scholarly journals Predictors of Parental Contentment with the Amount of Encouraging Digital Feedback from Teachers in Finnish Schools

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 253
Author(s):  
Anne-Mari Kuusimäki ◽  
Lotta Uusitalo ◽  
Kirsi Tirri

The Finnish National curriculum obligates teachers to give parents encouraging feedback about their children’s learning and development, the aim being to build a constructive relationship between homes and schools and to encourage close collaboration among all parties. Teachers in Finland nowadays use digital platforms that allow effective online communication. The frequency and quality of such communication vary a great deal. In particular, there seems to be a lack of clarity concerning the amount of encouraging feedback delivered in this way. The focus in this paper is on the extent to which Finnish parents (N = 1117) in both urban and rural areas are content with the amount of such feedback. We carried out a logistic regression analysis to predict parental contentment with the amount of encouraging messaging, with the pupil’s grade level, parental attitudes to digital communication, as well as parental educational level and gender as independent variables. In sum, parents who were less highly educated, with a neutral-to-positive attitude to digital communication and with a child in lower secondary school were most likely to be content with the amount of communication. These results have both research and practical implications in terms of enhancing the understanding of how best to deliver encouraging digital feedback between homes and schools. Furthermore, it seems that teacher education should focus on communicative competence early on. The current study completes our three-part series of studies on digital home–school communication in Finland.

Author(s):  
Elizabeth Murphy

Abstract: The study reported on in this paper used a framework of benefits, challenges and solutions to categorize data from a design experiment using synchronous online communication for learning French as a second language (FSL). Participants were 92 Grade 6, FSL students and four teachers from urban and rural areas of Newfoundland, Canada. Data collection relied on online observation, teachers’ use of blogs and an online discussion forum, face-to-face planning and reflection meetings for teachers as well as interviews with all participants. Benefits included independence and peer-learning; authenticity and motivation; anonymity and confidence; enhanced self-esteem. Challenges related to teacher multi-tasking; poor sound quality; technical problems; momentum; grouping; scheduling. Solutions included use of student moderators; audio tutorials and direct messaging; activity tutorials; technical support and capacity building. The categories and their subcategories were grouped into two themes of positive affect and student-centered learning. Résumé : L’étude décrite dans le présent article a utilisé un cadre prenant en considération les bénéfices, les défis et les solutions afin de classer les données d’un dispositif expérimental utilisant la communication synchrone en ligne pour l’apprentissage du français langue seconde (FLS). Les participants étaient 92 élèves en FLS de sixième année et quatre enseignants de milieux urbains et ruraux de Terre-Neuve, Canada. La collecte des données s’est fondée sur l’observation en ligne, l’utilisation de cybercarnets et d’un forum de discussion en ligne par les enseignants, la planification en face-à-face et des réunions de réflexion pour les enseignants, ainsi que des entrevues avec tous les participants. Les bénéfices comprenaient : l’indépendance et l’apprentissage entre pairs; l’authenticité et la motivation; l’anonymat et la confiance; l’amélioration de l’estime de soi. Les défis se rapportaient à : la multiplicité des tâches incombant aux enseignants; la mauvaise qualité sonore; les problèmes techniques; la dynamique; le regroupement; la planification. Les solutions incluaient : l’utilisation d’élèves à titre de modérateurs; les tutoriels audio et la messagerie directe; le renforcement des capacités; les tutoriels d’activités. Les catégories et leurs sous-catégories ont été regroupées en deux thèmes, soit l’affect positif et l’apprentissage centré sur l’élève.


