Assessing the relevance of higher education courses

The establishment of the European Higher Education Area has involved specifying lists of professional competencies that programs are expected to develop, and with this the need for procedures to measure how every course within a higher education program is aligned with the program's competencies. We propose an instrument for characterizing this alignment, a process that we call assessing the relevance of a course. Using information from the course syllabus (objectives, contents and assessment scheme), our instrument produces indicators for characterizing the syllabus in terms of a competence list and for assessing its coherence. Because assessment involves quality, the results obtained can also be used to revise and improve the course syllabus. We illustrate this process with an example of a methods course from a mathematics teacher education program at a Spanish university.     

How Satisfied are Spouses with their Leisure Time? Evidence from Europe

This paper first identifies the determinants of spouses’ satisfaction levels within the household with respect to their leisure time and, secondly, characterizes whether their preferences have some degree of altruistic or egoistic character in regard to this particular satisfaction. To that end, it formulates a theoretical framework from the collective family model whose stochastic formulations are estimated for 14 EU countries. The general empirical results first reveal that the presence of children has a significantly negative impact on the leisure satisfaction of both spouses. Then, increases in individual incomes lead to lower own leisure satisfaction levels. Both husbands and wives show egoistic behavior with respect to the labor and non-labor incomes (wage rate) of their respective spouses’ satisfaction levels.

Women and Poverty in Spain (1981--1991)

Social Indicators Research -     

西夏军队装备述论

西夏所处的时代,是我国古代冷兵器已得到高度发展,火药武器兴起但还处于早期的发展阶段。本文从战马、甲胄、兵器和指挥用具等四方面考察,认为西夏已经拥有冷兵器时代的高水平的军队装备,虽然其经济实力和科技水平不及宋、辽、金,但由于多种原因,彼此军队装备的水平是大体相当的。     

Characterizations based on conditional expectations

For given real functionsg andh, first we give necessary and sufficient conditions such that there exists a random variableX satisfying thatE(g(X)|X≥y)=h(y)r _x (y),∀y ∈ C _x , whereC _x andT _X are the support and the failure rate function ofX, respectively. These extend the results of Ruiz and Navarro (1994) and Ghitany et al. (1995). Next we investigate necessary and sufficient conditions such thath(y)=E(g(X)|X≥y), for a given functionh. Support for this research was provided in part by the National Science Council of the Republic of China, Grant No. NSC 86-2115-M-110-014 and NSC 88-2118-M-110-001     

Intergenerational cooperation within the household: a Public Good game with three generations

We analyze cooperation of individuals in a family context, using a Public Good game. In a lab experiment, 165 individuals from 55 three-generation families (youth, parent, and grandparent) play a repeated Public Good game in three different treatments: one in which three members of the same family play each other (family), a second with the youth and two non-family members, while preserving the previous generational structure (inter-generational), and a third in which three randomly-selected players play each other (random). We find that all the age groups cooperate more when playing with relatives, indicating that family ties may have a positive relationship to contributions to the Public Good. We also find that this trend is more evident for the youths and the parents than for the grandparents. Furthermore, young individuals tend to cooperate less than older generations, especially in non-family treatments. Our results serve as evidence of the relationship between family ties and inter-generational cooperative behaviors.

     

Urban ecosystem Services in Latin America: mismatch between global concepts and regional realities?

Urban Ecosystems - Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) is one of the most urbanized and biologically diverse regions in the world but is often characterized by weak environmental governance and...     

Sexual Practices Among a Sample of Young Lesbian and Bisexual Women from Mexico: An Exploratory Study

Objective: To describe sexual practices in Mexican lesbian and bisexual women. Materials and method: An online survey was conducted with a nonprobabilistic sample of self-identified lesbian (n?=?768) and bisexual (n?=?371) women from the 32 states of Mexico. Results: Lesbians less frequently reported having had sex with a man than bisexual women. Preferred sexual practices with other women were external genital stimulation with fingers, internal genital stimulation with fingers, and oral genital stimulation. Most (～80%) participants did not use protection to prevent sexually transmitted infections. Conclusions: Our results can inform the design of promotion and prevention programs in sexual health aimed at sexual minority women.