International Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making, 2023
Young people's skills and attitudes must be observed, studied and evaluated in order to create ap... more Young people's skills and attitudes must be observed, studied and evaluated in order to create appropriate models that would serve an educational purpose. In this paper, we propose a decision-making model with the aim to detect certain attitudinal and behavioral patterns of actively engaged young people. The data used in this research resulted from a questionnaire drawn up by a group of researchers from six European countries with the aim to investigate the youth's awareness about the Sustainable Development Goals and their engagement as active agents of development and change at regional level. For the purpose of this study, we selected the regional results obtained from administering this questionnaire in Dolj County (Romania) and La Rioja (Spain). We developed a neutrosophic model that determines the Mindchanger profile of the respondents based on a minimal set of questions, which is dependent on the inclusion or exclusion of the nationality-specific traits. The resulting decisions were then compared with the respondents' self-evaluations, yielding high precisions (more than 0.83) for all the investigated evaluation scenarios. Our results were significantly better than the ones provided by several machine learning models applied on the same set of data. A direct impact of our model is that it can be applied to questionnaires which include linguistic responses that express, among others, unclear or vague thoughts. Additionally, it offers the possibility to identify the minimal set of questions that impact the respondent's answer choice to a target question.
The aim of this paper is to present some aspects pertaining to the interpretation of a special ki... more The aim of this paper is to present some aspects pertaining to the interpretation of a special kind of relative clause construction, which is distinguished from restrictive and non-restrictive (appositives) relative clauses, namely amount relatives. It all started with a work by Carlson (1977) called “Amount Relatives,” in which he proposed that there was a third type of relative clause besides the traditionally recognised appositive and restrictive relatives – amount (Carlson 1977) or degree (Heim 1987) or maximalizing (Grosu & Landman 1998) relatives. The questions linguists have been trying to answer for the last 30 years is why they are called “amount” relatives and how they are different from ordinary (restrictive/non-restrictive) relatives. In the first part, we examine the approaches proposed in Carlson (1977), Heim (1987), Grosu and Landman (1998), Von Fintel (1999), McNally (2005), Herdan (2005) and Grosu (2000, 2002 and 2009). In the second part, we will briefly introduce the basic syntactic properties of the amount relatives, focusing on similarities and differences between English and Romanian. Amount relatives show restriction in the relativizers they allow, in the determiners that can combine with them (the determiners acceptable on the relative head to the ones that can be followed by an amount expression (Carlson, 1977) or to the definite and universals (Grosu and Landman, 1998)) and in their stacking possibilities. Data from Romanian seem to support these properties. Alongside with these common features, there exist in Romanian a construction which has been recently discovered (Grosu, 2009) and which will be discussed in the third part. We will present the contrasting elements that allow us to call this construction ‘a strange relative of the Romanian kind’ or a ‘Romanian unexpected relative’ (RUR) if we follow Grosu (2009). The open questions and further research topics conclude our discussion about the amount relative constructions.
To achieve the objectives in the Agenda 2030, the active participation of young people is crucial... more To achieve the objectives in the Agenda 2030, the active participation of young people is crucial, as they will be the protagonists of the scenario that will emerge at the local and global levels. In order to support young people's active participation in these issues, it is necessary to understand what dimensions can influence their decision to start and continue participation and also to increase the level of participation. The research presented here is part of the EU project Mindchangers: Regions and Youth for Planet and People and is aimed to define guidelines to support the involvement of young people in these issues. To this aim, we analyzed some good practices implemented at regional level and interviewed some youth engaged people in Pied-mont (IT) and in Dolj County (ROM). Our article highlights the results obtained in this cross-regional analysis and puts forward a set of recommendations for all actors involved in youth engagement.
To achieve the objectives in the Agenda 2030, the active participation of young people is crucial... more To achieve the objectives in the Agenda 2030, the active participation of young people is crucial, as they will be the protagonists of the scenario that will emerge at the local and global levels. In order to support young people's active participation in these issues, it is necessary to understand what dimensions can influence their decision to start and continue participation and also to increase the level of participation. The research presented here is part of the EU project Mindchangers: Regions and Youth for Planet and People and is aimed to define guidelines to support the involvement of young people in these issues. To this aim, we analyzed some good practices implemented at regional level and interviewed some youth engaged people in Pied-mont (IT) and in Dolj County (ROM). Our article highlights the results obtained in this cross-regional analysis and puts forward a set of recommendations for all actors involved in youth engagement.
