Suchergebnisse

Nowadays the web development is increasingly oriented towards social and participative uses. This tendency is generating the sense that we are going into a "second step" a new and "improved" version: Web 2.0. In this report we present a proposal for the use of this web in order to develop the "Social and citizenship competence" introduced by the Spanish educational legislation (LOE, 2006) that regulates the content of the school curriculum. In this proposal we have taken into account both the potential of the 2.0 applications to encourage cooperation and social relations and the activities or instructional strategies required to encourage the contents implied in the social and citizenship competence.

This research is part of a broader project being carried out by Erain School (San Sebastian) since February-March, 2004. The project is centered on the educational use of digital video. It has been catalogued as an R&D&I Project by the Diputacion (provincial council) of Guipuzcoa and the Basque government who collaborated in financing it, together with the European Regional Development Fund. The objective for using the WebQuest was to introduce a tool that allowed self-regulated and cooperative work of students in making a scientific video. Our research question was the following one: Does the WebQuest foster self-regulated and cooperative work in the students of Secondary Education (16 years old) when making a scientific video? In order to answer this question, we present a project carried out with a group of students in their fourth year of Secondary School. These students had to produce a scientific video about the geography of Guipuzcoa (Spain) for their Geography course. In order to do so, and following strategies to undertake scientific work as designed by the instructor in a WebQuest, they carried out their research work and then prepared the video (http://www.erain.es/vde/produccion3.asp). Data collection was carried out through two surveys which were specifically designed to collect data about this context of cooperative learning. The conclusions of this paper are similar to research about cooperative learning with regard to cognitive and affective variables. Finally, we present some prospects for follow-on research about self-regulated and cooperative learning.

Participation in organized Extracurricular Activities has contributed to improve academic achievement. However, this does not happen in the same way; it depends on sex, age, or parental educational level. Our objective is to know the importance of these factor interactions¿ in the explanation of academic achievement. The sample consisted of 1148 adolescents, aged between 12 and 18 years, 52% of whom were female. Participants completed the Extracurricular Activities questionnaire, and academic and sociodemographic data were collected. The results show that differences in academic achievement depend on the adolescent stage. In early adolescence, girls improve in academic achievement, as well as with better parental education, reading of books and activity duration. On the contrary, in the middle and late adolescence, academic achievement improves with not participating in collective sports and reduced activity breadth, although parental educational level follows the same trend as in the early adolescence. These results reinforce the evolutionary hypothesis of specialization in the choice of activities throughout adolescence. In this sense, some proposals for schools that advocate for greater integration of curricular and non-curricular elements are discussed.