Developing Student Self-Assessment Competences in the Online Learning Environment Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic

Didactic self-assessment represents students' ability to make value judgments on their own academic performances obtained as a result of the instructive-educational process. Developing self-assessment competences in the virtual environment represents a major challenge, given that teachers' regulatory intervention to ensure the objectivity of the process is very limited. The aim of the present study conducted on a sample of 139 students from the University of Oradea, Romania was to identify how the implementation of an interactive teaching approach may contribute to the formation of student self-assessment competences as objectively as possible. The results obtained showed that most students tend to underestimate themselves in exams due to a lack of confidence in their own abilities due to insufficient preparation for the subjects studied. However, the use of specific strategies for the development of self-assessment competences can lead to their improvement but only if they are implemented constantly and to as many study subjects as possible.

Decision-making model to assess organizational climate in healthcare organizations

Organizational climate impacts on the employee’s well-being, commitment and positive behavior. Most studies to assess climate in healthcare organizations use qualitative and/or statistical methods. Here, we propose a general framework, based on a multiple criteria decision making/aid (MCDM / A) method, which considers different objectives in a single problem. Such framework includes internal and external factors to assess organizational climate and presented adequate results when tested in a particular case. To assess the organizational climate, we use the ELECTRE TRI method, an outranking method that combine the decision-maker (DM) preferences and his value judgments. We conclude that MCDM methods can improve agility, provide a systemic vision on organizational climate assessment and contribute to the decision-making process

Psychological and Cultural Analysis of Attitude to Entrepreneurship in Russia and China

The article considers the attitude to entrepreneurial activity and entrepreneurs as a social group in society, which is one of the factors of formation of economic self-determination of entrepreneurs at the present time, from the position of interdisciplinary approach in the context of historical, cultural, psychological analyses. The values of Chinese and Russian business culture were influenced by traditional religious attitudes in these countries. Theoretical analysis showed that in Chinese culture the attitude to entrepreneurship was more stable and positive, the basis of entrepreneurship is rationality, pragmatism, compliance with social hierarchy. Incoherent images are rather inherent for the Russian culture; thus, the stereotype of the entrepreneur was endowed with negative qualities, both in pre-revolutionary times, and in the Soviet period, changes towards positive side emerged only in the 2000s. The article summarizes the empirical data on the prevailing value judgments regarding such economic categories as wealth, poverty, money, as well as the formed stereotypical images of the entrepreneur. According to Russian respondents, a positive and rational attitude to money dominates, but along with positive associations, the negative ones are vividly expressed, such as: dependence, cynicism, conflict, hopelessness, retrenchment, need, quarrels, crisis, etc. From the Chinese respondents’ point of view, money and wealth are values, on which status and credibility depend, and are associated with nobility and humanity. According to Russian and Chinese respondents, the stereotype of the mo­dern entrepreneur is characterized by the following qualities: respectful for people, communicative, cooperative, critical thinking, selective, rather independent, serious, intelligent.

Implicit ways to express the author’s opinion in the publicistic discourse of Runet blogosphere

The modern analysis of journalist discourse is based on many extralinguistic factors: ethnocultural characteristics of the social environment, creating and sustaining discourse; conditions of political loyalty and the orientation of journalist discourse to the target audience, sources of discourse replenishment and conditions for its self-development in the general discourse-forming environment. These factors have a direct impact on specific ways of delivering information by the authors of the journalistic message to the individual recipient and the mass audience. The relevance of the research is determined, first of all, by the study of the features of the Russian language functioning on the Internet, which fits into the foremost problems of modern Russian studies. The novelty is associated with the analysis of specific ways of linguistic expression of the authors position in Runet journalism, which have not been specially studied so far. The purpose of the research is to consider the ways of expressing evaluation in the texts of the Runet blogs authors. The article shows that implicit ways of expressing the authors evaluation in the Runet texts have the same function as any other evaluative statements: to specifically influence the addressee. The studied material shows that the evaluativeness of the Runet blogosphere authors statements, closely interacting with expressiveness and emotionality, depends on their subjective perception of information and helps them express their point of view. The article highlights the implicit ways of expressing the authors position, which allow in an implicit but understandable form to convey the meaning of the statement to the recipient. The study used materials from Runet blogs, which most vividly and representatively show the features of the Russian-language network journalistic discourse. When working with speech material, analytical methods were used - descriptive (descriptive-analytical) and contrastive, which revealed the linguistic specifics of journalistic discourse, identified and interpreted intra-contextual and intertextual connections, established communication features. The research approaches of discourse analysis and stylistics were also used. The studied material and the results allow to conclude that implicit ways of expressing the authors position have the same goals as explicit value judgments: they emotionally affect the recipient and accurately convey the meaning of the statement. At the same time, implicitness in the Russian language successfully solves the problem of creating and maintaining the authors individuality. The prospects for this study are seen in further scientific development of various implicit ways of expressing the authors position in Runet journalism for further understanding of new processes in the Russian language, in the formation of journalistic discourse and in Russian communication in the digital space.

