Šiandieną bendrosios programos ir išsilavinimo standartai akcentuoja moksleivių kompetencijų ugdymą. Jose aptariamos asmens kompetencijos - žinių, gebėjimų bei nuostatų visuma, įgalinanti kelti prasmingus tikslus bei jų siekti, mokytis visą gyvenimą, būti aktyviu piliečiu ir dalyvauti visuomenės gyvenime, susirasti tinkamą darbą. Kadangi bendrasis privalomasis ugdymas turi suformuoti asmens kompetencijas, todėl svarbu ne tik žinoti kokios kompetencijos yra būtinos šių dienų augančiam vaikui, bet kokios bendrosios technologinės kompetencijos galėtų būti ugdomos, atsižvelgiant į vis sparčiau tobulėjančią visuomenę. Atlikto tyrimo metu tirtos 5 ir 10 klasių moksleivių bendrosios technologinės kompetencijos. Išanalizavus mokslinę, metodinę literatūrą atskleista kompetencijų samprata. Tyrimui atlikti buvo sudarytas bendrųjų technologinių kompetencijų modelis remiantis bendrosiomis programomis ir išsilavinimo standartais Atliktoje anketinėje apklausoje dalyvavo 314 moksleivių: 205 penktokai ir 107 dešimtokai, 2 moksleiviai nenurodė kurioje klasėje mokosi. Apibendrinant atliktą literatūros analizę galima teigti, kad mokslininkai atskleisdami kompetencijų sąvoką, dažniausiai remiasi profesinėmis kompetencijomis. Šiuolaikinių edukologų darbuose kompetencija nusakoma kaip tam tikrų asmenybės nuostatų, gebėjimų, žinių, veiklos ir teisės tam tikrai veiklai atlikti visuma. Remiantis bendrosiomis programomis ir išsilavinimo standartais bendrosios technologinės kompetencijos traktuojamos... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / Today general programmes and education standards put emphasis on the development on pupils’ competence. They discuss person’s competence – a unity of knowledge, skills and attitudes enabling pupils set sensible goals and pursue them, study throughout their lives, be active citizens and participate in the social life, and find an appropriate job. Since general compulsory education is intended to form personal competence, it is important to know not only what kind of competence is necessary for a growing child of today but also what kind of the general technological competence could be developed taking into account the fast advancing society. During the research there was investigated the technological competence of 5th and 10th grade schoolchildren. Analysis of scientific methodological literature revealed the notion of competence. In order to conduct the research, there was designed a general technological competence model based on general programmes and education standards. A survey in form of questionnaires involved 314 schoolchildren: 205 5th grade pupils and 107 10th grade pupils. The results of the literature analysis allow concluding that scientists usually rely on the professional competence when assessing for the notion of competence. In works of present day educologists, competence is presented as a unity of certain personal attitudes, skills, knowledge, activity and the rights for such activity. Relying on general programmes and education standards, the general... [to full text]

