The Relationship Between Social Support and Student Academic Involvement: The Mediating Role of School Belonging

Canada’s high school graduation rates are still low when compared to other members of the OECD. Previous studies have found academic involvement is associated with positive trajectories toward graduation, that social support promotes student engagement, and that school belonging could mediate this relationship. Still, little is known about the specificity of such mediation, especially in Québec. Therefore, this study examined the role of belonging as mediator of the relationship between social support and academic involvement. Participants ( N = 238) were high-school students from the Greater Montréal Area. All variables were measured by the School-Climate Questionnaire. Results from hierarchical multiple regressions indicated parental support had a direct relationship, whereas peer and teacher support had a mediated relationship by school belonging with academic involvement. Results highlight the critical role of school belonging in promoting academic involvement in relation to social support.

El aprendizaje a saltos mediante el uso de equipos de radio definida por software para la docencia en el grado en ingeniería electrónica de telecomunicación

How to design communications systems and its foundations depends on various factors such as the accessibility to learning resources, the academic environment and the audience itself. This article reports how the introduction of learning methodologies based on project based learning (PBL), practical devices and asynchronous working has modified the perception of the students about their learning aptitudes. The combination of traditional and offline sessions, with the PBL methodology to perform practical communications systems demonstrations based on professional SDR devices by group of students is presented and analysed in this article. The quantified outcome of their academic involvement due to this innovation is evaluated. The indicators shows that the overall dimensions of student learning of communications systems were improved compared with previous sessions based on simulated, non-groupal and magistral lectures.

Academic Involvement in Children’s Education: An Investigation into the Lives of Domestic Worker Parents of Kolkata

Parenting holds tremendous significance in today’s world as quality parenting facilitates the development of social and emotional competence in a child. The present study explores the dual role of domestic workers as workers and parents. Domestic Workers work from dawn to dusk to take care of their employees’ families. The obvious question arises: who takes care of their children, back home? As a parent, Domestic workers with their odd working hours and low or no literacy rate are nowadays trying to overcome the socio-economic challenges as well as handicaps of the profession by getting involved in their children’s academics. This paper investigates the effects of the length of working hours and education levels of domestic worker parents on their academic involvement with the children. The present study uses a descriptive survey research design to find out the relationship between academic involvement and work hours. The data was subjected to appropriate descriptive and inferential statistics. The results indicate a negative relationship between work hours and academicinvolvement. It is also revealed that higher education level to be associated with better academic involvement. The study thus calls for further intervention by schools and the government to motivate parents. Parent-teacher meetings may be of help in this respect along with workshops and government-sponsored programs to educate the parents to support them to climb up the socio-economic ladder through their children.