Value and Quality in the Dialectics between Human and Urban Capital of the City Networks on the Land District Scale

This contribution proposes an inter-scalar and multi-polar analysis evaluation model of the territory of the Enna district, aimed at providing a robust axiological representation of the salient aspects of the general issue of internal areas, and therefore of the set of criticalities affecting them from the perspective of the human and urban capital they express. In the prospect of investigating the relations between urban and life quality – corresponding to the “city effect” – in the territorial context of each of the 20 municipalities of the Enna district, a hierarchical descriptive-valuation model was created, which coordinates a relevant amount of information units (data) and the corresponding attributes, indicators and indices that have been turned in aggregate value judgments attributed to each administrative land unit, from the perspectives of the criteria referred to as the main forms of the territorial capital. This is a multi-dimensional valuation model based on the Multi-Attribute Value Theory. Each survey and processing is mapped with different levels of detail at the scale of municipalities, census sections and cadastral land units. The outcome of this complex process of analysis and assessment provides multiple comparisons, revealing unexpected and sometimes counter-intuitive aspects in several municipalities, some of which are characterised by innovative prospects and opportunities for redevelopment of their historic centers. Correlations between information units at the different levels of the dendrogram have also indicated interesting trends and attitudes, whose comparisons can address territorial policies on both a local and provincial scale. Furthermore, the focus on the “cities network” is here assumed and proposed as the privileged point of observation of territory and the related aspects of the quality of life.

Soviet Mass Loans 1946-1957: Judgments of Citizens (Based on the Materials of Ego-Documents)

The article analyzes the ego documents (diaries of Soviet citizens) of 1946-1957 containing information about Soviet mass loans of this period. The research is aimed at identifying citizens’ judgments about the practices of loan subscription campaigns, subscription amounts, the reliability of Soviet bonds, as well as value judgments about the reforms carried out by the government in this area. When writing the article, the author was guided by the principles of historicism and objectivity. General scientific methods (analysis, synthesis, induction, etc.), historical methods (problem-chronological, comparative-historical) were used in the work. The source base of the study was made up of the materials of the diaries of 21 people (4 – residents of rural areas, and 17 – citizens), of different ages (from 17 to 80 years old) and professions living in various regions of the USSR. It was revealed that the voluntary subscription to the loan was a declared propaganda technique. In fact, the subscription to the loan was an important component of the relationship of workers with the administration, and the refusal of subscription (or reduction of the subscription amount) could be fraught with conflicts with the leadership. In 1946-1957, various judgments about the subscription campaigns were recorded in the Soviet public consciousness: from positive acceptance to categorically negative assessments. In the diary entries of citizens made in the 1940s, positive assessments of loans are recorded, judgments indicating an understanding of their need for the restoration of the country. In the 1950s. negative comments prevail in the diaries. The indicated dynamics correlates with the number of cases of refusal to subscribe to a loan, which became more frequent in the 1950s. In general, we can conclude that in the 1950s a certain fatigue from the endless mobilization campaigns of the post-war period was recorded in Soviet society, one of which was the subscription to a loan.

Research on the Improvement of Teachers’ Artistic Accomplishment Based on the Status Quo of Contemporary Aesthetic Education

Contemporary aesthetic education is one of the educational methods under the contemporary cultural system, which includes contemporary educational ideas, methods, and countermeasures of art. Teachers under contemporary aesthetic education must take on the responsibility of improving their artistic qualities in this process, express differences through perceiving life, and reshape aesthetics by regulating oneself. Teachers need to be concerned about the society, and based on the present, with independent thinking, capture the essence of life and conform to the laws of art, maintain a vigilant and critical edge, advance with the times in teaching and life, as well as embody their own educational philosophies and value judgments.