Abstract: The beneficial role of extracurricular activities on academic performance and social be... more Abstract: The beneficial role of extracurricular activities on academic performance and social behaviour has been acknowledged and confirmed in numerous recent studies (Hansen et al. 2003, Darling et al. 2005 a.o.), which regard them as powerful resources for developing learners’ essential competences. In the Romanian educational system, there have been many extracurricular initiatives, including school-sanctioned projects, which are organised outside the formal educational setting and whose role is to complement formal education by developing both transversal and specialized competences in students. However, there is a scarcity of studies dealing with the students’ feedback on how these projects respond to their real needs and correlate with the objectives of their formal education. To fill this gap, this research tackles important issues regarding the impact of such projects by addressing the following questions: Do these projects meet the needs and expectations of students? Are they correlated with the objectives of the educational process? How are the educational outcomes of these projects assessed? Are there any assessment instruments to assess the impact on students’ progress? Accordingly, the objective of this research is to identify the impact of extracurricular projects on the students’ training from their own point of view, as direct beneficiaries of these educational activities. To this purpose, we investigated the feedback of a group of Romanian teenage students, aged 17-18, from two high-schools in Craiova, by means of a questionnaire-based quantitative research. In order to obtain clear, unequivocal answers, as well as exclude any undue discrimination based on how articulate respondents are (Wilson and McLean 1994: 21), the questionnaire included 12 dichotomous and multiple choice questions. We collected 228 valid responses out of 280 administered questionnaires, which were subject to quantitative analysis, in order to understand if and how the students make the shift from mere participation to active engagement. The results pointed to the students’ interest in participating in such projects, even if the concept of ‘project’ was not very clear to them. The respondents identified a set of 3 transversal competences developed within the extracurricular projects: creativity, responsibility, and communication in their native language and highlighted 3 school subjects to which they made greater progress: Foreign Languages, Romanian and Computer Science. Overall, the results showed that the respondents were aware of both the educational and social benefits of the projects they were involved in and that they are not used to answering such questionnaires and doing self-reflexive exercises. In conclusion, this study indicates that in the Romanian educational system there is still a need for a better correlation of the extracurricular and curricular activities in the benefit of developing the students’ both transversal and specialised competences. Moreover, the projects should be better tuned to students' needs and expectations through a continuous dialogue between all major actors in the educational setting. Keywords: Extracurricular projects, competences, students’ feedback, impact.
Abstract:
The beneficial role of extracurricular activities on academic performance and social b... more Abstract:
The beneficial role of extracurricular activities on academic performance and social behaviour has been acknowledged and confirmed in numerous recent studies (Hansen et al. 2003, Darling et al. 2005 a.o.), which regard them as powerful resources for developing learners’ essential competences.
In the Romanian educational system, there have been many extracurricular initiatives, including school-sanctioned projects, which are organised outside the formal educational setting and whose role is to complement formal education by developing both transversal and specialized competences in students. However, there is a scarcity of studies dealing with the students’ feedback on how these projects respond to their real needs and correlate with the objectives of their formal education. To fill this gap, this research tackles important issues regarding the impact of such projects by addressing the following questions: Do these projects meet the needs and expectations of students? Are they correlated with the objectives of the educational process? How are the educational outcomes of these projects assessed? Are there any assessment instruments to assess the impact on students’ progress? Accordingly, the objective of this research is to identify the impact of extracurricular projects on the students’ training from their own point of view, as direct beneficiaries of these educational activities.
To this purpose, we investigated the feedback of a group of Romanian teenage students, aged 17-18, from two high-schools in Craiova, by means of a questionnaire-based quantitative research. In order to obtain clear, unequivocal answers, as well as exclude any undue discrimination based on how articulate respondents are (Wilson and McLean 1994: 21), the questionnaire included 12 dichotomous and multiple choice questions. We collected 228 valid responses out of 280 administered questionnaires, which were subject to quantitative analysis, in order to understand if and how the students make the shift from mere participation to active engagement.
The results pointed to the students’ interest in participating in such projects, even if the concept of ‘project’ was not very clear to them. The respondents identified a set of 3 transversal competences developed within the extracurricular projects: creativity, responsibility, and communication in their native language and highlighted 3 school subjects to which they made greater progress: Foreign Languages, Romanian and Computer Science. Overall, the results showed that the respondents were aware of both the educational and social benefits of the projects they were involved in and that they are not used to answering such questionnaires and doing self-reflexive exercises.
In conclusion, this study indicates that in the Romanian educational system there is still a need for a better correlation of the extracurricular and curricular activities in the benefit of developing the students’ both transversal and specialised competences. Moreover, the projects should be better tuned to students' needs and expectations through a continuous dialogue between all major actors in the educational setting.
The New Testament is a collection of writings having multiple authors. The traditional view, that... more The New Testament is a collection of writings having multiple authors. The traditional view, that of the Christian Church, is that all the books were written by apostles (Mathew, Paul, Peter, John) or by the apostles’ disciples (Mark and Luke). However, with the development of literary theory and historical research, this point of view is disputed. For example, the authorship of seven out of the fourteen epistles canonically attributed to Paul is questioned by modern scholars: the Pastoral epistles (First Timothy, Second Timothy, and Titus), which are thought to be pseudoepigraphic, another three about which modern scholars are evenly divided (Ephesians, Colossians, Second Thessalonians), and the anonymous Hebrews, which, most scholars agree, wasnt written by Paul, but may have been written by a disciple of Pauls. In this paper we applied two different techniques (PCA and clustering based on rank distance) to investigate the authorship identification of Apostles’ Epistles.
Social Sciences and Education Research Review, 2020
This comparative study has a two-fold aim. On the one hand, it provides a description of the nati... more This comparative study has a two-fold aim. On the one hand, it provides a description of the national educational framework – legislative provisions, institutional strategies and policies – and the regional and local practices regarding the presence of Education for Democratic Citizenship (EDC) competences in the educational process. On the other hand, it brings together two educational systems that share a full commitment to European values and principles, but which are based on historically different and distant cultures. More specifically, this research starts from the presentation of EDC in the two contexts, comparing the presence of the EDC competences in policy and strategy documents, academic curricula and syllabi of study programmes relevant for EDC, focusing on the role and importance of education as a site of learning for democratic citizenship. Overall, it capitalizes the results obtained in the joint research work carried out within the international joint project "...
