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In the rapidly changing atmosphere of the global economy, productivity has become a very important concept for long-term economic growth, development, regional and global competitiveness, raising social living standards and increasing the level of welfare for countries. In the 21st century, when scientific knowledge, technology, innovation, R&D and entrepreneurship manifest themselves in every stage of the production process, human capital has come to the fore as an important and determining factor that increases productivity. In the current study, the effect of human capital, one of the most important outputs of education, on country productivity was analyzed for 24 developing countries, including Turkey, which are in the upper middle income group. In the application part, a panel data set was created for the 24 countries included in the study with the series obtained from the database of PWT10.0 for the period of 1980-2019. The Human Capital Index was used to reveal the human capital status of the countries included in the analysis and the Total Factor Productivity Index was used to reveal the productivity status. The Granger Panel Causality Test was employed to determine whether there is a short-term relationship and the Westerlund Panel Cointegration Test was employed to determine whether there is a long-term relationship between the two variables. As a result of a bilateral causality relationship was found between human capital and productivity in the short-term and a cointegration relationship in the long-term. The study is important and different from other studies in that it focuses on the concepts of human capital and productivity, which have a very limited place in the education literature, although they are directly related to education, and it is grounded on an interdisciplinary approach (bringing together education, sociology and econometrics).

Promoting adhesion to attitudes toward gender equity is critical to achieving more equal societies, yet endorsement of gender equality among Latin American adolescents remains lower than global averages. This study investigates the role of school environments, civic knowledge, and authoritarianism in shaping gender equity attitudes among 8th-grade students in Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Peru, using data from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) 2016. Fitting different regression models, we explore the relationships between individual socioeconomic status, classroom practices, and school-wide ideological climates on gender equity endorsement. Findings highlight the pivotal influence of civic knowledge and open classroom discussions as protective factors against authoritarian beliefs, which are negatively associated with gender equity support at both individual and contextual levels. Moreover, peer-group ideological climates significantly shape student attitudes, demonstrating the importance of school environments in fostering or hindering egalitarian beliefs. We discussed the role of school practices in the promotion of gender equity. These findings contribute to the global goal of citizenship education and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), particularly Goal 5, emphasising the role of schools in promoting democratic and gender-equitable values.

Positive personal characteristics such as happiness or wellbeing can motivate students to elevate their school performance in higher education. Orientation to happiness is a construct that combines three sources of happiness: pleasure, meaning, and engagement, all of which have been identified as a predictor of university students' engagement. However, most research in this area has been conducted during ideal situations or face-to-face education, and no crosscountry research has been published examining the relationship between these two concepts during the COVID-19 era, where online education was predominant. This study aimed to investigate the relation between orientation to happiness and student engagement after twelve months of distance education in a sample of 1723 students from six American countries, including the USA, Mexico, El Salvador, Colombia, Peru, and the Dominican Republic. Results indicate that university students' engagement is influenced by the orientation to happiness. Further implications of these results are discussed.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of Open Educational Resources (OERs) has increased due to its advantages for academic activities and educational quality. Hence, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have sought to develop strategies to promote curricular and extracurricular activities that favor developing disciplinary and transversal competencies such as complex thinking and its meta-competencies: critical, systemic, scientific, and innovative thinking, oriented to favor problem-solving among students and the academic community. The main objective of this study was to analyze how using OERs in virtual education can promote the development of complex thinking as a transversal competency in higher education. We analyzed the content of 65 educational projects in a webinar aimed at promoting the adoption of OERs in the professional practice of the educational community. Each project had to comply with specific requirements, from the project's identification and description to measuring and evaluating the results and its impact and added value. Once all the projects were reviewed, the responses were classified into defined categories for better presentation; the sub-competency of complex thinking promoted by each project element was identified qualitatively. The results highlight how an OER can, through concrete activities, elicit complex thinking and its sub-competencies in higher education. The present study adds new evidence to the literature regarding boosting OERs as a tool to develop competencies aligned with UNESCO recommendations and contribute to fulfilling the Sustainable Development Goals in education.

