Quis custiodet ipsos custodes? How to detect and correct teacher cheating in Italian student data

The increasing diffusion of standardized assessments of students’ competences has been accompanied by an increasing need to make reliable data available to all stakeholders of the educational system (policy makers, teachers, researchers, families and students). In this light, we propose a multistep approach to detect and correct teacher cheating, which decreases the quality of student data offered by the Italian Institute for the Educational Evaluation of Instruction and Training. Our method integrates the “mechanistic” logic of the fuzzy clustering technique with a statistical model-based approach, and it aims to improve the detection of cheating and to correct test scores at both the class and student level. The results show a normalization of the scores and a stronger correction on data for Southern regions, where the propensity to cheat appears to be highest.     

Life on the Edge: Balancing Gendered and Occupational Identities among Unauthorized Mexican Migrant Roofers

Scholars have addressed the economic, gendered, and emotional dimensions of migration, especially as migrants move from origin to destination. However, scholarship on return migration and the subjective experiences of reintegrating to origin communities is poorly understood. In this paper, we examine the return migration of formerly unauthorized migrants who labored as roofers in the United States. We argue that the migration process redefines men’s masculinity as they attempt to balance family life in Mexico and their occupational lives in the U.S., all of which are essential for their identity but remain separated by an international border. We draw on 40 in-depth interviews with return migrant men in a small city in Guanajuato, Mexico to examine the emotional tensions men experience regarding the decision to remain in close proximity to family in Mexico and a desire to return again to their economically and emotionally fulfilling occupations in the U.S. We find that migrants’ nostalgia for prior U.S. labor market experience, in juxtaposition to reentry into the Mexican labor market, competes with current feelings of happiness and contentment obtained through family reintegration. These competing feelings, together with economic need, help explain the complex meaning of migration for return migrant men. We conclude by suggesting that once men have been exposed to U.S. life, the occupational identity becomes a “pull” that encourages future migration trips.     

Informal Learning for Citizenship Building in Shared Struggles for Rights: Cases of Political Solidarity Between Colombian and Spanish Organisations

Dominant discourses and practices in international cooperation have been characterised by depoliticisation and unequal power relationships. However, a number of more transformative experiences of cooperation also exist, where joint work between Northern and Southern social organisations is linked with a more political perspective. These kinds of experiences can be considered processes of informal learning in social action: through shared actions, strategies and frameworks and through interaction between organisations, institutions and the grassroots, informal and multidimensional learning processes occur in the people and organisations engaged. The study approaches four cases of networks that have linked Spanish and Colombian organisations which promote advocacy and social mobilisation for the defence of human rights in Colombia. The results show that people engaged in the cases experience intense learning processes that are relevant for the construction of solidarities and a radical global citizenship, but that these processes are also replete with limitations, tensions and challenges.     

Quantitatively Oriented Forms of Journalism and Their Epistemology

The contemporary availability of data and the growing possibility of their processing have also influenced the journalistic field. Several global news companies have embraced and enhanced forms of data use. This article provides an overview of research and analysis on the journalistic use of data. It discusses three broad definitions of data, computational, and automated journalism. It then debates their epistemological implications at each stage of news production (access, processing, and editing). Finally, it outlines factors that influence their future implication, focusing on education.     

ICT,young people and social work: distances and opportunities

ABSTRACT

The relationship between social work and Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is an awkward one in Spanish tradition, particularly from social work perspective due to a certain lack of institutional and professional competence in terms of understanding the capabilities of ICTs. Young people use ICTs to connect to each other and express themselves, however. ICTs represent a means—increasingly the main one—for young people to build and communicate their own identities and understand reality. As with other social sciences, social work suffers from a difficult relationship with young people. Youth is often studied differently and sometimes perceived as a problem that ends when adulthood is reached. In this context, the relationship among ICTs, social work and young people is also a difficult one. But this problem may also be a solution. By adopting a critical ICT approach, social work can create innovative initiatives and frameworks to improve communication between social work practitioners and teachers as with young people and students. Imagination and empathy will clearly be key to achieving this, in addition to deeper involvement in the use of new software and applications that can offer enhanced communication and build bridges between social workers and young people.     

Transformational leadership and job satisfaction of police officers (carabineros) in Chile: the mediating effects of group identification and work engagement / Liderazgo transformacional y satisfacción laboral en carabineros de Chile: los efectos mediadores de la identificación con el grupo y el work engagement

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between transformational leadership and work satisfaction, as well as to analyse the mediating role of group identification and work engagement in a police training process at a Chilean professional military institution. The sample was made up of 985 candidates representing all the candidates that joined the units of the country in the different locations. Officers and non-commissioned officers acting as instructors were considered ‘leaders’, while their ‘followers’ were the young candidates in the training period. It was found that all the relevant variables were positively and significantly interrelated, and a model of structural equations revealed that both work engagement and group identification played a mediating role in the relationship between transformational leadership and work satisfaction.     

Use of visitors’ perception in urban reserves in the Buenos Aires metropolis

Urban nature reserves (UR’s) fulfill unique functions for society and are irreplaceable, satisfying human needs particularly in urban and periurban areas. The aim of this paper was to use a perception based approach to analyze whether the urban nature reserves in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires, Argentina were principally used by visitors according to their main conservation mission. Five hundred written surveys designed to evaluate users’ profile and their perceptions of the selected reserves were conducted during the summer of 2009 to visitors selected at random. Collected data was analyzed by multivariate analyses. The results discriminated two groups (1 and 2) of reserves showing that people chose to visit a nature reserve for two contrasting motivations: the contemplation of nature (group 1) or active recreation (group 2). Both groups of reserves, the respondents participated in environmental programs. All respondents knew about plants whereas knowledge of the fauna was related to the visitors’ level of education. In all reserves respondents considered that nature enhance the quality of human life in the first place, and valued biodiversity en second place. Visitors in group 1 considered nature as very important, while respondents in group 2 thought that is important as a place for having fun. Our findings can potentially assist administrators to understand better how visitors perceive the reserves.     

Markers of unsustainable gambling for early detection of at-risk online gamblers

In this work we propose novel markers for identifying at-risk gamblers based on the concept of sustainability. The first hypothesis here verified is that problematic gamblers oscillate between intervals of increasing wager size followed by rapid drops, probably because they exceed their economic sustainability limits. Due to the non-periodic nature of these fluctuations, the proposed marker detects a certain occurring feature, such as a rapid drop in wager size, over a wide range of fluctuation periods, drop sizes and shapes. The second marker, counting the number of games the gambler is involved in, aims at predicting possible consequences of an exceeding amount of time dedicated to gambling, that ultimately causes social and relational breakdowns. In the experimental phase we demonstrate how the adoption of these markers allows for identifying larger segments of high- and medium-risk gamblers with respect to previous research on actual betting behaviours.