This study has investigated the development of writing skills among 9-year-old pupils during Engl... more This study has investigated the development of writing skills among 9-year-old pupils during English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes in six European countries, namely Romania, Greece, Serbia, Poland, Lithuania and Iceland. Specifically, it examines the correlation between theory (what EFL teachers should do) and practice (what they actually do) in teaching writing skills to young learners. To that end, an anonymous self-administered questionnaire consisting of 55 questions and addressing issues ranging from the status of EFL in primary education to EFL writing activities was distributed to a total of 100 teachers from the participant countries. The structure of the questionnaire follows the dichotomy theory-practice and dwells on important issues regarding the implementation of adequate methodological strategies and varied techniques in classroom practice (Barkaoui, 2007, Cole\u0026Fang, 2015). We used a 5-level Likert scale with pre-coded responses targeting both cognitive and affective components of the teacher's attitude towards writing. Additionally, we used a 4-level Likert frequency scale aimed at finding out the teacher's behaviour in writing classes and the implementation of the theoretical aspects in the classroom practice. Our preliminary findings indicate on the one hand that if we consider the informants as an overall group, the status, objectives and methodology of FL are wellknown in all participant countries, but teachers fail to put them into practice. On the other hand, the answers provided at the level of the national subgroups show that there is an irregular distribution of the correlation between theory and practice which could be explained by taking into consideration the specificity of each national educational context.
This volume of thematic studies offers multifaceted interpretations of education for sustainable ... more This volume of thematic studies offers multifaceted interpretations of education for sustainable and solidary development (ESSD). It is a joint work of academics, teachers and researchers covering the domain of education from the perspective of economy, social sciences, language studies, communication and pedagogy. The authors propose a range of reflections and empirical studies which refer to: various means and methods for an effective teaching/learning process; transversal skills related to ESSD; and the importance of financial resources and quality assurance in education. The unitary and original endeavour of this volume establishes a common meeting point for devising up-to-date methods and practices across disciplines, with a view to supporting sustainable and solidary education.
This study is based on the empirical research carried out in the project A Comparative and Transf... more This study is based on the empirical research carried out in the project A Comparative and Transferable Approach to Education for Democratic Citizenship (ACTA), funded under the EEA and Norway Grants (2014-2021) and focused on developing students’ transversal competences that lead to active citizenship during their academic activity. Starting from the premise that university curricula should integrate transversal skills and competences in order to improve the teaching-learning outcomes, and in direct relation to the targeted priorities bringing EU development policy and EU answers to global challenges, we emphasise once more the need to change first the teachers-to-be so that they would become mindchangers themselves in their future activities. Being actively involved in educating and shaping the society they live in, teachers should be equipped with appropriate skills and competences to better adapt to the changing way in which people interact with each other and perceive information and knowledge. One such skill that has become more important than ever before in the current context of digitalised education is the ability to think critically. This skill does not only help create habits of mind and behaviour, but also makes the learners, placed in the centre of the whole educational process, actively responsible for their own learning. Although it is generally considered that critical thinking skills, alongside other important transversal competences, are implicitly developed in the teaching activity, we consider it necessary to evaluate the level at which this skill is acquired. Therefore, the aim of our study is to determine the level of critical thinking of the students enrolled at the Faculty of Letters in Foreign Language (FL) programmes from the University of Craiova. In order to do that, we use the model and the assessment tool drawn up in the ACTA project to evaluate the critical thinking skills of a group of 50 students trained to become FL teachers when confronted with a problem-based situation. The evaluation is done by means of a questionnaire applied to a video and article excerpts about climate change (a global issue included in the EU 2030 Agenda) that tackles both students’ critical thinking skills, and their capacity to actively respond to the problem in question. Overall, the results of the study show that although great efforts have been made to integrate the competence-based curriculum in the teaching/learning practice, there is still a stringent need to develop educational strategies in order to enhance critical thinking and to help our students act as mindchangers in their future career. Indirectly, our analysis could be further used to evaluate the implementation of competence-based curriculum and the quality of education at a local level, at a time when educators envisage the development of appropriate skills and competences that would lead to new ways of acting and thinking in a global context.
This study has investigated the development of writing skills among 9-year-old pupils during Engl... more This study has investigated the development of writing skills among 9-year-old pupils during English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes in six European countries, namely Romania, Greece, Serbia, Poland, Lithuania and Iceland. Specifically, it examines the correlation between theory (what EFL teachers should do) and practice (what they actually do) in teaching writing skills to young learners. To that end, an anonymous self-administered questionnaire consisting of 55 questions and addressing issues ranging from the status of EFL in primary education to EFL writing activities was distributed to a total of 100 teachers from the participant countries. The structure of the questionnaire follows the dichotomy theory-practice and dwells on important issues regarding the implementation of adequate methodological strategies and varied techniques in classroom practice (Barkaoui, 2007, Cole\u0026Fang, 2015). We used a 5-level Likert scale with pre-coded responses targeting both cognitive and affective components of the teacher's attitude towards writing. Additionally, we used a 4-level Likert frequency scale aimed at finding out the teacher's behaviour in writing classes and the implementation of the theoretical aspects in the classroom practice. Our preliminary findings indicate on the one hand that if we consider the informants as an overall group, the status, objectives and methodology of FL are wellknown in all participant countries, but teachers fail to put them into practice. On the other hand, the answers provided at the level of the national subgroups show that there is an irregular distribution of the correlation between theory and practice which could be explained by taking into consideration the specificity of each national educational context.
The aim of this paper is to present some aspects pertaining to the interpretation of a special ki... more The aim of this paper is to present some aspects pertaining to the interpretation of a special kind of relative clause construction, which is distinguished from restrictive and non-restrictive (appositives) relative clauses, namely amount relatives. It all started with a work by Carlson (1977) called “Amount Relatives,” in which he proposed that there was a third type of relative clause besides the traditionally recognised appositive and restrictive relatives – amount (Carlson 1977) or degree (Heim 1987) or maximalizing (Grosu & Landman 1998) relatives. The questions linguists have been trying to answer for the last 30 years is why they are called “amount” relatives and how they are different from ordinary (restrictive/non-restrictive) relatives. In the first part, we examine the approaches proposed in Carlson (1977), Heim (1987), Grosu and Landman (1998), Von Fintel (1999), McNally (2005), Herdan (2005) and Grosu (2000, 2002 and 2009). In the second part, we will briefly introduce ...
