Programa de letramento reescrevendo o futuro : uma experiência de formação de alfabetizadores no Estado do Amazonas

O presente estudo apresenta uma pesquisa qualitativa e tem como objetivo analisar a experiência de formação de alfabetizadores de EJA do Programa de Letramento Reescrevendo o Futuro desenvolvido pela Universidade do Estado do Amazonas, contemplando sua abordagem teórica e prática a fim de verificar se as formações inicial e continuada à luz das concepções construtivistas e sociointeracionistas têm possibilitado a aderência entre a teoria e prática. A proposta de formação do Programa é pautada em uma prática reflexiva e dialógica que toma como ponto de partida os saberes dos professores, que no caso do programa em questão, são na sua maioria acadêmicos dos cursos de pedagogia e normal superior da própria Universidade e de outras instituições de ensino superior. Tomaremos como referenciais para esta pesquisa, as contribuições de Maurice Tardif sobre saberes docentes, a vertente sociológica expressada pelo conceito de habitus, as contribuições de Piaget, Vygotsky e Emília Ferreiro, cujas investigações têm favorecido a consolidação de uma concepção sobre o processo de aprendizagem como resultado da ação do aprendiz e ainda a proposta metodológica de Heloisa Vilas Boas, uma Doutora brasileira em linguística, que nos apresenta uma nova alternativa didática de alfabetização.

Saberes docentes mobilizados no ensino de EJA e sua relevância na vida cotidiana do aluno

A preocupação central desta pesquisa foi compreendermos quais os saberes docentes que o professor de EJA mobiliza na organização do seu trabalho em sala de aula e a relevância desses saberes no cotidiano do aluno de Escolas Estaduais da cidade de Garanhuns, Pernambuco, Brasil. A pesquisa foi conduzida com 100 discentes da EJA que estudam em quatro escolas da referida cidade e com oito docentes que lecionam nas referidas Instituições. Procedeu-se à aplicação de um questionário validado e adaptado aos discentes e uma entrevista semi-estruturada aos docentes dessa modalidade. A análise dos dados quantitativos foi realizada por meio do programa SPSS; enquanto a análise dos dados qualitativos foi orientada pela análise de discurso. Os resultados evidenciaram a falta de formação profissional específica dos docentes para trabalhar com a EJA, bem como a necessidade de uma política educacional voltada para essa modalidade de ensino, visto que, apesar de a maioria dos professores recorrerem aos diferentes saberes adquiridos em sua trajetória, a educação de jovens e adultos ainda expressa um reflexo de exclusão e ideologia apresentando bastante dificuldade. Assim, sugere-se que muito se tem a evoluir para que toda a potencialidade utilizada a favor do ensino de jovens e adultos obtenha sucesso, tanto para construção das práticas pedagógicas de seus docentes quanto para a facilitação do processo de ensino-aprendizagem com os alunos.

Livro didático na EJA: concepções de professores e alunos no cotidiano escolar

A presente investigação teve como propósito analisar a concepção dos sujeitos professor e aluno sobre o livro didático no cotidiano escolar. A investigação foi realizada em três Escolas da Rede Municipal de Ensino, localizadas na cidade de Olinda em Pernambuco. Para tanto esse estudo resgata a trajetória da Educação de Jovens e adultos e do livro didático a partir de uma retrospectiva histórica, destacando o seu quadro legal vigente. Discutiu-se sobre o livro didático e a EJA numa perspectiva teórica com a intenção de respaldar o aporte teórico – Análise de Conteúdo – necessário para a investigação. Com o estudo realizado pode-se concluir que na concepção ideológica de professores e alunos, o livro didático caracteriza-se como um instrumento de ensino indispensável para o processo de ensino e aprendizagem. Através dessa visão, emerge um discurso ideológico que os leva a conceber o livro didático de modo não crítico e bastante distanciado da realidade que se apresenta. Constatou-se também que os professores que atuam na modalidade EJA, em sua maioria, não possuem formação específica para trabalhar nessa área; o que acentua e dificulta a reflexão sobre a qualidade e o uso do livro didático no cotidiano escolar.

Effect of unilateral hearing loss on the speech-evoked auditory brainstem response in the presence of noise

Speech-evoked auditory brainstem responses (ABRs) were acquired in quiet and in the presence of noise at two study sessions to investigate 1) test-retest variability and 2) subcortical representation of speech stimuli. Participants were adults with normal hearing in both ears who listened monaurally and adults with unilateral deafness. Results indicate consistency in responses across sessions and several differences between hearing groups for magnitudes of discrete components.