Africa ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Tranberg Hansen

AbstractThe rapid expansion in commercial exports of second-hand clothing from the West to the Third World and the increase in second-hand clothing consumption in many African countries raise challenging questions about the effects of globalisation and the meanings of the West and the local that consumers attribute to objects at different points of their journey across global space. This article draws on extensive research into the sourcing of second-hand clothing in the West, and its wholesaling, retailing, distribution and consumption in Zambia. Discussing how people in Zambia are deahng with the West's unwanted clothing, the article argues that a cultural economy is at work in local appropriations of this particular commodity that is opening space for local agency in clothing consumption. Clothing has a powerful hold on people's imagination because the self and society articulate through the dressed body. To provide background for this argument, the article briefly sketches recent trends in the global second-hand clothing trade that place the countries of sub-Saharan Africa as the world's largest importing region. There follows a discussion of Zambians' preoccupation with clothing, both new and second-hand, historically and at the present time. It demonstrates that the meanings consumers in Zambia attribute to second-hand clothing are neither uniform nor static but shift across class and gender lines, and between urban and rural areas. Above all, they depend on the cultural politics of their time. In dealing with clothing, people in Zambia are making sense of post-colonial society and their own place within it and in the world at large.


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 316-334
Author(s):  
Debarati Sen

This article posits that gendered militarized labour, women’s everyday entrepreneurialism and political mobilizations around subnational autonomy are intricately linked. To understand the relationship between these entities, one needs to zero in on the generational dynamics of women’s collective engagement in upholding the martial identity of Gorkhas, and the consequences of such preoccupation on the legibility of Gorkha subjects vis-à-vis the Indian state. To locate the specificity of women’s collective engagements with Gorkhaland, I propose a de-essentialized intersectional perspective in drawing up my framework of ‘subnational enterprise’. I draw from Black Feminist scholarship on the nuances of mothering and community work, strains of Feminist International Relations perspectives that attend to the invisibility of gendered labour in situations of conflict, and the emerging feminist work on entrepreneurialism which emphasize its socio-psychological aspects. My framework of subnational enterprise draws on 16 years of longitudinal ethnographic work in urban and rural areas of Darjeeling, and in this piece, I draw on life history interviews as well as unstructured interviews with men and women in Darjeeling. I advocate for grounded explorations of the relationship between militarization, discourses of belonging and gender identity to explain how right and left agendas jostle within a regional autonomy movement.


PeerJ ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. e8327
Author(s):  
Lidwina Priliani ◽  
Sukma Oktavianthi ◽  
Ria Hasnita ◽  
Hazrina T. Nussa ◽  
Rut C. Inggriani ◽  
...  

Obesity prevalence is increasing worldwide, including in the Bali Province, Indonesia, a popular tourism destination area. The common single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) rs9939609 and rs1421085 of the fat mass and obesity-associated (FTO) gene have been repeatedly reported as one of the important obesity genetic risk factors. We have examined the associations of FTO rs9939609 and rs1421085 SNPs with obesity in the 612 unrelated Balinese subjects living in urban and rural areas. Linear and logistic regression analyses with adjustment for age and gender were employed to investigate the association between FTO genotypes, haplotypes and obesity parameters. We found that the FTO SNPs genotypes increased BMI by 1.25 kg/m2 (p = 0.012) for rs9939609 AA and 1.12 kg/m2 (p = 0.022) for rs1421085 CC, particularly in females and in rural population. Subjects carrying these genotypes also showed a tendency to maintain high BMI, regardless of their age. Our result showed that the FTO rs9939609 and rs1421085 risk alleles were associated with increased BMI and obesity in the Balinese.


Author(s):  
Jinat Hosain

This study tries to explore the interrelated dynamics among cosmetic surgery, choice and empowerment. While poverty, poor health accessibility and gender inequality are common problems in Bangladesh, a growing number of cosmetic clinics are being established and a number of women are increasingly taking up cosmetic surgeries. This study seeks to explore why women choose cosmetic surgeries for beautification, how they experience it and whether cosmetic surgery leads women to be empowered or not. Using qualitative research methods, this study used in-depth semi structured interview, observation and case study method to collect the data from the different cosmetic surgery patients, coming from both urban and rural areas of Bangladesh. The data was further analyzed by coding informants' responses into themes based on the research objectives and the theory, named ‘empowerment'. The study shows that even if the women choose surgery, it does not necessarily enhance their empowerment. That is the surgery that brings changes in physical appearance and might make them attractive, but it contributes little socially in terms of enabling them to make own decision in the contest of family and in community. Rather these women act as prescribed by patriarchal norms and gendered rules. Analyzing the data from theoretical point of view, this study found that the women, irrespective of regional boundaries, can rarely fulfill the condition of empowerment in relation to choice and IAP. The study concludes with some questions and queries that need more research to be answered.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne-Mari Kuusimäki ◽  
Lotta Uusitalo-Malmivaara ◽  
Kirsi Tirri