Nuolat atsinaujinančioje, tobulinamoje Lietuvos švietimo sistemoje ypač aktualus kokybiško ugdymo klausimas, o veiksmingo vadovavimo problema tampa vis aktualesnė. Mokyklos vadovai turi gebėti profesionaliai valdyti mokyklą, užtikrindami sėkmingą jos veiklą bei veiksmingą tobulinimą, nukreiptą į mokinio kokybišką ugdymąsi. Tyrimo tikslas yra įvertinti mokyklų vadovų vadovavimo stiliaus įtaką pradinių klasių mokytojų profesinės ir vadybinės kompetencijos kokybei. Atlikus pedagogų apklausą, buvo nustatytas pačių pedagogų socialinės, informacijos valdymo, efektyvios veiklos, pokyčių valdymo ir edukacinės kompetencijos lygis, kuris pagal gautus rezultatus visose kompetencijose yra geras, o gebėjimų objektyvus pagrindimas pakankamas. Atlikus vadovų apklausą interviu metodu, nustatyta, kad siekdami įgyvendinti švietimo politikos uždavinius ir pasiekti ugdymo kokybės, vadovai derina vadovavimo stilius. Švietimo įstaigų vystymasis, novatoriškumas ir ugdymosi kokybė tiesiogiai priklauso nuo vadovo ir jo vadovavimo kokybės, jo komandos kompetencijos – intelektualinių ir pragmatinių administravimo mokėjimų ir įgūdžių – sąmoningos plėtotės. Tyrimo rezultatai parodė, kad ryškios pedagogų kompetencijų kokybės priklausomybės nuo vadovavimo stiliaus nepastebėta. / The topical issue of effective teaching has gained much importance in the constantly developing and reformative education system in Lithuania, while the question of efficient management is becoming more significant nowadays. It is within the competences of school managers to professionally govern the school in ensuring its successful management as well as effective improvement oriented towards the students’ potent education. On carrying out a survey of managers, it has been established that the managers shall coordinate styles of management in seeking to implement the objectives of the education policy and improve the process of teaching. The present paper aims at evaluating the impact of management style of school managers on the quality of lower class teachers’ occupational and managerial competences. Having performed the teachers’ questionnaire, the level of teachers’ social, educational, information management competences as well as the competences of effective activities and the ability to cope with unexpected changes was established. The said level is satisfactory according to the results obtained during the research, while an impartial substantiation of abilities is sufficient. The development of educational institutions, innovations and the quality of education depend mainly on the manager and his/her managerial skills, as well as on the sustainable development of his/her team’s competence, i.e. the knowledge and pragmatic skills of school administration. The... [to full text]

Biofilms are complex and highly adapted communities of microorganisms found attached to surfaces. Among the best characterized infectious multi-cellular biofilms is the oral community known as dental plaque. Streptococcus mutans resides in the oral biofilm, and is one of the main causative agents of dental caries. Streptococci are known to monitor their population density using a peptide pheromone (CSP)/two component signalling system (ComDE) in a process classically known as quorum sensing (QS). Previous work in S. mutans has implicated the QS system in genetic competence, the stress response, bacteriocin production and biofilm formation. Our objective in this work was to thoroughly characterize the transcriptional and phenotypic response to CSP in S. mutans, and determine its role in biofilm formation. We have shown that the CSP pheromone is more than simply a QS signal, and is also an inducible ‘alarmone’ capable of communicating stress in the population. We have demonstrated that elevated concentrations of CSP such as those that occur during stress trigger autolysis in a fraction of the population. Importantly, we have shown that autolysis in S. mutans occurs via a novel mechanism of action: intracellular accumulation of a self-acting bacteriocin. We have also identified and characterized the autolysis immunity protein, which is differentially regulated from the bacteriocin to allow survival at low cell density. A second regulatory system was shown to govern expression of autolysis immunity in the absence of CSP signaling, and also contribute to the oxidative stress response in the biofilm. Finally, we present evidence that autolysis is involved in the release of DNA in the biofilm, which contributes to the architecture of the extracellular matrix and may provide a mechanism for the dissemination of fitness-enhancing genes under stress. Together, our data provides a mechanistic link between phenotypes previously ascribed to the CSP pheromone in S. mutans.

Research in the field of intellectual disability (ID) has long recognized that social skills and, in turn, social acceptance, are key areas of difficulty for children with ID. However, little work has been done to examine the factors that may contribute to the development of these difficulties. This study examined early childhood parent-child interactions, as well as early characteristics of both the parent and the child, in order to identify the factors that may be relevant to the later development of social competence and social integration. The study found that the social competence of school-aged children with ID affects the extent to which they are integrated within the social and academic domains. Furthermore, school-age social competence was affected by child and parent functioning in toddlerhood. The findings have important implications for intervention, as mentally healthy, well-supported parents may pose a protective factor for at-risk children. Future studies will need to further examine the role of parent-child interactions in child development. / Thesis (Ph.D, Psychology) -- Queen's University, 2009-09-24 13:50:22.687