Avoidance responses of an aphidophagous ladybird, Adalia bipunctata, to aphid-tending ants

1. Insect predators often aggregrate to patches of high prey density and use prey chemicals as cues for oviposition. If prey have mutualistic guardians such as ants, however, then these patches may be less suitable for predators. 2. Ants often tend aphids and defend them against predators such as ladybirds. Here, we show that ants can reduce ladybird performance by destroying eggs and physically attacking larvae and adults. 3. Unless ladybirds are able to defend against ant attacks they are likely to have adaptations to avoid ants. We show that Adalia bipunctata ladybirds not only move away from patches with Lasius niger ants, but also avoid laying eggs in these patches. Furthermore, ladybirds not only respond to ant presence, but also detect ant semiochemicals and alter oviposition strategy accordingly. 4. Ant semiochemicals may signal the extent of ant territories allowing aphid predators to effectively navigate a mosaic landscape of sub-optimal patches in search of less well-defended prey. Such avoidance probably benefits both ants and ladybirds, and the semiochemicals could be regarded as a means of cooperative communication between enemies. 5. Overall, ladybirds respond to a wide range of positive and negative oviposition cues that may trade-off with each other and internal motivation to determine the overall oviposition strategy.

Antecedent priming at trace positions in children's sentence processing

The present study examines whether children reactivate a moved constituent at its gap position and how children's more limited working memory span affects the way they process filler-gap dependencies. 46 5-7 year-old children and 54 adult controls participated in a cross-modal picture priming experiment and underwent a standardized working memory test. The results revealed a statistically significant interaction between the participants' working memory span and antecedent reactivation: High-span children (n = 19) and high-span adults (n = 22) showed evidence of antecedent priming at the gap site, while for low-span children and adults, there was no such effect. The antecedent priming effect in the high-span participants indicates that in both children and adults, dislocated arguments access their antecedents at gap positions. The absence of an antecedent reactivation effect in the low-span participants could mean that these participants required more time to integrate the dislocated constituent and reactivated the filler later during the sentence.

Production of relative clauses in monolingual Turkish children

Research on the production of relative clauses (RCs) has shown that in English, although children start using intransitive RCs at an earlier age, more complex, bi-propositional object RCs appear later (Hamburger & Crain, 1982; Diessel and Tomasello, 2005), and children use resumptive pronouns both in acceptable and unacceptable ways (McKee, McDaniel, & Snedeker, 1998; McKee & McDaniel, 2001). To date, it is unclear whether or not the same picture emerges in Turkish, a language with an SOV word-order and overt case marking. Some studies suggested that subject RCs are more frequent in adults and children (Slobin, 1986) and yield a better performance than object RCs (Özcan, 1996), but others reported the opposite pattern (Ekmekçi, 1990). Our study addresses this issue in Turkish children and adults, and uses participants’ errors to account for the emerging asymmetry between subject and object RCs. 37 5-to-8 year old monolingual Turkish children and 23 adult controls participated in a novel elicitation task involving cards, each consisting of four different pictures (see Figure 1). There were two sets of cards, one for the participant and one for the researcher. The former had animals with accessories (e.g., a hat) whereas the latter had no accessories. Participants were instructed to hold their card without showing it to the researcher and describe the animals with particular accessories. This prompted the use of subject and object RCs. The researcher had to identify the animals in her card (see Figure 2). A preliminary repeated measures ANOVA with the factor Group (pre-school, primary-school children) showed no differences between the groups in the use of RCs (p>.1), who were therefore collapsed into one for further analyses. A repeated measures ANOVA with the factors Group (children, adults) and RC-Type (Subject, Object) showed that children used fewer RCs than adults (F(1,58)=7.54, p<.01), and both groups used fewer object than subject RCs (F(1,58)=22.46, p<.001), but there was no Group by RC-Type interaction (see Figure 3). A similar ANOVA on the rate of grammatical RCs showed a main effect of Group (F(1,58)=77.25, p<.001), a main effect of RC-Type (F(1,58)=66.33, p<.001), and an interaction of Group by RC-Type (F(1,58)=64.6, p<.001) (see Figure 4). Children made more errors than adults in object RCs (F(1,58)=87.01, p<.001), and children made more errors in object compared to subject RCs (F(1,36)=106.35, p<.001), but adults did not show this asymmetry. The error analysis revealed that children systematically avoided the object-relativizing morpheme –DIK, which requires possessive agreement with the genitive-marked subject. They also used resumptive pronouns and resumptive full-DPs in the extraction site similarly to English children (see Figure 5). These findings are in line with Slobin (1986) and Özcan (1996). Children’s errors suggest that they avoid morphosyntactic complexity of object RCs and try to preserve the canonical word order by inserting resumptive pronouns in the extraction site. Finally, cross-linguistic similarity in the acquisition of RCs in typologically different languages suggests a higher accessibility of subject RCs both at the structural (Keenan and Comrie, 1977) and conceptual level (Bock and Warren, 1986).