This study has investigated the development of writing skills among 9-year-old pupils during Engl... more This study has investigated the development of writing skills among 9-year-old pupils during English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes in six European countries, namely Romania, Greece, Serbia, Poland, Lithuania and Iceland. Specifically, it examines the correlation between theory (what EFL teachers should do) and practice (what they actually do) in teaching writing skills to young learners. To that end, an anonymous self-administered questionnaire consisting of 55 questions and addressing issues ranging from the status of EFL in primary education to EFL writing activities was distributed to a total of 100 teachers from the participant countries. The structure of the questionnaire follows the dichotomy theory-practice and dwells on important issues regarding the implementation of adequate methodological strategies and varied techniques in classroom practice (Barkaoui, 2007, Cole\u0026Fang, 2015). We used a 5-level Likert scale with pre-coded responses targeting both cognitive and affective components of the teacher's attitude towards writing. Additionally, we used a 4-level Likert frequency scale aimed at finding out the teacher's behaviour in writing classes and the implementation of the theoretical aspects in the classroom practice. Our preliminary findings indicate on the one hand that if we consider the informants as an overall group, the status, objectives and methodology of FL are wellknown in all participant countries, but teachers fail to put them into practice. On the other hand, the answers provided at the level of the national subgroups show that there is an irregular distribution of the correlation between theory and practice which could be explained by taking into consideration the specificity of each national educational context.
International Journal of Information Technology & Decision Making, 2023
Young people's skills and attitudes must be observed, studied and evaluated in order to create ap... more Young people's skills and attitudes must be observed, studied and evaluated in order to create appropriate models that would serve an educational purpose. In this paper, we propose a decision-making model with the aim to detect certain attitudinal and behavioral patterns of actively engaged young people. The data used in this research resulted from a questionnaire drawn up by a group of researchers from six European countries with the aim to investigate the youth's awareness about the Sustainable Development Goals and their engagement as active agents of development and change at regional level. For the purpose of this study, we selected the regional results obtained from administering this questionnaire in Dolj County (Romania) and La Rioja (Spain). We developed a neutrosophic model that determines the Mindchanger profile of the respondents based on a minimal set of questions, which is dependent on the inclusion or exclusion of the nationality-specific traits. The resulting decisions were then compared with the respondents' self-evaluations, yielding high precisions (more than 0.83) for all the investigated evaluation scenarios. Our results were significantly better than the ones provided by several machine learning models applied on the same set of data. A direct impact of our model is that it can be applied to questionnaires which include linguistic responses that express, among others, unclear or vague thoughts. Additionally, it offers the possibility to identify the minimal set of questions that impact the respondent's answer choice to a target question.
The aim of this paper is to present some aspects pertaining to the interpretation of a special ki... more The aim of this paper is to present some aspects pertaining to the interpretation of a special kind of relative clause construction, which is distinguished from restrictive and non-restrictive (appositives) relative clauses, namely amount relatives. It all started with a work by Carlson (1977) called “Amount Relatives,” in which he proposed that there was a third type of relative clause besides the traditionally recognised appositive and restrictive relatives – amount (Carlson 1977) or degree (Heim 1987) or maximalizing (Grosu & Landman 1998) relatives. The questions linguists have been trying to answer for the last 30 years is why they are called “amount” relatives and how they are different from ordinary (restrictive/non-restrictive) relatives. In the first part, we examine the approaches proposed in Carlson (1977), Heim (1987), Grosu and Landman (1998), Von Fintel (1999), McNally (2005), Herdan (2005) and Grosu (2000, 2002 and 2009). In the second part, we will briefly introduce the basic syntactic properties of the amount relatives, focusing on similarities and differences between English and Romanian. Amount relatives show restriction in the relativizers they allow, in the determiners that can combine with them (the determiners acceptable on the relative head to the ones that can be followed by an amount expression (Carlson, 1977) or to the definite and universals (Grosu and Landman, 1998)) and in their stacking possibilities. Data from Romanian seem to support these properties. Alongside with these common features, there exist in Romanian a construction which has been recently discovered (Grosu, 2009) and which will be discussed in the third part. We will present the contrasting elements that allow us to call this construction ‘a strange relative of the Romanian kind’ or a ‘Romanian unexpected relative’ (RUR) if we follow Grosu (2009). The open questions and further research topics conclude our discussion about the amount relative constructions.
To achieve the objectives in the Agenda 2030, the active participation of young people is crucial... more To achieve the objectives in the Agenda 2030, the active participation of young people is crucial, as they will be the protagonists of the scenario that will emerge at the local and global levels. In order to support young people's active participation in these issues, it is necessary to understand what dimensions can influence their decision to start and continue participation and also to increase the level of participation. The research presented here is part of the EU project Mindchangers: Regions and Youth for Planet and People and is aimed to define guidelines to support the involvement of young people in these issues. To this aim, we analyzed some good practices implemented at regional level and interviewed some youth engaged people in Pied-mont (IT) and in Dolj County (ROM). Our article highlights the results obtained in this cross-regional analysis and puts forward a set of recommendations for all actors involved in youth engagement.
