1,721,059 research outputs found
Caught in the middle : Italian middle class mothers facing school choice dilemmas in London
No full textResearch on schooling decisions in market-oriented educational systems has explored how school choice proves to be a powerful mechanism for the reproduction of native middle-class advantage. The literature has widely pointed out that middle-class parents, thanks to their specific forms of economic, cultural and social capital, are more capable than lower-class ones to evaluate different alternatives and to succeed in accessing their selected options. For middle-class parents, school choice also means deploying strategies of avoidance and distinction from other less advantaged social groups, in terms of ethnicity and/or class. Just recently research on school choice have expanded its focus to encompass also the educational decisions of migrant and ethnic minority parents, showing how their chance to make the “right choice” could be jeopardized by the lack of country-specific cultural capital, fundamental for understanding the functioning of local educational systems, as well as by the economic forms of disadvantage which often characterizes these groups.
However, research has just partially explored the different ways in which class is ethnicized and ethnicity is classed: while research on middle-class school choice has generally overlooked (and taken for granted) parents’ whiteness, research on foreign parents has, on the contrary, mainly focused on non-white, extra-EU and economically disadvantaged ethnic minorities.
This article aims to partially bridge this gap, exploring intra-EU, Italian high-skilled migrants’ schooling decisions and preferences. It draws on 28 semi-structured qualitative interviews to Italian mothers living in London, exploring their views and dilemmas concerning their children’s schooling choices since the very beginning of their educational paths. Looking at the different ways in which mothers discuss school choices’ issues, according to their values, cultural and material resources, we will show how they differently interpret, face and negotiate the functioning of the British educational system, very different from the one they were socialized to. While their efforts to make the “right choice” closely evoke the strategies, contradictions and dilemmas experienced by the native middle-classes, their being Italian middle-class parents in London also opens up specific grounds for maneuvering and re-negotiating their inherited, culturally-grounded ideas of school and childhood in a foreign context
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Teachers’ guidance, family participation and track choice: the educational disadvantage of immigrant students in Italy
No full textIn Italy, as in other European countries, students of foreign origin are over-represented in the vocational school tracks, with relevant consequences on their limited chances of attaining a university degree. While research has long underlined the weight that a family’s social, cultural and economic capital has on a child’s school performance, educational expectations and choices, the role that school and teachers themselves play in the transition from lower to upper secondary school has been rarely explored in Italian sociological research. The present study aims to bridge this gap in the literature, showing how teachers’ orienting practices, interacting with highly differentiated patterns of family participation in the school guidance process, can play a relevant role in reproducing foreign-origin students’ segregation into the lower tracks of the school system
L’orientamento nella scuola media : una possibile causa della segregazione etnica nella scuola superiore?
No full textStudi recenti hanno rivelato che, al termine della scuola secondaria di primo grado, gli studenti con background migratorio scelgono più frequentemente degli studenti italiani percorsi tecnici e professionali. In questo articolo –— basato su 26 interviste condotte con insegnanti e dirigenti didattici di scuole secondarie di primo e secondo grado nella città di Milano — ci siamo interrogati sul ruolo che le pratiche di orientamento possono giocare nel contribuire a tali processi di segregazione. I dati raccolti evidenziano che le rappresentazioni degli insegnanti sulle capacità degli alunni stranieri e sulle loro condizioni socio-economiche — combinate a diverse forme di partecipazione delle famiglie al processo di orientamento — possono contribuire a spiegare perché gli studenti con background migratorio intraprendono meno frequentemente degli italiani i percorsi più ambiziosi e orientati all’università come i licei.Recent studies have shown that, at the end of lower secondary school, students with a migratory background choose technical and professional school careers more often than Italian students. In this article — based on 26 interviews conducted with teachers and heads of lower and upper secondary schools in the city of Milan — we wonder what role vocational guidance practices can play in contributing to these segregation processes. The data gleaned highlight that teachers’ ideas of what foreign students are capable of and of their socioeconomic status — together with varying degrees of participation of the families in the vocational guidance process — can contribute to explaining why students with a migratory background embark on more ambitious school careers geared towards university study, like lyceums, less frequently than Italian students
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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