The overall aim of the thesis is to contribute with knowledge about the conditions for preschool children’s meaning making with regard to sustainable development. With a focus on critical actions, the thesis explores how education is executed and how a critical action may be conducted in a preschool practice. Different teaching situations in preschool have been analysed in order to determine how and which actions are privileged in the various situations, what the consequences of these actions are, and what kind of conditions that enable children to develop critical action competence. The results show that teachers affect children’s meaning making by directing actions toward a specific learning content. The conditions in which children learn action competences for sustainable development may be affected by which actions are privileged or excluded in the situation. The analyses of conditions for children to act critically in this thesis are when: the teacher aims the attention towards a pluralistic teaching content, where the content consists of value judgments. variations of views are highlighted – by the help of other children or from example different viewpoints in a book. children have the courage or/and feel safe expressing contradicting views. Although the situations in which children act critically are few and far between in the empirical material, they do exist and are important to highlight, especially as few other studies explore what meaning making processes look like when critical actions are privileged. The thesis therefore contributes to the research by providing analyses of situations in which children act critically in preschool.

The communicative competence of bilingual children involves a large array of skills---they must not only acquire the full range of communication skills of monolinguals but also learn when, how and with whom to use each language. This dissertation features three studies on the communication skills of bilingual children (French-English bilinguals aged 2.5 and 3 years from the Montreal area). Studies 1 and 2 explored these children's ability to make appropriate language choices by studying their responsiveness to two types of cues: The first study investigated whether children's language choice is influenced by their interlocutor's code-mixing; the second study examined whether children change their language in response to their interlocutor's requests for clarification following the children's use of the inappropriate language. The children demonstrated that they were capable of making on-line adjustments in their language choice in response to both types of cues, thereby showing that sensitivity to cues for language change is part of bilingual children's communicative competence from a young age. Study 3 compared bilingual and monolingual children's responses to requests for clarification following breakdowns in communication due to problematic aspects of their utterances such as speaking too softly or mispronouncing words. The findings revealed no significant differences between the bilingual and monolingual children's responses and suggest that the acquisition of conversational repair skills is not influenced by the simultaneous acquisition of two languages. Together, these three studies contribute to the understanding of the skills underlying children's ability to make appropriate language choices and suggest that the unique demands of bilingual interpersonal communication do not interfere with the acquisition of more general communication skills.

Biofilms are complex and highly adapted communities of microorganisms found attached to surfaces. Among the best characterized infectious multi-cellular biofilms is the oral community known as dental plaque. Streptococcus mutans resides in the oral biofilm, and is one of the main causative agents of dental caries. Streptococci are known to monitor their population density using a peptide pheromone (CSP)/two component signalling system (ComDE) in a process classically known as quorum sensing (QS). Previous work in S. mutans has implicated the QS system in genetic competence, the stress response, bacteriocin production and biofilm formation. Our objective in this work was to thoroughly characterize the transcriptional and phenotypic response to CSP in S. mutans, and determine its role in biofilm formation. We have shown that the CSP pheromone is more than simply a QS signal, and is also an inducible ‘alarmone’ capable of communicating stress in the population. We have demonstrated that elevated concentrations of CSP such as those that occur during stress trigger autolysis in a fraction of the population. Importantly, we have shown that autolysis in S. mutans occurs via a novel mechanism of action: intracellular accumulation of a self-acting bacteriocin. We have also identified and characterized the autolysis immunity protein, which is differentially regulated from the bacteriocin to allow survival at low cell density. A second regulatory system was shown to govern expression of autolysis immunity in the absence of CSP signaling, and also contribute to the oxidative stress response in the biofilm. Finally, we present evidence that autolysis is involved in the release of DNA in the biofilm, which contributes to the architecture of the extracellular matrix and may provide a mechanism for the dissemination of fitness-enhancing genes under stress. Together, our data provides a mechanistic link between phenotypes previously ascribed to the CSP pheromone in S. mutans.

