The Key Role of the School Principal’s Leadership in the Schooling of Newly Arrived Immigrant Pupils in Sweden : Experiences from an Interactive Action Research Project

When newly immigrated children and young people begin school in Sweden, certain challengesarise. These may result from weak Swedish-language skills and different schooling backgrounds,as well as organizational and pedagogical limitations in the schools. This generates demands onschool leaders to lead and develop the organization and teachers competences to meet these pupils’needs. This situation was behind the initiation of the project “New Immigrants and Learning—Competence Development for Teachers and School Principals.” The project ran in schools infour Swedish municipalities, its aim was to develop leadership, organizational and pedagogicalskills that would facilitate the schooling and integration of newly arrived pupils. This article aimsto describe and discuss a Participant Action Research (PAR) based on a think tank and researchcircles, drawing special attention to the role of the school leaders. It will also examine whether theresearch circles and the project overall served to develop educational and intercultural leadership,organizational conditions, collegial learning, pedagogical methods and competence in terms ofschooling for this pupil group.

The state of the youth: prisons, drugs and car crashes

By virtue of the volume and nature of their attributions, including secondary school as well as problem-areas such as security and traffic, the Brazilian states are the ultimate responsible entities for young people. This study argues in favour of granting greater freedom for the states to define their own public policy parameters to deal with local features and to increase the degree of learning about such actions at the national level. In empirical terms, the study assesses the impacts of new laws, such as the new traffic code (from the joint work with Leandro Kume, EPGE/FGV doctor’s degree student) and traces the statistics for specific questions like drugs, violence and car accidents. The findings show that these questions produce different results for young men and women.The main characters in these dramas are young single males, suggesting the need for more distinguished public policies according not only to age, but also by gender. The study also reveals that the magnitude of these problems changes according to the youth’s social class. Prisons concern poorer men (except for the functional illiterate) while fatal car accidents and the confessed use of drugs concern upper-class boys.

Optimal taxation with gradual learning of types

An important feature of life-cycle models is the presence of uncertainty regarding one’s labor income. Yet this issue, long recognized in different areas, has not received enough attention in the optimal taxation literature. This paper is an attempt to fill this gap. We write a simple 3 period model where agents gradually learn their productivities. In a framework akin to Mirrlees’ (1971) static one, we derive properties of optimal tax schedules and show that: i) if preferences are (weakly) separable, uniform taxation of goods is optimal, ii) if they are (strongly) separable capital income is to rate than others forms of investiment.

A case study approach to classroom experiential learning of problem structuring methods

The proposed research aims at consolidating two years of practical experience in developing a classroom experiential learning pedagogic approach for the problem structuring methods (PSMs) of operational research. The results will be prepared as papers to be submitted, respectively, to the Brazilian ISSS-sponsored system theory conference in São Paulo, and to JORS. These two papers follow the submission (in 2004) of one related paper to JORS which is about to be resubmitted following certain revisions. This first paper draws from the PSM and experiential learning literatures in order to introduce a basic foundation upon which a pedagogic framework for experiential learning of PSMs may be built. It forms, in other words, an integral part of my research in this area. By September, the area of pedagogic approaches to PSM learning will have received its first official attention - at the UK OR Society conference. My research and paper production during July-December, therefore, coincide with an important time in this area, enabling me to form part of the small cohort of published researchers creating the foundations upon which future pedagogic research will build. On the institutional level, such pioneering work also raises the national and international profile of FGVEAESP, making it a reference for future researchers in this area.