To achieve the objectives in the Agenda 2030, the active participation of young people is crucial... more To achieve the objectives in the Agenda 2030, the active participation of young people is crucial, as they will be the protagonists of the scenario that will emerge at the local and global levels. In order to support young people's active participation in these issues, it is necessary to understand what dimensions can influence their decision to start and continue participation and also to increase the level of participation. The research presented here is part of the EU project Mindchangers: Regions and Youth for Planet and People and is aimed to define guidelines to support the involvement of young people in these issues. To this aim, we analyzed some good practices implemented at regional level and interviewed some youth engaged people in Pied-mont (IT) and in Dolj County (ROM). Our article highlights the results obtained in this cross-regional analysis and puts forward a set of recommendations for all actors involved in youth engagement.
Abstract: The beneficial role of extracurricular activities on academic performance and social be... more Abstract: The beneficial role of extracurricular activities on academic performance and social behaviour has been acknowledged and confirmed in numerous recent studies (Hansen et al. 2003, Darling et al. 2005 a.o.), which regard them as powerful resources for developing learners’ essential competences. In the Romanian educational system, there have been many extracurricular initiatives, including school-sanctioned projects, which are organised outside the formal educational setting and whose role is to complement formal education by developing both transversal and specialized competences in students. However, there is a scarcity of studies dealing with the students’ feedback on how these projects respond to their real needs and correlate with the objectives of their formal education. To fill this gap, this research tackles important issues regarding the impact of such projects by addressing the following questions: Do these projects meet the needs and expectations of students? Are they correlated with the objectives of the educational process? How are the educational outcomes of these projects assessed? Are there any assessment instruments to assess the impact on students’ progress? Accordingly, the objective of this research is to identify the impact of extracurricular projects on the students’ training from their own point of view, as direct beneficiaries of these educational activities. To this purpose, we investigated the feedback of a group of Romanian teenage students, aged 17-18, from two high-schools in Craiova, by means of a questionnaire-based quantitative research. In order to obtain clear, unequivocal answers, as well as exclude any undue discrimination based on how articulate respondents are (Wilson and McLean 1994: 21), the questionnaire included 12 dichotomous and multiple choice questions. We collected 228 valid responses out of 280 administered questionnaires, which were subject to quantitative analysis, in order to understand if and how the students make the shift from mere participation to active engagement. The results pointed to the students’ interest in participating in such projects, even if the concept of ‘project’ was not very clear to them. The respondents identified a set of 3 transversal competences developed within the extracurricular projects: creativity, responsibility, and communication in their native language and highlighted 3 school subjects to which they made greater progress: Foreign Languages, Romanian and Computer Science. Overall, the results showed that the respondents were aware of both the educational and social benefits of the projects they were involved in and that they are not used to answering such questionnaires and doing self-reflexive exercises. In conclusion, this study indicates that in the Romanian educational system there is still a need for a better correlation of the extracurricular and curricular activities in the benefit of developing the students’ both transversal and specialised competences. Moreover, the projects should be better tuned to students' needs and expectations through a continuous dialogue between all major actors in the educational setting. Keywords: Extracurricular projects, competences, students’ feedback, impact.
Abstract:
The beneficial role of extracurricular activities on academic performance and social b... more Abstract:
The beneficial role of extracurricular activities on academic performance and social behaviour has been acknowledged and confirmed in numerous recent studies (Hansen et al. 2003, Darling et al. 2005 a.o.), which regard them as powerful resources for developing learners’ essential competences.
In the Romanian educational system, there have been many extracurricular initiatives, including school-sanctioned projects, which are organised outside the formal educational setting and whose role is to complement formal education by developing both transversal and specialized competences in students. However, there is a scarcity of studies dealing with the students’ feedback on how these projects respond to their real needs and correlate with the objectives of their formal education. To fill this gap, this research tackles important issues regarding the impact of such projects by addressing the following questions: Do these projects meet the needs and expectations of students? Are they correlated with the objectives of the educational process? How are the educational outcomes of these projects assessed? Are there any assessment instruments to assess the impact on students’ progress? Accordingly, the objective of this research is to identify the impact of extracurricular projects on the students’ training from their own point of view, as direct beneficiaries of these educational activities.
To this purpose, we investigated the feedback of a group of Romanian teenage students, aged 17-18, from two high-schools in Craiova, by means of a questionnaire-based quantitative research. In order to obtain clear, unequivocal answers, as well as exclude any undue discrimination based on how articulate respondents are (Wilson and McLean 1994: 21), the questionnaire included 12 dichotomous and multiple choice questions. We collected 228 valid responses out of 280 administered questionnaires, which were subject to quantitative analysis, in order to understand if and how the students make the shift from mere participation to active engagement.
The results pointed to the students’ interest in participating in such projects, even if the concept of ‘project’ was not very clear to them. The respondents identified a set of 3 transversal competences developed within the extracurricular projects: creativity, responsibility, and communication in their native language and highlighted 3 school subjects to which they made greater progress: Foreign Languages, Romanian and Computer Science. Overall, the results showed that the respondents were aware of both the educational and social benefits of the projects they were involved in and that they are not used to answering such questionnaires and doing self-reflexive exercises.
In conclusion, this study indicates that in the Romanian educational system there is still a need for a better correlation of the extracurricular and curricular activities in the benefit of developing the students’ both transversal and specialised competences. Moreover, the projects should be better tuned to students' needs and expectations through a continuous dialogue between all major actors in the educational setting.
