Preservice Elementary Teachers’ Beliefs toward Mathematics and Mathematics Teaching

As they began their one-year teacher education program 138 elementary school teacher candidates completed a questionnaire designed to measure their beliefs concerning the nature of mathematics, measured on a scale from absolutist to fallibilist, and their beliefs concerning effective mathematics instruction, measured on a scale from traditional to constructivist. Interviews were conducted with volunteer questionnaire participants, with selection based on the questionnaire results and using two sets of criteria. Study 1. involved 8 teacher candidates showing distinct absolutist or fallibilist views of mathematics and individual interviews explored participants' beliefs concerning the use of information and communication technology, particularly interactive whiteboards (IWB), in the teaching and learning of mathematics. Participants with absolutist beliefs about the nature of mathematics tended to focus on the IWB as a presentation tool, while those with fallibilist beliefs appreciated the use of the IWB to support student exploration. Study 2. involved 8 teacher candidates with apparently misaligning absolutist beliefs concerning the nature of mathematics and constructivist beliefs concerning teaching. Interviews exploring participants' favoured instructional approaches, particularly those involving the use of manipulatives, showed that constructivist views involved essentially surface beliefs and that in fact manipulatives would be employed to support traditional direct instruction.

Software Release Planning: An Evolutionary and Iterative Approach

Abstract To achieve higher flexibility and to better satisfy actual customer requirements, there is an increasing tendency to develop and deliver software in an incremental fashion. In adopting this process, requirements are delivered in releases and so a decision has to be made on which requirements should be delivered in which release. Three main considerations that need to be taken account of are the technical precedences inherent in the requirements, the typically conflicting priorities as determined by the representative stakeholders, as well as the balance between required and available effort. The technical precedence constraints relate to situations where one requirement cannot be implemented until another is completed or where one requirement is implemented in the same increment as another one. Stakeholder preferences may be based on the perceived value or urgency of delivered requirements to the different stakeholders involved. The technical priorities and individual stakeholder priorities may be in conflict and difficult to reconcile. This paper provides (i) a method for optimally allocating requirements to increments; (ii) a means of assessing and optimizing the degree to which the ordering conflicts with stakeholder priorities within technical precedence constraints; (iii) a means of balancing required and available resources for all increments; and (iv) an overall method called EVOLVE aimed at the continuous planning of incremental software development. The optimization method used is iterative and essentially based on a genetic algorithm. A set of the most promising candidate solutions is generated to support the final decision. The paper evaluates the proposed approach using a sample project.

The reform of Welfare Regimes in Costa Rica, Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay

The aim of this article is to analyze the social policy in Latin America in a context of emerging welfare states. To understand the changes one takes into consideration the theories about institutional reform and the transformations produced in the XX century and the beginning of the XXI to substitute a social security regime mainly based on segmentation of benefi ts and on programs to fi ght poverty by another with an institutional and redistributive nature. The paper pays attention in particular to the path of the most developed welfare states of Latin America: Costa Rica, Chile, Argentina, Brasil y Uruguay.

Conscientiousness and laboriousness as academic achievement predictors in a Spanish students sample

To understand academic performance of students, the variable of conscientiousness from personality inventory Big Five, has been recognized as an important key. The aim of this paper is to analyze the relationship established between the personality factor conscientiousness itself and two of its facets, laboriousness and planning, with academic performance, and observe if there are genre differences in consciousness personality factor. A total of 456 Spanish students of high school and college participated in the study. They were requested to answer a personality report and a self inform questionnaire. The results show that both conscientiousness as a personality dimension and the consideration of laboriousness facet are able to predict academic performance, especially with regard to student’s exam marks, classroom attendance and dedication to study. The genre variable pointed out that feminine genre is more conscious than male in that personality factor. From a practical perspective, these results indicate that the establishment of a routine of continuous work is suitable for improving student grades and their adaptation to the educational environment.

Localization in Sardinia and Its Obstacles: A Reply to Hospers’ “Localization in Europe’s Periphery: Tourism Development in Sardinia”

In this reply to Hospers' “Localization in Europe's Periphery: Tourism Development in Sardinia” by Gert-Jan Hospers (2003), we argue that the author's advocacy of localized economic policies as a viable means to the economic development of Sardinia does not take into account current institutional assets that prevent Sardinia from pursuing localized interests effectively. We first discuss the historical background of these institutional assets, highlighting that a top-down approach to decision-making has characterized relations between Sardinia and the central state for most of the modern era. We then discuss the institutional and economic impediments to Sardinian attempts to pursue localized policies in light of recent institutional conflicts between region and central state. Our conclusion is that the localization of economic strategies necessitates entwined localization of decision-making powers in order to be effective.