Higher salaries, more teaching, better performance? The effects of the introduction of the minimum salary for teachers in Brazil

De acordo com a literatura empírica, há fortes evidências de que, após o controle de características socioeconômicas dos alunos, a qualidade dos professores é o fator mais importante para explicar o desempenho do aluno em testes padronizados. No entanto, não há consenso sobre como sistemas públicos de ensino podem melhorar a qualidade dos professores. Será que o pagamento de salários mais elevados a professores da rede pública impactam a qualidade dos professores nas escolas públicas? O Governo Federal brasileiro introduziu, em 2009, piso salarial nacional para os professores de escolas públicas, provocando um perceptível aumento exógeno dos salários dos professores municipais. O principal objetivo desta tese é avaliar os impactos de curto prazo da elevação linear e incondicional do salário do professor na qualidade da educação. Devido à ausência de dados secundários sobre o valor do salário-base de professores entre 2008 e 2013, tivemos que realizar um levantamento com as Secretarias Municipais de Educação para reunir informação sobre a estrutura da carreira docente e sobre os salários-bases nesse período. Com base em nossa pesquisa de campo, o primeiro capítulo investiga a conformidade dos sistemas municipais de ensino ao piso salarial nacional para professores de redes públicas. Encontramos que fatores não observáveis/observados são determinantes para explicar a variabilidade salarial verificada entre os municípios e o cumprimento da lei, o que embasa nossa estratégia de identificação com base em métodos de diferença em diferenças, combinados com pareamento com base em escore de propensão. O segundo capítulo centra-se na estimativa do impacto da elevação dos salários dos professores sobre a proficiência dos alunos de 5º ano do ensino fundamental municipal. De acordo com estes resultados, o aumento salarial incondicional não gerou uma expansão da proficiência escolar dos alunos, pelo menos no curto prazo. Embora não tenham sido detectados impactos na aprendizagem dos alunos, alguns mecanismos de transmissão do aumento salarial para melhores resultados educacionais podem já ter sido ativados. Assim, o principal objetivo do terceiro capítulo é avaliar o impacto dos aumentos de salário sobre a qualidade dos professores atuais e dos potenciais futuros professores. Avaliamos o impacto de aumentos de salário sobre o desempenho dos professores no ENADE, uma proxy de sua qualidade, e sobre a atratividade dos cursos de ensino superior associados à carreira docente. Essa atratividade é medida por meio da qualidade dos que entram nos respectivos cursos superiores, de acordo com seu desempenho no Enem. Neste último capítulo, aplicamos modelo de Tripla-Diferenças visando controlar dois tipos de potenciais fatores de confusão: (i) mudanças no desempenho dos professores (potenciais futuros professores) entre grupos de municípios, que foram submetidos ao tratamento e os que não foram tratados, que nada têm a ver com a política; e (ii) as alterações no desempenho de todos os professores (alunos) que vivem no município em que houve a elevação salarial devido à introdução da lei. As estimativas obtidas indicam que a elevação salarial gerou efeitos leves sobre a qualidade dos professores e sobre a atratividade dos cursos relacionados à carreira docente.

Immune response pattern of the popliteal lymph nodes of dogs with visceral leishmaniasis

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Testing time-place learning in the cichlid fish Nile tilapia

Time-place learning based on food association was investigated in the fish Nile tilapia. During a 30-day period, food was placed at one side of the aquarium (containing three compartments) in the morning and at the opposite side in the afternoon. Learning was inferred by the number of correct side choices of all fish in each day of test (15th, 30th). During the test day, fish were not fed. The Nile tilapia did not learn to switch sides at the correct day period in order to get food, suggesting thus that this species does not have time-place learning ability.

Temporal and morphological differences in post-embryonic differentiation of the mushroom bodies in the brain of workers, queens, and drones of Apis mellifera (Hymenoptera, Apidae)

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

A survey of the entomofauna associated with the inflorescences of pejibaye (Arecaceae: Bactris gasipaes Kunth) in the Ribeira Valley, SP, Brazil