Several studies have been published on disengaged test respondents, and others have analyzed disengaged survey respondents separately. For many large-scale assessments, students answer questionnaire and test items in succession. This study examines the percentage of students who continuously engage in disengaged responding behaviors across sections in a low-stakes assessment. The effects on calculated scores of filtering students, based on their responding behaviors, are also analyzed. Data of this study came from the 2015 administration of PISA. For data analysis, frequencies and percentages of engaged students in the sessions were initially calculated using students' response times. To investigate the impact of filtering disengaged respondents on parameter estimation, three groups were created, namely engaged in both measures, engaged only in the test, and engaged only in the questionnaire. Next, several validity checks were performed on each group to verify the accuracy of the classifications and the impact of filtering student groups based on their responding behavior. The results indicate that students who are disengaged in tests tend to continue this behavior when responding to the questionnaire items in PISA. Moreover, the rate of continuity of disengaged responding is non-negligible as can be seen from the effect sizes. On the other hand, removing disengaged students in both measures led to higher or nearly the same performance ratings compared to the other groups. Researchers analyzing the dataset including achievement tests and survey items are recommended to review disengaged responses and filter out students who are continuously showing disengaged responding before performing further statistical analysis.

Globalisation and policy transfer in education make it incumbent upon decision makers to prioritise among competing policy options, select policy initiatives that are appropriate for their national contexts, and understand how system-specific factors moderate the relationship between those policies and student outcomes. This study used qualitative comparative analysis and correlational analyses to explore these relationships with publicly available data on socio-economic, cultural, and education conditions, and their association with PISA 2015 results in 49 countries. Findings show that gender and income equality, human development, and individualism were outcome-enabling conditions for PISA 2015 results, and gender equality was the most consistent of these conditions. These factors significantly moderated the relationships between education policy and PISA results. Implications for the identification of meaningful peer countries for comparative educational research, policy transfer, and the future expansion of PISA are discussed.

Captioning of recorded videos is beneficial to many and a matter of compliance with accessibility regulations and guidelines. Like recorded captions, real-time captions can also be means to implement the Universal Design for Learning checkpoint to offer text-based alternatives to auditory information. A cost-effective solution to implement the checkpoint for live online presentations is to use speech recognition technologies to generate automated captions. In particular, "Microsoft PowerPoint Present Live" (MSPL) is an application that can be used to present with real-time automated captions and subtitles in multiple languages, allowing individuals to follow the presentation in their preferred language. The purpose of this study was to identify challenges that participants could encounter when using the MSPL feature of real-time automated captions/subtitles, and to determine what they describe as potential uses, challenges, and benefits of the feature. Participants were full-time faculty and administrators with a faculty appointment in a higher education institution. Data from five native English speakers and five native Spanish speakers were analyzed. Activities of remote usability testing and interviews were conducted to collect data. Overall, participants did not encounter challenges that they could not overcome and described MSPL as an easy-to-use and useful tool to present with captions/subtitles for teaching or training and to reach English and Spanish-speaking audiences. The themes that emerged as potential challenges were training, distraction, and technology. Findings are discussed and further research is recommended.

This study aims to examine to what extent the field of competence regarding curriculum knowledge is concordant with the other sub-competency fields of teaching. These fields are field knowledge, pedagogic competence in field teaching, use of information and communication technologies in teaching, student behaviours and class management, individualised learning approaches, teaching students with special needs, education in a multicultural and multilingual environment, teaching crosscurricular skills, vocational guidance, internal evaluation of schools and self-evaluation, teacher-parent collaboration and school management and administration. Survey is our research model. The participations of the study are 54.395 teachers from 17 different countries, which have been obtained from PISA 2015. The correspondence and multiple correspondence analyses were used. The results of simple correspondence analysis have revealed that the measure of accountable correspondence is more than 50% between the sources of curriculum knowledge and those of other sub-competency fields such as field insight and knowledge, pedagogic competence in field teaching and student assessment procedures. Likewise, multiple correspondence analysis has also produced similar results.

The aim of the study is to explore alienated and disaffected students in Latin America and investigate the development of their civic attitudes. The study has focused on a context that is assuming growing importance globally and about which more needs to be known, especially in terms of its potential for democratic development. The focus is on students from Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Mexico. Three distinct groups of students were identified labeled 'Outsiders', 'Moderates', and 'Active Participators'. The 'Outsiders' had lowest scores on all civic values. Gender, parents' political and social interest, students' expected education level and home literacy were the four most important predictors for membership in the 'Outsider' group. Implications and future directions for research on Latin American 'Outsiders' are discussed.