The New Testament is a collection of writings having multiple authors. The traditional view, that... more The New Testament is a collection of writings having multiple authors. The traditional view, that of the Christian Church, is that all the books were written by apostles (Mathew, Paul, Peter, John) or by the apostles’ disciples (Mark and Luke). However, with the development of literary theory and historical research, this point of view is disputed. For example, the authorship of seven out of the fourteen epistles canonically attributed to Paul is questioned by modern scholars: the Pastoral epistles (First Timothy, Second Timothy, and Titus), which are thought to be pseudoepigraphic, another three about which modern scholars are evenly divided (Ephesians, Colossians, Second Thessalonians), and the anonymous Hebrews, which, most scholars agree, wasnt written by Paul, but may have been written by a disciple of Pauls. In this paper we applied two different techniques (PCA and clustering based on rank distance) to investigate the authorship identification of Apostles’ Epistles.
Social Sciences and Education Research Review, 2020
This comparative study has a two-fold aim. On the one hand, it provides a description of the nati... more This comparative study has a two-fold aim. On the one hand, it provides a description of the national educational framework – legislative provisions, institutional strategies and policies – and the regional and local practices regarding the presence of Education for Democratic Citizenship (EDC) competences in the educational process. On the other hand, it brings together two educational systems that share a full commitment to European values and principles, but which are based on historically different and distant cultures. More specifically, this research starts from the presentation of EDC in the two contexts, comparing the presence of the EDC competences in policy and strategy documents, academic curricula and syllabi of study programmes relevant for EDC, focusing on the role and importance of education as a site of learning for democratic citizenship. Overall, it capitalizes the results obtained in the joint research work carried out within the international joint project "...
This study has investigated the development of writing skills among 9-year-old pupils during Engl... more This study has investigated the development of writing skills among 9-year-old pupils during English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes in six European countries, namely Romania, Greece, Serbia, Poland, Lithuania and Iceland. Specifically, it examines the correlation between theory (what EFL teachers should do) and practice (what they actually do) in teaching writing skills to young learners. To that end, an anonymous self-administered questionnaire consisting of 55 questions and addressing issues ranging from the status of EFL in primary education to EFL writing activities was distributed to a total of 100 teachers from the participant countries. The structure of the questionnaire follows the dichotomy theory-practice and dwells on important issues regarding the implementation of adequate methodological strategies and varied techniques in classroom practice (Barkaoui, 2007, Cole\u0026Fang, 2015). We used a 5-level Likert scale with pre-coded responses targeting both cognitive and affective components of the teacher's attitude towards writing. Additionally, we used a 4-level Likert frequency scale aimed at finding out the teacher's behaviour in writing classes and the implementation of the theoretical aspects in the classroom practice. Our preliminary findings indicate on the one hand that if we consider the informants as an overall group, the status, objectives and methodology of FL are wellknown in all participant countries, but teachers fail to put them into practice. On the other hand, the answers provided at the level of the national subgroups show that there is an irregular distribution of the correlation between theory and practice which could be explained by taking into consideration the specificity of each national educational context.
This volume of thematic studies offers multifaceted interpretations of education for sustainable ... more This volume of thematic studies offers multifaceted interpretations of education for sustainable and solidary development (ESSD). It is a joint work of academics, teachers and researchers covering the domain of education from the perspective of economy, social sciences, language studies, communication and pedagogy. The authors propose a range of reflections and empirical studies which refer to: various means and methods for an effective teaching/learning process; transversal skills related to ESSD; and the importance of financial resources and quality assurance in education. The unitary and original endeavour of this volume establishes a common meeting point for devising up-to-date methods and practices across disciplines, with a view to supporting sustainable and solidary education.
This study is based on the empirical research carried out in the project A Comparative and Transf... more This study is based on the empirical research carried out in the project A Comparative and Transferable Approach to Education for Democratic Citizenship (ACTA), funded under the EEA and Norway Grants (2014-2021) and focused on developing students’ transversal competences that lead to active citizenship during their academic activity. Starting from the premise that university curricula should integrate transversal skills and competences in order to improve the teaching-learning outcomes, and in direct relation to the targeted priorities bringing EU development policy and EU answers to global challenges, we emphasise once more the need to change first the teachers-to-be so that they would become mindchangers themselves in their future activities. Being actively involved in educating and shaping the society they live in, teachers should be equipped with appropriate skills and competences to better adapt to the changing way in which people interact with each other and perceive information and knowledge. One such skill that has become more important than ever before in the current context of digitalised education is the ability to think critically. This skill does not only help create habits of mind and behaviour, but also makes the learners, placed in the centre of the whole educational process, actively responsible for their own learning. Although it is generally considered that critical thinking skills, alongside other important transversal competences, are implicitly developed in the teaching activity, we consider it necessary to evaluate the level at which this skill is acquired. Therefore, the aim of our study is to determine the level of critical thinking of the students enrolled at the Faculty of Letters in Foreign Language (FL) programmes from the University of Craiova. In order to do that, we use the model and the assessment tool drawn up in the ACTA project to evaluate the critical thinking skills of a group of 50 students trained to become FL teachers when confronted with a problem-based situation. The evaluation is done by means of a questionnaire applied to a video and article excerpts about climate change (a global issue included in the EU 2030 Agenda) that tackles both students’ critical thinking skills, and their capacity to actively respond to the problem in question. Overall, the results of the study show that although great efforts have been made to integrate the competence-based curriculum in the teaching/learning practice, there is still a stringent need to develop educational strategies in order to enhance critical thinking and to help our students act as mindchangers in their future career. Indirectly, our analysis could be further used to evaluate the implementation of competence-based curriculum and the quality of education at a local level, at a time when educators envisage the development of appropriate skills and competences that would lead to new ways of acting and thinking in a global context.