A cultura da pupunheira (Bactris gasipaes Kunth) vem se expandindo no Brasil, especialmente no Vale do Ribeira, SP, onde encontra condição edafoclimática compatível à sua produção. Com o objetivo de conhecer os insetos visitantes da inflorescência da pupunheira, foi realizado levantamento em duas áreas de coleção de pupunheiras selecionadas originárias de Yurimaguas, Peru, no - Polo Regional do Vale do Ribeira - APTA/SAA-SP, localizado no Município de Pariquera-açu, SP, e em uma propriedade particular no Município de Registro, SP. Durante o mês de janeiro de 2006 e 2007, foram instaladas armadilhas adesivas entomológicas amarelas em inflorescências de diferentes matrizes de pupunheira logo após a abertura de suas brácteas, as quais foram mantidas durante a antese feminina e masculina e retiradas no término do ciclo, cerca de 72 horas. Efetuou-se a separação, contagem e identificação ao nível de ordem dos 9.743 insetos totais coletados. Verificou-se que os insetos mais frequentes na inflorescência da pupunheira no Vale do Ribeira, SP, pertencem às ordens Diptera, Coleoptera e Hymenoptera.

Distribution and biological role of the oligopeptide-binding protein (OppA) in Xanthomonas species

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Monotonicity of the zeros of orthogonal polynomials through related measures

Relation between two sequences of orthogonal polynomials, where the associated measures are related to each other by a first degree polynomial multiplication (or division), is well known. We use this relation to study the monotonicity properties of the zeros of generalized orthogonal polynomials. As examples, the Jacobi, Laguerre and Charlier polynomials are considered. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Hypoactivity of the central dopaminergic system and autistic-like behavior induced by a single early prenatal exposure to lipopolysaccharide

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Variational studies and replica symmetry breaking in the generalization problem of the binary perceptron

We analyze the average performance of a general class of learning algorithms for the nondeterministic polynomial time complete problem of rule extraction by a binary perceptron. The examples are generated by a rule implemented by a teacher network of similar architecture. A variational approach is used in trying to identify the potential energy that leads to the largest generalization in the thermodynamic limit. We restrict our search to algorithms that always satisfy the binary constraints. A replica symmetric ansatz leads to a learning algorithm which presents a phase transition in violation of an information theoretical bound. Stability analysis shows that this is due to a failure of the replica symmetric ansatz and the first step of replica symmetry breaking (RSB) is studied. The variational method does not determine a unique potential but it allows construction of a class with a unique minimum within each first order valley. Members of this class improve on the performance of Gibbs algorithm but fail to reach the Bayesian limit in the low generalization phase. They even fail to reach the performance of the best binary, an optimal clipping of the barycenter of version space. We find a trade-off between a good low performance and early onset of perfect generalization. Although the RSB may be locally stable we discuss the possibility that it fails to be the correct saddle point globally. ©2000 The American Physical Society.

Toward an Explanation of the Genesis of Ketamine-Induced Perceptual Distortions and Hallucinatory States

The NMDA receptor (NMDAR) channel has been proposed to function as a coincidence-detection mechanism for afferent and reentrant signals, supporting conscious perception, learning, and memory formation. In this paper we discuss the genesis of distorted perceptual states induced by subanesthetic doses of ketamine, a well-known NMDA antagonist. NMDAR blockage has been suggested to perturb perceptual processing in sensory cortex, and also to decrease GABAergic inhibition in limbic areas (leading to an increase in dopamine excitability). We propose that perceptual distortions and hallucinations induced by ketamine blocking of NMDARs are generated by alternative signaling pathways, which include increase of excitability in frontal areas, and glutamate binding to AMPA in sensory cortex prompting Ca++ entry through voltage-dependent calcium channels (VDCCs). This mechanism supports the thesis that glutamate binding to AMPA and NMDARs at sensory cortex mediates most normal perception, while binding to AMPA and activating VDCCs mediates some types of altered perceptual states. We suggest that Ca++ metabolic activity in neurons at associative and sensory cortices is an important factor in the generation of both kinds of perceptual consciousness.

The transformation of the North American apparel industry: is NAFTA a curse or a blessing?

Includes bibliography