Laughter in the Dark: ethical aspects of drama education

This chapter considers two questions. Firstly, in what ways might drama be an effective medium through which to explore difficult and sensitive issues that concern teenagers? And secondly, what ethical questions surround the use of drama to explore such issues? A practical workshop on teenage suicide is used as a platform for a discussion on the use and implications of different drama strategies and the role of humour as a critical lens and distancing device. The work of actual teenagers is used to illustrate the effectiveness of the techniques in both raising awareness and facilitating both critical and creative responses to the delicate issue explored in the workshop.

Intake fraction of nonreactive motor vehicle exhaust in HongKong

The intake fraction (iF) of nonreactive constituents of exhaust from mobile vehicles in the urban area of HongKong is investigated using available monitoring data for carbon monoxide (CO) as a tracer of opportunity. Correcting for regional transport of carbon monoxide into HongKong, the annual-average iF for nonreactive motor vehicle emissions within the city is estimated to be around 270 per million. This estimated iF is much higher than values previously reported for vehicle emissions in US urban areas, Helsinki and Beijing, and somewhat lower than those reported for a densely populated street canyon in downtown Manhattan, New York City, or for emissions into indoor environments. The reported differences in intakefractions in various cities mainly result from the differences in local population densities. Our analysis highlights the importance of accounting for the influence of upwind transport of pollutants when using ambient data to estimate iF for an urban area. For vehicleexhaust in HongKong, it is found that the in/near vehicle microenvironment contributes similarly to the indoor home environment when accounting for the overall iF for children and adults. Keywords Intakefraction; Vehicle emission; Regional pollutant transport; Carbon monoxide; Exposure

Can nutrition be promoted through agriculture-led food price policies? A systematic review

Abstract Objective: To systematically review the available evidence on whether national or international agricultural policies that directly affect the price of food influence the prevalence rates of undernutrition or nutrition-related chronic disease in children and adults. Design: Systematic review. Setting: Global. Search strategy: We systematically searched five databases for published literature (MEDLINE, EconLit, Agricola, AgEcon Search, Scopus) and systematically browsed other databases and relevant organisational websites for unpublished literature. Reference lists of included publications were hand-searched for additional relevant studies. We included studies that evaluated or simulated the effects of national or international food-price-related agricultural policies on nutrition outcomes reporting data collected after 1990 and published in English. Primary and secondary outcomes: Prevalence rates of undernutrition (measured with anthropometry or clinical deficiencies) and overnutrition (obesity and nutrition-related chronic diseases including cancer, heart disease and diabetes). Results: We identified a total of four relevant reports; two ex post evaluations and two ex ante simulations. A study from India reported on the undernutrition rates in children, and the other three studies from Egypt, the Netherlands and the USA reported on the nutrition related chronic disease outcomes in adults. Two of the studies assessed the impact of policies that subsidised the price of agricultural outputs and two focused on public food distribution policies. The limited evidence base provided some support for the notion that agricultural policies that change the prices of foods at a national level can have an effect on population-level nutrition and health outcomes. Conclusions: A systematic review of the available literature suggests that there is a paucity of robust direct evidence on the impact of agricultural price policies on nutrition and health.

Psychopathology in Williams Syndrome: the effect of individual differences across the life span

The present research aimed to comprehensively explore psychopathology in Williams syndrome (WS) across the lifespan and evaluate the relationship between psychopathology and age category (child or adult), gender and cognitive ability. The parents of 50 participants with WS, aged 6-50 years, were interviewed using the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia for School-Age Children (K-SADS-PL). The prevalence of a wide range of Axis I DSM-IV disorders was assessed. In addition to high rates of anxiety and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) (38% and 20% respectively), 14% of our sample met criteria for a depressive disorder and 42% of participants were not experiencing any significant psychopathological difficulties. There was some evidence for different patterns of psychopathology between children and adults with WS and between males and females. These relationships were largely in keeping with those found in the typically developing population, thus supporting the validity of applying theory and treatment approaches for psychopathology in the typically developing population to WS.

Releasing of pheasants for shooting in the UK alters woodland invertebrate communities

The management of pheasants (Phasianus colchicus) in pens and their subsequent release within woodland for game shoots is widely practised in Britain. With the exception of ground flora and songbirds, the impacts on other taxa have not been well documented. We investigated the effects of pheasants on invertebrate abundance and community composition, using pitfall trapping. We compared release pens with control plots located in the same woods and in woods where no pheasant releasing had occurred for at least 25 years. Conditions for invertebrates within release pens were altered, with more annual plants and disturbance-tolerant perennials and a reduced leaf litter layer. No major differences in invertebrate abundance, or Carabidae or Staphylinidae richness, were found in spring at either the pen scale or the wood scale. However, pheasant release pens resulted in significant changes in the species composition of Carabidae, with shifts towards species typical of arable fields and grassland. Carabid species active in spring and those that are very large (N17.0 mm) declined at pheasant release densities higher than 1000 birds/ha. Both effects are likely to be due to predation by pheasants at the peak of release in July–August, operating separately on larvae and adults respectively. There was an overall increase in the abundance of detritivores, including Diplopoda, Oniscoidea, Gastropoda (snails), at higher release densities. Mean release density in our study was 1489 ± 126 birds/ha (range 174–3409, n = 37 pens) and we suggest that detrimental effects on specialist woodland invertebrates would be minimized if releasing was conducted at the recommended density of 700 birds/ha.

Convergence accommodation in orthoptic practice

Aims. Orthoptists are familiar with AC/A ratios and the concept that accommodation drives convergence, but the reverse relationship, that of the accommodation associated with convergence, is rarely considered. Methods. This article reviews published evidence from our laboratory which has investigated the drives to both vergence and accommodation. All studies involved a method by which accommodation and vergence were measured concurrently and objectively to a range of visual stimuli which manipulate blur, disparity and proximal/looming cues in different combinations. Results Results are summarised for both typical and atypical participants, and over development between birth and adulthood. Conclusions For the majority of typical children and adults, as well as patients with most heterophorias and intermittent exotropia, disparity is the main cue to both vergence and accommodation. Thus the convergence→accommodation relationship is more influential than that of accommodative vergence. Differences in “style” of near cue use may be a more useful way to think about responses to stimuli moving in depth, and their consequences for orthoptic patients, than either AC/A or CA/C ratios. The implications of a strong role for vergence accommodation in orthoptic practice are considered.

An Evaluation of”Middle Ages Dead or Live?”The first interactive exhibition at the National Museum of History

This is a study conducted at, and for, the National Museum of History in Stockholm. The aim of the study was to confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis that visitors in a traditional museum environment might not take part in interactivity in an interactive exhibition. And if they do the visitors might skip the texts and objects on display. To answer this and other questions a multiple method was used. Both non participant observations and exit interviews were conducted. After a description of the interactive exhibits, theory of knowledge and learning is presented before the gathered data is presented. All together 443 visitors were observed. In the observations the visitors were timed on how much time they spent in the room, the time spent on the interactivity, texts and objects. In the 40 interviews information about visitors’ participation in the interactivity was gathered. What interactivity the visitor found easiest, hardest, funniest and most boring.The result did not confirm the hypothesis. All kinds of visitors, children and adults, participated in the interactivities. The visitors took part in the texts and objects and the interactive exhibits.

Visuellt & Auditivt korttidsminne

The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of sensory modality on short-term memory recall. An exploratory, cross-sectional study was performed. A total of 119 individuals participated. There were 70 female and 49 male subjects, aged 4 to 80 years (M=34,3). The participants were presented with 12 different objects in auditory, visual or auditory/visual mode over a period of 24 seconds. The participants were then asked to recall as many of the 12 objects as possible in any order. The study took place at a day nursery, junior high schools, meetings with elderly and adults with house calls. Non-probability samples were used. The conclusion was that visual short-term memory generated the highest recollection and that adults had the highest mean on the different stimuli. A visual element is recommended at recollection.