Job uncertainty and ambiguity is a reality in many current societies, therefore, the idea of self-employment has taken a more active role, not only out of necessity, but also because it brings innovation and development to societies. In view of this situation, the following question arises: how can we strengthen the entrepreneurial spirit of our students? This article has the objective to collect theoretical information of the state of the art on entrepreneurship education: what it has been, what it is, and what can it be, in order to present the current condition of the topic, both in the psychological and pedagogical field. To achieve this objective, information from 108 research sources, mainly from scientific articles and books was collected, concluding that, although generally, entrepreneurship education has significantly contributed to the creation of businesses, developing countries, specifically, those in Latin America, still require extra effort to fully implement entrepreneurship topic in the curriculums, particularly because of challenges such as political instability, technology and international competition.

This study examines recent trends and factors in school dropout at the upper secondary education level across Latin America. The methodology employs repeated cross sections of data to track the life cycle path of cohorts of individuals in 18 countries. A key finding is that while upper secondary enrollment rates increased in the region, dropout has remained persistently high, despite relatively favorable macroeconomic conditions. To explain dropout trends, the study examines the impact of three groups of factors: (i) shifts in the cohort size and socioeconomic composition of the population eligible for entering upper secondary; (b) the macroeconomic environment and labor market opportunities; and (c) the returns to schooling. We show that an important factor in persistently high dropout rates has been the higher numbers of students from poor socioeconomic backgrounds reaching upper secondary. In addition, high returns to education have been a pull factor into schooling, while, especially in countries where the majority of youth dropout prior to upper secondary, the data confirm an apparent substitution effect due to the opportunity cost of forgoing employment opportunities. The findings confirm the growing policy focus on upper secondary across Latin America and suggest implications for the policy agenda.

Given the lack of studies regarding migrant parents' views towards the education system of their host countries in an era of global movement, this article focuses on the strategies deployed by Latin American migrant parents towards their children's schooling in the Chilean educational field. To understand these strategies in the context of south-south migration, the article is informed by Pierre Bourdieu's theory and a decolonial critical interculturality framework (DeCI). The article concludes that three processes can be distinguished from the point of view of migrant parents regarding their schooling experience, which link to issues around accessing, adjusting and transforming. Additionally, the notion of parents as a source of knowledge emerged strongly among migrant parents as a way of transmitting their cultural capital in the context of migration.

As inclusion becomes a growing standard for universities in the United States, data extracted from OCLC suggest that university libraries in the United States build their Spanish-language collections with books purchased primarily in Spain and Mexico. This overlooks presses from 19 other Spanish-speaking countries in the Americas. This research is concerned with the representation of books published in these Hispano-American countries and examines the holdings of 88 university libraries. The article discusses the drawbacks in neglecting purchase of literature published in Hispano-American countries and the benefits of changing collection practices into a more inclusive design, including recommendations for best practices.

This article will be of interest to anyone wishing to conduct research related to citizenship education in Latin America. It shares the results of a systematic review of empirical studies with the goal of (a) mapping the current research on citizenship education in Latin America and (b) suggesting a research agenda for citizenship education in Latin America. One particular contribution of this article is that it describes research that was previously accessible only to those who read Spanish. Findings include an increase in publications on citizenship education in Latin America since 2000 and show that research is being published on (1) the content of official documents, (2) what happens in educational settings, (3) teachers' views, (4) students' views, (5) what influences students' civic outcomes and (6) students' civic identities. The final section of the article explores various suggestions for future research.

Studies of gender disparities in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) performance have generally focused on average differences. However, the extremes could also be important because disparities at the top may shape stratification in access to STEM careers, while disparities at the bottom can shape stratification in dropout. This article investigates determinants of gender disparities in math across the performance distribution in Latin American countries, where there is a persistent boys' advantage in STEM performance. Findings reveal disparate national patterns in gender gaps across the performance distribution. Furthermore, while certain national characteristics are linked to gender gaps at the low- and middle-ranges of the performance distribution, female representation in education is the only characteristic associated with a reduced gender gap at the top level.

The endorsement of anti-corruption norms is a normative assumption in legal systems with freedom of information acts, where citizens are expected to act as monitors of the public service. Tolerance of corruption counteracts this assumption. We studied tolerance of corruption among 8th graders from Latin-American samples of the International Civic and Citizenship Study 2009. We proposed a model where associations between students' socioeconomic status (SES) and tolerance of corruption are explained by civic knowledge, authoritarianism and open classroom discussion. This model accounted for 36-43% of the variance within schools, and 87-96% of the variance between schools, across six countries. The socioeconomic gap in tolerance of corruption was mainly present between schools. In addition, students with higher civic knowledge were less tolerant of corruption, partially explained by authoritarianism, while open classroom discussion also had indirect associations with tolerance of corruption.

