Parents’ Beliefs about and Associations to their Elementary Children’s Home Technology Usage

This study sought to gather information through a survey of how newcomer parents’ beliefs about technology usage and how they engage with technology as they support their children with twenty-first century literacies. Parent respondents (N = 70) were drawn from two publicly funded schools in the Niagara Region, Ontario, Canada, where the population tends to be immigrant, visible minority, with post-secondary education, but unemployed and low income. Descriptive statistics quantified daily technology activities as being communication-oriented with the majority of parents holding distinct beliefs about the amount and type of their children’s technology usage. Chi-square tests indicated significant associations for demographic characteristics such as the gender, age, education, first language, and ethnicity of the parents as determinants of their beliefs about their children’s technology usage (e.g., social media, mobile phones, television). As well, levels of access and use varied in terms of the number of new technologies and the types of literacy practices that families engage in. Immigrant parents might hold misconceptions about twenty-first century literacies, therefore there should be an attempt to assist them to provide responsive twenty-first century literacy and technology support for their children

Socioeconomic gradients in eastern european countries: Evidence from PIRLS 2006

This article analyses educational inequalities related to socioeconomic status (SES) in 12 Eastern European countries that participated in the International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2006. Economies and educational systems of these countries have undergone critical transformations since the fall of communism. The authors' analyses, using data collected almost 20 years after this period, help explain how these transformations affected the equity and quality of educational outcomes in the region. For each country, overall inequalities as well as inequalities between schools and within schools are estimated with regression models and represented graphically with socioeconomic gradient lines. A possible trade-off between equity and quality of outcomes is explored, identifying countries that have been relatively successful at attaining both educational goals. The extent to which the school SES explains achievement gaps between rural and urban schools is analysed. The results point to country groupings that are reasonably consistent with regional classifications of educational systems postulated in the literature

Youth Future Civic Participation in Europe: Differences Between the East and the Rest

European countries were economically and politically separated during the Cold War, but since its end processes of globalization and the formation of the European Union have contributed to blur the borders. Previous studies suggest that the social transformations have affected differently civic participation of youths, but shortage of more recent data has precluded researchers from examining the differences in a country-comparative fashion. Along these lines, this paper has two main objectives: to explore the differences in the levels of expected civic participation across Europe, and to evaluate the fit of a theoretical model of civic participation in regard to the different points in time their democracies were established. To achieve these goals, data from 22 European educational systems (9 post-communist and 13 established democracies) participating in the International Civic and Citizenship Study (2009) conducted by International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement is used. The results, in accordance with the literature, suggest differentiated patterns of future civic participation between the new and established democracies, but they are not that clear, suggesting that convergence between the two groups is ongoing. However, the tested empirical model of civic participation functions in a better way in the established than in the new democracies. In contrast with previous findings, differences in levels of expected civic participation seem to be related not only with the countries' experience with democracy, but also with their cultural similarities and common history. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht