“This is a disturbing case”. la corte suprema canadese tra libertà di religione, multiculturalismo e interesse pubblico secolare

Il 2 Novembre 2017 la Corte Suprema Canadese si è definitivamente espressa sul caso Ktunaxa Nation v. British Columbia (Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations)2, nato dall’annosa controversia relativa alla costruzione di uno ski-resort nella provincia candese della British Columbia all’interno dell’area denominata Qat’muk, ovvero della Jumbo Valley. La sentenza – in controtendenza rispetto all’apertura tradizionalmente dimostrata dai giudici supremi canadesi – segna un cambio di rotta nell’interpretazione e nell’affermazione della libertà di religione, se posta in relazione ai diritti fondiari delle popolazioni aborigene, in ragione della supremazia dell’interesse pubblico dello Stato. La libertà di culto è stato infatti considerata come uno dei capisaldi del peculiare pluralismo culturale canadese, modello riuscito di convivenza pacifica e di mutuo riconoscimento di culture e frange della popolazione differenti tra loro3. La pronuncia qui in esame pare però porre una battuta d’arresto a tale evoluzione progressista

Why Is It Important for Students and Teachers to Share Goals?

Teachers often use instructional goals to guide students’ learning and to track their performance. Typically, teachers develop these instructional goals before they meet students and then hand over their list of goals to students during their first class session. Prior research shows that students do not necessarily understand the underlying principles of those broader terms and how they are to be assessed—they don’t truly understand what is expected of them, nor how a teacher sets out to help them learn. The inadequacy in students’ understanding about instructional goals has been shown to be related to student underachievement, disengagement in classes, and poor student-teacher relationships. The effectiveness of goal-driven learning is dependent on the learner’s ability to make informed decisions about what to learn and what strategies to use to achieve the desired objectives. Given that, I hypothesize that helping students understand their teacher’s rationale behind the goal creation process will help students make better decisions with their study, demonstrate stronger motivation, develop better student-teacher relationships, and eventually improve their academic performance. To test these hypotheses, I created an intervention that required students to have a discussion with their teacher about how the instructional goals were prioritized. Eighty-nine students from an introductory Microbiology class were randomly assigned into three conditions: (1) Goal Listing (GL) condition, in which students read a list of instructional goals as they were in the syllabus; (2) Goal Ranking (GR) condition, in which students read a list of instructional goals that had been ranked according to their importance by their teacher; and (3) Goal Ranking + Discussing (GRD) condition, in which students read the ranked goals and discussed them with their teacher in a one-on-one meeting. The measures I used to test the effects of the intervention include study-time allocation, accuracy of self-assessment for an upcoming exam, help-seeking tendency toward the teacher, attitude toward the class and the teacher, and class performance. Results showed that the GRD group performed significantly better than the other two groups on every behavioral measure, but no significant difference was found between the GR and GL group. Specifically, students in the GRD condition scored significantly higher, planned their study more strategically, predicted their final grade more accurately, and demonstrated stronger tendency to seek help from their teacher. Mediation analyses were conducted to test whether students’ metacognitive strategies causally contributed to their better performance. Results show that both study-time planning and self-assessment mediated exam performance for the GRD group, but not for the GR group. This suggests that a discussion on the ranked goals is more powerful in affecting students’ learning process than simply showing them the goals without an explanation. In addition to the behavioral measures, we also examined students’ attitudes toward their teacher and the course. The results show that the GRD group gave a more positive evaluation of their teacher and perceived the course as more interesting and valuable than the other two groups. This suggests that a discussion of goals can bring about motivational benefits such as improving student-teacher relationships. This study made unique theoretical and practical contributions to our understanding of how teachers can best communicate goals to their students. First, most previous research on students’ goals focused on what goals might be beneficial to learning, but did not address how to enable students to strategically arrive at those goals. Our study suggests that having teachers explain how their instructional goals were set can be a promising step toward that end. Second, our findings add to past research on metacognitive training, which largely focused on teaching strategies to students. Our study suggests that we can improve students’ use of metacognitive strategies by helping them gain a clear understanding of the instructional goals. Moreover, the study points to the important role of social interaction in enhancing students’ self-regulating abilities such as planning and self-assessment. Metacognition is not just about understanding one’s own thinking. Understanding the goals of those who are important to one’s learning can be helpful to improving one’s metacognition. Finally, the study offers clear guidance in how to make teachers’ office hours more productive. Goal discussion provides an implementable tool that can improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their communication and their relationship