Who We Are and Who Can Join Us: National Identity Content and Entry Criteria for New Immigrants

We argue that attitudes about immigration can be better understood by paying closer attention to the various ways in which national group boundaries are demarcated. We describe two related lines of work that address this. The first deals with national group definitions and, based on evidence from studies carried out in England and analyses of international survey data, argues that the relationship between national identification and prejudice toward immigrants is contingent on the extent to which ethnic or civic definitions of nationality are endorsed. The second, which uses European survey data, examines support for ascribed and acquired criteria that can be applied when determining who is permitted to migrate to one's country, and the various forms of national and individual threat that affect support for these criteria. We explain how the research benefits from a multilevel approach and also suggest how these findings relate to some current policy debates.

The Evolution of European Identity: Using biographical methods to study the development of European identity

Based upon the original application to the European Commission, this article gives insights into the thinking of the Euroidentities team at the point that the project began. The question: “Is the European ‘identity project’ failing?” is posed in the sense that the political and economic attainments of the European Union have not been translated into a sense of identity with or commitment to Europe from the populaces that have benefited from them. The urgency of European ‘identity work’ is asserted with a number of levels for the construction of European identity being hypothesized. Euroidentities is intended to break conceptual ground by bringing together on an equal footing two apparently antagonistic views of identity -- the collective and institutional and the individual and biographical – to give a more anchored and nuanced view of identity formation and transformation than either can provide on its own. Rather than following the dominant approaches to research on European identity that have been macro-theoretical and ‘top-down’, retrospective in-depth qualitative biographical interviews are planned since they provide the ideal means of gaining insight into the formation of a European identity or multiple identities from the ‘bottom up’ perspective of non-elite groups. The reliability of analysis will be buttressed by the use of contrastive comparison between cases, culminating in contrastive comparison across the national project teams between cases drawn from different ‘sensitized groups’ that provide the fieldwork structure of the project. The paper concludes with a summary of some of the more significant findings.

Towards an Acceptable Level of Violence: Institutional Lessons from Northern Ireland

Institutional and economic development has recently returned to the forefront of economic analysis. The use of case studies (both historical and contemporary) has been important in this revival. Likewise, it has been argued recently by economic methodologists that historical context provides a kind of ‘‘laboratory’’ for the researcher interested in real world economic phenomena. Counterterrorism economics, in contrast with much of the rest of the literature on terrorism, has all too rarely drawn upon detailed contextual case studies. This article seeks to help remedy this problem. Archival evidence, including previously unpublished material on the DeLorean case, is an important feature of this article. The article examines how an inter-related strategy, which traded-off economic, security, and political considerations, operated during the Troubles. Economic repercussions of this strategy are discussed. An economic analysis of technical and organizational change within paramilitarism is also presented. A number of institutional lessons are discussed including: the optimal balance between carrot versus stick, centralization relative to decentralization, the economics of intelligence operations, and tit-for-tat violence. While existing economic models are arguably correct in identifying benefits from politico-economic decentralization, they downplay the element highlighted by institutional analysis.

Research intensity and knowledge transfer activity in UK universities

As the innovation process has become more open and networked, Government policy in the UK has sought to promote both research excellence in the university sector and the translation of this into economic benefit through university–business engagement. However, this policy approach has tended to be applied uniformly with little account for organisational differences within the sector. In this paper we consider if differences between universities in their research performance is reflected in their knowledge transfer activity. Specifically, as universities develop a commercialization agenda are the strategic priorities for knowledge transfer, the organisational supports in place to facilitate knowledge transfer and the scale and scope of knowledge transfer activity different for high research intensive (HRI) and low research intensive (LRI) universities? The findings demonstrate that universities’ approach to knowledge transfer is shaped by institutional and organisational resources, in particular their ethos and research quality, rather than the capability to undertake knowledge transfer through a Technology Transfer Office (TTO). Strategic priorities for knowledge transfer are reflected in activity, in terms of the dominance of specific knowledge transfer channels, the partners with which universities engage and the geography of business engagement.

Emotional intelligence, personality and decoding non-verbal expressions of emotion

Previous research has highlighted theoretical and empirical links between measures of both personality and trait emotional intelligence (EI), and the ability to decode facial expressions of emotion. Research has also found that the posed, static characteristics of the photographic stimuli used to explore these links affects the decoding process and differentiates them from the natural expressions they represent. This undermines the ecological validity of established trait-emotion decoding relationships. This study addresses these methodological shortcomings by testing relationships between the reliability of participant ratings of dynamic, spontaneously elicited expressions of emotion with personality and trait EI. Fifty participants completed personality and self-report EI questionnaires, and used a computer-logging program to continuously rate change in emotional intensity expressed in video clips. Each clip was rated twice to obtain an intra-rater reliability score. The results provide limited support for links between both trait EI and personality variables and how reliably we decode natural expressions of emotion. Limitations and future directions are discussed.