How not to count the health benefits of family planning

Several influential organisations have attempted to quantify the costs and benefits of expanding access to interventions—like contraceptives—that are expected to decrease the number of pregnancies. Such health economic evaluations can be invaluable to those making decisions about how to allocate scarce resources for health. Yet how the benefits should be measured depends on controversial value judgments. One such value judgment is found in recent analyses from the Disease Control Priority Network (DCPN) and the Study Group for the Global Investment Framework for Women’s and Children’s Health. Noting the decrease in the number of pregnancies expected to result from providing access to family planning, DCPN and the Study Group claim that a substantial benefit of such interventions is averting the stillbirths and child deaths that would have resulted from those pregnancies. We argue that health economic analyses should not count such averted deaths as benefits in the same way as saved lives. First, by counting averted stillbirths and child deaths as a benefit but not counting as a cost the lives of babies who survive, DCPN and the Study Group implicitly commit themselves to antinatalism. Second, this method for calculating the benefits of family planning interventions implies that infertility treatments are harmful. Determining how potential people should be treated in health economic analyses will require grappling with population ethics.

The biopolitics of private conservation: jeopardizing labor and rhino to optimize capital?

The conservation of biodiversity has increasingly been analyzed as biopolitical. That is, conservation initiatives such as breeding programs and protected areas seek to optimize some nonhuman life forms while exposing others to harm or degradation. Biopolitical conservation studies have looked at the implications of how human and non-human lives have been valued differently. Wildlife has received more attention than the lives of conservation laborers in studies of private conservation. The article builds on Foucault's conceptualization of biopolitics to dissect the responses of the eco-tourism and wildlife breeding industries to rhino poaching in the Lowveld, South Africa. There are two central arguments. First, their responses hinge on creating new, and re-instating old, avenues of capital accumulation that ironically prioritize the optimization of the wildlife economy over the lives of rhino. Second, I show that private conservation disproportionately exposes black laborers to harm while attempting to protect rhino from poachers, a function of how conservation labor has been governed since the onset of poaching in 2008. I conclude that private conservationists in South Africa make value judgments to construct a hierarchy of life with whiteness at its apex, rhinos following closely behind, with laborers, and finally poachers at the bottom.

Cartesianism, argumentation, values in the context of Chaïm Perelman’s «New Rhetoric»

The article deals with the process of founding and further development of the new rhetoric, a theory of argumentation developed by the Belgian philosopher Chaïm Perelman (1912-1984) and his co-worker Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca (1899-1987). The intellectual and philosophical backgrounds of the authors and some key characteristics of their theoretical approaches are described. The new rhetoric: (а) is primarily concerned with argument or practical reasoning, (b) suggests that figures of speech may be arguments instead of merely ornaments, (c) with its goal to influence minds, new rhetoric is a dynamic field of study, (d) it is complimentary rather than in opposition to formal reasoning. According to Perelman, the theory of argumentation conceived as a new rhetoric or dialectic, covers the whole range of discourse that aims at persuasion and conviction, whatever the audience addressed and whatever the subject matter. Perelman presents his new rhetoric as a much better form of logic than Cartesian deductive, stringent reasoning, at least where law and other values-based systems are concerned. Perelman challenged the unwholesome assumption that what we cannot know with mathematical certainly is necessarily arbitrary, irrational, and subjective. Perelman recognized "reasoned conviction" as a bridge to knowledge, although he was aware that it was a less perfect source of cognition than verified certainty. It is explained how the idea of developing the new rhetoric was born out of dissatisfaction with logical positivism or neopositivism (The Vienna Circle’s theories and ideas) and which classical and modern sources inspired the authors in developing a specific logic of value judgments that could deal with argumentation about actions, choices, decisions and without dismissing such argumentation as irrational. The rhetorical framework of the theory is expounded and an overview is provided of the key notions and concepts of Perelman’s ‘new rhetoric’ – the notions of adherence, audience (particular and universal audience), persuasion are explained. According to Perelman, the new rhetoric is based on the idea that since argumentation aims at securing the adherence of those to whom it is addressed, it is, in its entirety, relative to the audience to be influenced. Рerelman's position on the difference between formal logic and argumentation is analyzed.