Parents’ and teachers’ well-functioning communication supports their partnership and also benefits pupils’ well-being. Today, communication largely takes place using electronic tools. In the current study, Finnish parents’ (N = 1123) and teachers’ (N = 118) opinions on digital communication in urban and rural areas were studied by applying a new 14-item Digital Communication Scale (DCS) created for the purpose. The three-factor structured DCS was used to elucidate parents’ and teachers’ views on their partnership, feedback, and clarity of messaging. In contrast to some negative headlines and myths, the main finding of our study was overall satisfaction with digital communication, which was seen as supporting the parent-teacher partnership and providing valuable information on pupils’ development and their everyday issues. In particular, rural parents seemed satisfied with digital communication as a partnership-building tool. However, the view of parents was that they received less encouraging feedback about their children than teachers believed they had given. On the other hand, teachers experienced more ambiguity in digital communication than parents. This was more salient among urban teachers than among rural teachers. To summarize, rural parents and rural teachers saw digital communication as serving their collaboration better than did their urban peers. The results of the current study can be used for further development of parent-teacher communication in digital environments.


2019 ◽  
Vol 07 (01) ◽  
pp. 1940001
Author(s):  
Chunling LI

Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is a key component of the concept of sustainable social development advocated by the international community. The international community has successively set periodic goals for ESD, e.g. The Dakar Framework for Action and Education 2030 Framework for Action, to advance universal education that is conducive to global equity and quality development. According to the Global Education Monitoring (GEM) reports of UNESCO, ESD has made great strides on many fronts worldwide since 2000, but the gaps between countries with different incomes and levels of development remain significant, and gender and class inequalities in educational opportunities persist. China has yielded substantial results in ESD with all its indexes reaching or even surpassing the goals set in The Dakar Framework for Action. And in response to the Education 2030 Framework for Action, the Chinese Government is formulating Education 2030: Modernization of Education in China to guide China’s ESD, with the aim to raise the level of education for all, gradually address the educational inequalities among regions, between urban and rural areas, and among different social strata, and develop more inclusive and equitable quality education, thus achieving the goal of lifelong education for all.


2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Farrukh Bashir ◽  
Tusawar Iftikhar Ahmad ◽  
TEHMINA HIDAYAT

The objective of the study is to find out the causes of unemployment among educated women in Bahawalnagar district of Pakistan. The research is based on primary data collected through questionnaire method from urban and rural areas. Using probit model, the finding state that age, education, husband’s education, father’s education, mother’s education, total employed persons at home, mother’s job status and technical education are reducing unemployment while joint family system, number of children and household size are causes of higher unemployment among educated women in Bahawalnagar district.


Author(s):  
Paul Schuler ◽  
Mai Truong

While much research focuses on social media and urban movements, almost no research explores its potentially divergent effects in rural areas. Building on recent work emphasizing the multidimensional effects of online communication on vertical and horizontal information, we argue that while the Internet may facilitate large-scale urban movements, it inhibits large-scale rural movements. Because social media increases vertical information flows between government and citizens, the central government responds quickly to rural protests, preventing such protests from developing into a large-scale movement. By contrast, social media does less to change the vertical information flows in urban areas. We explore the plausibility of our argument by process tracing the evolution of protests in urban and rural areas in Vietnam in the pre-Internet and in the Internet eras.


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