China as a WTO developing member, is it a problem? CEPS Policy Insights No 2019/16, November 2019

The developing member status is an area identified for WTO reform by the US, the EU and the Trilateral Trade Ministerial Cooperation. The grievance is that some of the world’s top trading nations that declared themselves as developing members are taking advantage of the 155 special and deferential treatment provisions embedded to date across the range of WTO agreements, resorting to weaker commitments, undermining the functioning of the multilateral trading system and impeding the negotiation of future agreements. The developing member status per se is not a problem in relation to China’s commitments undertaken at its WTO accession, neither following accession as far as the three agreements that China participated in are concerned. China relinquished most special and differential treatment provisions at its accession, and many of its commitments are WTO-plus in nature. Within this remit, the problem lies in China’s lack of faithful compliance with certain accession commitments, such as notification and transparency. However, China’s developing member status could be a problem for the ongoing fisheries subsidies negotiations, especially given its world-leading fishing capacity. This presumption could also be true for other negotiations, for example those regarding the joint initiative on the trade-related aspects of ecommerce. China’s persistent claim of developing member status at the WTO may be understood as a result of political positioning, too, because championing “South-South cooperation” is a strategic priority for China’s diplomacy

Comparing Human Development Patterns Across Countries: Is it Possible to Reconcile Multidimensional Measures and Intuitive Appeal?

The aims of this paper are two. The first is to to present a framework that facilitates the identification and analysis of human development patterns in terms of outcomes performance from a cross and time perspective. The second is to find a method that is effective in summarizing different dimensions that concerns human development progress. We consider human development progress as enhanced throughout virtuous synergies among positive human development outcomes and between these and `positive' economic outcomes. The methodology aims to take into consideration these synergies, while the theoretical framework captures different patterns of human development progress through the distinction between the social dimensions (SD) and the economic dimensions (ED) as `command over resources'. Although this framework is not a sufficient guide for policy, the research findings are an explicit recognition of the need to analyse and to integrate economic and social policies. Furthermore, the explorative empirical results highlight different human development patterns between countries and their connection to the different policies adopted by each country (e.g. by transition economies) and by the impact of different type of crises.Human Development, HDI, Multidimensional Index

Cost Containment May Have a Price, But Is It a Crime? Analyzing the Basis for Criminalizing Managed Care Conduct

A recent transplant case raises an interesting question: Should a managed care organization (“MCO”) face criminal prosecution when a patient dies after the MCO’s decision to deny payment for treatment? Is providing such a legal cause of action the solution, or does doing so just put money into the pockets of attorneys rather than into the hands of the injured health care consumer? As a recent case suggests, bad publicity could be as effective a deterrent as any criminal prosecution in changing an MCO’s behavior

Is it democratisation? : the rule of law and political changes in Jordan since 1989

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

The Time for Lofty Speeches is Over - It Is Time for Implementation: The Problem of 50 Years of Application of International Environmental Law

The global environment is not in a better shape than 50 years ago (climate change, loss of biodiversity, pollution, waste of natural resources, poverty). As main reasons for the limited result of the legal efforts to appropriately preserve and protect the environment, the contribution identifies poor drafting of environmental agreements, the absence of effective implementation mechanisms and their full application, and the attemps to keep information on non-compliance with commitments within the closed club of contracting parties. The article suggests a number of possibilities to improve the present situation and concludes that the full and effective application of (international) environmental law is the biggest problem which environmental lawyers face