This study has investigated the development of writing skills among 9-year-old pupils during Engl... more This study has investigated the development of writing skills among 9-year-old pupils during English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes in six European countries, namely Romania, Greece, Serbia, Poland, Lithuania and Iceland. Specifically, it examines the correlation between theory (what EFL teachers should do) and practice (what they actually do) in teaching writing skills to young learners. To that end, an anonymous self-administered questionnaire consisting of 55 questions and addressing issues ranging from the status of EFL in primary education to EFL writing activities was distributed to a total of 100 teachers from the participant countries. The structure of the questionnaire follows the dichotomy theory-practice and dwells on important issues regarding the implementation of adequate methodological strategies and varied techniques in classroom practice (Barkaoui, 2007, Cole\u0026Fang, 2015). We used a 5-level Likert scale with pre-coded responses targeting both cognitive and affective components of the teacher's attitude towards writing. Additionally, we used a 4-level Likert frequency scale aimed at finding out the teacher's behaviour in writing classes and the implementation of the theoretical aspects in the classroom practice. Our preliminary findings indicate on the one hand that if we consider the informants as an overall group, the status, objectives and methodology of FL are wellknown in all participant countries, but teachers fail to put them into practice. On the other hand, the answers provided at the level of the national subgroups show that there is an irregular distribution of the correlation between theory and practice which could be explained by taking into consideration the specificity of each national educational context.
The aim of this paper is to present some aspects pertaining to the interpretation of a special ki... more The aim of this paper is to present some aspects pertaining to the interpretation of a special kind of relative clause construction, which is distinguished from restrictive and non-restrictive (appositives) relative clauses, namely amount relatives. It all started with a work by Carlson (1977) called “Amount Relatives,” in which he proposed that there was a third type of relative clause besides the traditionally recognised appositive and restrictive relatives – amount (Carlson 1977) or degree (Heim 1987) or maximalizing (Grosu & Landman 1998) relatives. The questions linguists have been trying to answer for the last 30 years is why they are called “amount” relatives and how they are different from ordinary (restrictive/non-restrictive) relatives. In the first part, we examine the approaches proposed in Carlson (1977), Heim (1987), Grosu and Landman (1998), Von Fintel (1999), McNally (2005), Herdan (2005) and Grosu (2000, 2002 and 2009). In the second part, we will briefly introduce ...
This study has investigated the development of writing skills among 9-year-old pupils during Engl... more This study has investigated the development of writing skills among 9-year-old pupils during English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes in six European countries, namely Romania, Greece, Serbia, Poland, Lithuania and Iceland. Specifically, it examines the correlation between theory (what EFL teachers should do) and practice (what they actually do) in teaching writing skills to young learners. To that end, an anonymous self-administered questionnaire consisting of 55 questions and addressing issues ranging from the status of EFL in primary education to EFL writing activities was distributed to a total of 100 teachers from the participant countries. The structure of the questionnaire follows the dichotomy theory-practice and dwells on important issues regarding the implementation of adequate methodological strategies and varied techniques in classroom practice (Barkaoui, 2007, Cole\u0026Fang, 2015). We used a 5-level Likert scale with pre-coded responses targeting both cognitive and affective components of the teacher's attitude towards writing. Additionally, we used a 4-level Likert frequency scale aimed at finding out the teacher's behaviour in writing classes and the implementation of the theoretical aspects in the classroom practice. Our preliminary findings indicate on the one hand that if we consider the informants as an overall group, the status, objectives and methodology of FL are wellknown in all participant countries, but teachers fail to put them into practice. On the other hand, the answers provided at the level of the national subgroups show that there is an irregular distribution of the correlation between theory and practice which could be explained by taking into consideration the specificity of each national educational context.
„Cititorul are în faţa sa o carte fascinantă. Originalitatea pregnantă a volumului Arbor Scientia... more „Cititorul are în faţa sa o carte fascinantă. Originalitatea pregnantă a volumului Arbor Scientiae constă în caracterul său inter-şi transdisciplinar. Cartea ne oferă un dialog între religie, literatură, folclor şi artă, între cuvânt şi imagine. Ea ne incită să gândim prin noi înşine, să ne chestionăm şi să imaginăm soluţii pentru tulburata epocă în care trăim.” Basarab NICOLESCU - Membru de Onoare al Academiei Române
This volume of thematic studies offers multifaceted interpretations of education for sustainable ... more This volume of thematic studies offers multifaceted interpretations of education for sustainable and solidary development (ESSD). It is a joint work of academics, teachers and researchers covering the domain of education from the perspective of economy, social sciences, language studies, communication and pedagogy. The authors propose a range of reflections and empirical studies which refer to: various means and methods for an effective teaching/learning process; transversal skills related to ESSD; and the importance of financial resources and quality assurance in education. The unitary and original endeavour of this volume establishes a common meeting point for devising up-to-date methods and practices across disciplines, with a view to supporting sustainable and solidary education.
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The beneficial role of extracurricular activities on academic performance and social behaviour has been acknowledged and confirmed in numerous recent studies (Hansen et al. 2003, Darling et al. 2005 a.o.), which regard them as powerful resources for developing learners’ essential competences.
In the Romanian educational system, there have been many extracurricular initiatives, including school-sanctioned projects, which are organised outside the formal educational setting and whose role is to complement formal education by developing both transversal and specialized competences in students. However, there is a scarcity of studies dealing with the students’ feedback on how these projects respond to their real needs and correlate with the objectives of their formal education. To fill this gap, this research tackles important issues regarding the impact of such projects by addressing the following questions: Do these projects meet the needs and expectations of students? Are they correlated with the objectives of the educational process? How are the educational outcomes of these projects assessed? Are there any assessment instruments to assess the impact on students’ progress? Accordingly, the objective of this research is to identify the impact of extracurricular projects on the students’ training from their own point of view, as direct beneficiaries of these educational activities.