This thesis reports the results of both normative and empirical investigations into human conditional reasoning, i.e. reasoning using if ... then and related constructions. Previous empirical investigations have concentrated on experimental paradigms like Wason's Selection Task, where subjects must assess evidence relevant to the truth or falsity of a conditional rule. Popperian falsification provided the normative theory by which to assess errorful behaviour on these tasks. However, it is doubtful whether this is an appropriate normative theory from which to derive a competence model of human reasoning abilities. The relationship between normative theory and competence model need not be direct, no more than the relationship between competence model and performance needs to be. However, research in this area has imported a theory directly into individual psychology from the philosophy of science. On the apparently orthodox assumption of directness, continued adherence to this import may stand in need of re-assessment in the light of the quite radical descriptive inadequacy of falsification as a model of rational scientific inquiry. However, this model also possesses the virtue of relating the interpretation of the rule directly to the normative task strategy. Hence, this thesis has two aims: first, to retain the virtue of a direct relation between normative task strategy and interpretation while simultaneously offering a competence model which is consistent with more recent and descriptively adequate accounts of the process of scientific inquiry. In Part I, this will involve introducing a semantic theory (situation semantics) and showing that the process of inquiry implicit in this semantic theory is consistent with recent normative conceptions in the philosophy of science. The second aim is to show that the competence model derived in Part I can provide a sound rational basis for subjects' observed patterns of reasoning in conditional reasoning tasks. In Part II, chapter 5, the data obtained from the Wason Selection Task using only affirmative rules is discussed and the behaviour observed rationally reconstructed in terms of the competence model of Part I. A central concept of that model is partial interpretation (motivated by concerns of context sensitivity). Prima facie evidence for partial interpretation is provided by the observation of defective truth tables. However, in conditional reasoning experiments using negated constituents, this evidence has been interpreted differently. A subsidiary aim of Part II (which will constitute the largest section of this thesis) therefore concerns the empirical demonstration of the consistency of this data with the competence model.

This thesis reports on an evaluation of competence-based vocational education practice in Scotland, with particular reference to Scottish Vocational Qualifications. The research was undertaken between 1996-1999 and included a national survey of higher level SVQ students in Scotland, an analysis of national database on N/SVQs and case study research with providers and students. It was found that participation in the 'new vocationalism' was highly gender patterned, had little impact on education and training targets and was skewed in favour of particular awards and occupational groups. The criterion-based assessment methodology proved more time-consuming for the students than the staff, with the emphasis on producing paper-based portfolios of evidence. A particular concern emerging from the research was the superficial nature of learning taking place on competence-based vocational education programmes and the role of the Local Enterprise Companies. These findings are discussed in the context of the growth in 'outcome-based' approaches to education adopted by policy makers in Scotland. It is argued that the narrow instrumentalist employer-led standards used to underpin education practice are ill-suited to developing a highly skilled professional workforce for the next century.

Students in Sweden are exposed to English education in the classroom from a very young age. This paper sets out to see whether bilingual or multilingual students perform better than monolingual students when acquiring English as a second or third language in Sweden. The research questions look at whether or not complex noun phrase structures can be connected to the language background of the students. The Dynamic Model of Multilingualism along with Second Language Acquisition theories suggest that students who have already acquired a second language have achieved a multilingual competence that monolingual speakers do not have, and that this multilingual competence can benefit a learner in acquiring additional languages. 64 students submitted language background surveys and essays. 12 essays were chosen to represent three different language categories: monolingual, bilingual and multilingual. The method of comparing the essays was based on the use of complex noun phrases. Two analyses were carried out: 1) on the modification of noun phrases at phrase level, and 2) on the embedding and modification of embedded noun phrases at the clause level. The results of the study are not statistically significant, but they may indicate that bilingual students create the most complex noun phrases, though the monolingual students were not far behind. The multilingual students used the least modification and also the least embedded noun phrases. Further research in this area is warranted based on the results found here.