research produced at Faculty of Pharmacy, made it available to the entire Faculty, involve researchers and library team, capitalize and reinforce team work with the integration of several distinct projects and reducing tasks’ redundancy. Methods – Our basis was the imported data collection from the ISI Web of Science (WoS), for the period of 2000-2009, into ULSR. All the researchers and indexed publications at WoS, were identified. A first validation to identify all the researchers and their affiliation (university, faculty, department and unit) was done. The final validation was done by each researcher. In a second round, concerning the same period, all Pharmacy Faculty researchers identified their published scientific work in other databases/resources (NOT WoS). To our strategy, it was important to get all the references and essential/critical to relate them with the correspondent digital objects. To each researcher previously identified, was requested to register all their references of the ‘NOT WoS’ published works, at ULSR. At the same time, they should submit all PDF files (for both WoS and NOT WoS works) in a personal area of the Web server. This effort enabled us to do a more reliable validation and prepare the data and metadata to be imported to Repository and to Library Catalogue. Results – 558 documents related with 122 researchers, were added into ULSR. 1378 bibliographic records (WoS + NOT WoS) were converted into UNIMARC and Dublin Core formats. All records were integrated in the catalogue and repository. Conclusions – Although different strategies could be adopted, according to each library team, we intend to share this experience and give some tips of what could be done and how Faculty of Pharmacy created and implemented her strategy.

Reading Processes and Parenting Styles

Home literacy environment explains between 12 and 18.5% of the variance of children’s language skills. Although most authors agree that children whose parents encourage them to read tend to develop better and earlier reading skills, some authors consider that the impact of family environment in reading skills is overvalued. Probably, other variables of parent–child relationship, like parenting styles, might be relevant for this field. Nevertheless, no previous studies on the effect of parenting styles in literacy have been found. To analyze the role of parenting styles in the reading processes of children. Children’s perceptions of parenting styles contribute significantly to the explanation of statistical variance of children’s reading processes. 110 children (67 boys and 43 girls), aged between 7 and 11 years (M=9.22 and SD = 1.14) from Portuguese schools answered to a socio-demographic questionnaire. To assess reading processes it was administered the Portuguese adaptation (Figueira et al. in press) of Bateria de Avaliação dos Processos Leitores-Revista (PROLEC-R). To assess the parenting styles Egna Minnen av Barndoms Uppfostran-parents (EMBU-P) and EMBU-C (children version) were administered. According to multiple hierarchical linear regressions, individual factors contribute to explain all reading tests of PROLEC-R, while family factors contribute to explain most of these tests. Regarding parenting styles, results evidence the explanatory power about grammatical structures, sentence comprehension and listening. Parenting styles have an important role in the explanation of higher reading processes (syntactic and semantic) but not in lexical processes, focused by main theories concerning dyslexia.

Assessing student perceptions and comprehension of climate change in portuguese higher education institutions

The higher education system has a critical role to play in educating environmentally aware and participant citizens about global climate change. Yet, few studies have focused on higher education students’ knowledge and attitudes about this issue. This study aims to contribute to a comprehensive understanding of views and attitudes about climate change issues, across the postgraduate student population in three universities—the on Campus University of Porto and University of Coimbra, and the distance learning Universidade Aberta, Portugal. We surveyed university students and graduates from three master programs in environmental sciences targeting their knowledge, attitudes and behaviour on climate change issues, and their views of the role that their master degree had on it. A majority of the respondents believed that climate change is factual, and is largely human-induced; and a majority expressed concerns about climate change. Still, the surveyed students hold some misconceptions about basic causes and consequences of climate change. Further research is necessary to comprehend the university postgraduate students’ population, so that curricula programs can be adapted to grant consensus on scientific knowledge about climate change, and an active engagement of the graduate citizens, as part of the solution for climate change problems.