To this purpose, we investigated the feedback of a group of Romanian teenage students, aged 17-18, from two high-schools in Craiova, by means of a questionnaire-based quantitative research. In order to obtain clear, unequivocal answers, as well as exclude any undue discrimination based on how articulate respondents are (Wilson and McLean 1994: 21), the questionnaire included 12 dichotomous and multiple choice questions. We collected 228 valid responses out of 280 administered questionnaires, which were subject to quantitative analysis, in order to understand if and how the students make the shift from mere participation to active engagement.
The results pointed to the students’ interest in participating in such projects, even if the concept of ‘project’ was not very clear to them. The respondents identified a set of 3 transversal competences developed within the extracurricular projects: creativity, responsibility, and communication in their native language and highlighted 3 school subjects to which they made greater progress: Foreign Languages, Romanian and Computer Science. Overall, the results showed that the respondents were aware of both the educational and social benefits of the projects they were involved in and that they are not used to answering such questionnaires and doing self-reflexive exercises.
In conclusion, this study indicates that in the Romanian educational system there is still a need for a better correlation of the extracurricular and curricular activities in the benefit of developing the students’ both transversal and specialised competences. Moreover, the projects should be better tuned to students' needs and expectations through a continuous dialogue between all major actors in the educational setting.
Keywords:
Extracurricular projects, competences, students’ feedback, impact.
the books were written by apostles (Mathew, Paul, Peter, John) or by the apostles’ disciples (Mark and Luke). However, with the
development of literary theory and historical research, this point of view is disputed. For example, the authorship of seven out of the
fourteen epistles canonically attributed to Paul is questioned by modern scholars: the Pastoral epistles (First Timothy, Second Timothy,
and Titus), which are thought to be pseudoepigraphic, another three about which modern scholars are evenly divided (Ephesians,
Colossians, Second Thessalonians), and the anonymous Hebrews, which, most scholars agree, wasnt written by Paul, but may have
been written by a disciple of Pauls. In this paper we applied two different techniques (PCA and clustering based on rank distance) to
investigate the authorship identification of Apostles’ Epistles.
The beneficial role of extracurricular activities on academic performance and social behaviour has been acknowledged and confirmed in numerous recent studies (Hansen et al. 2003, Darling et al. 2005 a.o.), which regard them as powerful resources for developing learners’ essential competences.
In the Romanian educational system, there have been many extracurricular initiatives, including school-sanctioned projects, which are organised outside the formal educational setting and whose role is to complement formal education by developing both transversal and specialized competences in students. However, there is a scarcity of studies dealing with the students’ feedback on how these projects respond to their real needs and correlate with the objectives of their formal education. To fill this gap, this research tackles important issues regarding the impact of such projects by addressing the following questions: Do these projects meet the needs and expectations of students? Are they correlated with the objectives of the educational process? How are the educational outcomes of these projects assessed? Are there any assessment instruments to assess the impact on students’ progress? Accordingly, the objective of this research is to identify the impact of extracurricular projects on the students’ training from their own point of view, as direct beneficiaries of these educational activities.
To this purpose, we investigated the feedback of a group of Romanian teenage students, aged 17-18, from two high-schools in Craiova, by means of a questionnaire-based quantitative research. In order to obtain clear, unequivocal answers, as well as exclude any undue discrimination based on how articulate respondents are (Wilson and McLean 1994: 21), the questionnaire included 12 dichotomous and multiple choice questions. We collected 228 valid responses out of 280 administered questionnaires, which were subject to quantitative analysis, in order to understand if and how the students make the shift from mere participation to active engagement.
The results pointed to the students’ interest in participating in such projects, even if the concept of ‘project’ was not very clear to them. The respondents identified a set of 3 transversal competences developed within the extracurricular projects: creativity, responsibility, and communication in their native language and highlighted 3 school subjects to which they made greater progress: Foreign Languages, Romanian and Computer Science. Overall, the results showed that the respondents were aware of both the educational and social benefits of the projects they were involved in and that they are not used to answering such questionnaires and doing self-reflexive exercises.
In conclusion, this study indicates that in the Romanian educational system there is still a need for a better correlation of the extracurricular and curricular activities in the benefit of developing the students’ both transversal and specialised competences. Moreover, the projects should be better tuned to students' needs and expectations through a continuous dialogue between all major actors in the educational setting.
Keywords:
Extracurricular projects, competences, students’ feedback, impact.
the books were written by apostles (Mathew, Paul, Peter, John) or by the apostles’ disciples (Mark and Luke). However, with the
development of literary theory and historical research, this point of view is disputed. For example, the authorship of seven out of the
fourteen epistles canonically attributed to Paul is questioned by modern scholars: the Pastoral epistles (First Timothy, Second Timothy,
and Titus), which are thought to be pseudoepigraphic, another three about which modern scholars are evenly divided (Ephesians,
Colossians, Second Thessalonians), and the anonymous Hebrews, which, most scholars agree, wasnt written by Paul, but may have
been written by a disciple of Pauls. In this paper we applied two different techniques (PCA and clustering based on rank distance) to
investigate the authorship identification of Apostles’ Epistles.
Cartea ne oferă un dialog între religie, literatură, folclor şi artă, între cuvânt şi imagine.
Ea ne incită să gândim prin noi înşine, să ne chestionăm şi să imaginăm soluţii pentru tulburata epocă în care trăim.”
Basarab NICOLESCU - Membru de Onoare al Academiei Române