The purpose of this article is to describe the efforts of three Latin American countries (Chile, Colombia, and Dominican Republic) to develop their own early childhood teacher preparation standards. The authors explain the demographic and historical environmental conditions, the sociopolitical climate that gave impetus to the development of the standards, the existing teacher preparation systems, and their underlying processes and structures, the underlying beliefs implicit in the development of the standards, and the process of development of the early childhood teacher preparation standards. These countries vary in size, population, and history. As a result, they are in different stages of the process of full implementation of these standards. The article comparatively analyzes the facilitators for the development of the standards and the challenges which these countries encountered in their design and implementation.

The academic programs at the graduate level are increasingly interested about the enrollment management challenges in terms of international student mobility. Understanding fundamental enrollment concepts to attract international students provides the essential key to consider the competitive environment concerning university resources, academic program potential, complex cultural dynamics, and workplaces among others. Based on a six-year quantitative and descriptive statistical study, this paper addresses the trends of first-time graduate enrollment and patterns of international student mobility by faculty at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez. Results revealed the sustained trend of graduate enrollment of international students mainly from South America, Central America, and the Caribbean among others. Moreover, the presence of international graduate students adds a dimension of diversity to UPRM between teaching and research undertakings that enhance the Colleges of Engineering, Arts and Sciences, Agricultural Sciences, and Business Administration. The international student mobility has a consistent tendency mainly in the Colleges of Engineering, Arts and Sciences, and Agricultural Sciences. This consistency resembles the quality and reputation recognized by educational institutions and organizational world rankings. In-depth, understanding the trends related to international graduate enrollment and mobility should be considered by institutional leaders and administrators at UPRM to make knowledgeable decisions and to effectively set priorities to recruit highly qualified international students.

The purpose of this paper is to comprehend the importance that grammar has in the teaching of writing in the Hispanic American countries and Spain. To achieve this, the discussion that has taken place in these countries about the importance of sentence grammar in the teaching of writing is analysed. Three proposals for the contextualised teaching of grammar are systematised from the literature review: those that are focused in the writing process, those focused on metalinguistic reflection and those with a greater emphasis in the grammar of text. Besides, the school curricula of 14 Spanish-speaking countries that were involved in the international assessment of TERCE are examined. This analysis shows an evident attachment to the communicative approach of grammar. This means that in almost all countries grammar is taught linked to the linguistic skills of reading, writing or orality, with an especial emphasis in writing. Also, two tendencies can be observed in the curricula of this countries, that guide the way in which curricula use sentence grammar to have an impact on written communication: (i) from sentence grammar to text grammar and (ii) from text grammar to sentence grammar.

Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration has been seeking to become a global leader in Public Policy & Administration (PPA) education by sharing knowledge and experiences across its members and other associate programs around the world. The Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region is part of this endeavor and Mexico represents a strategic partner for this network. Comparative studies of PPA higher education are relatively recent but only focus on the supply-side (programs offered by universities) among developed countries. A competency map framework was extended to considering the supply and demand-sides (universities and employers) of the PPA education market. By comparing official information of 301 master's programs between the United States, LAC region, and Mexico, this study identifies similarities/differences of general characteristics and competencies from the supply side as a first part of an investigation. The results provide insights of PPA higher education between these countries and regions with some practical implications.

This article analyses the progresses and challenges in education in Latin America since the Salamanca World Conference on Special Needs Education. The main advances have been in the access to education of a greater number of students derived from a higher public expenditure. The challenges that still exist can be summed up through insufficient educational quality, especially with regard to the situation of teachers and the infrastructure of schools. It's difficult to collect appropriate, rigorous and accurate data for special needs education. The article concludes by pointing out the importance of rebuilding three bridges to move faster in the inclusive process: first, a political bridge to agree on the improvement of the educational budget during the next decade; a social and cultural bridge that supports attitudes of citizens in favour of diversity and inclusion; and finally, an educational bridge with two fundamental pillars: education of infant and young children and training and professional development for teachers.

The article describes a case study of lifelong e-training for postgraduates delivered jointly by the Carlos III University of Madrid and Spain's National Library from 2011 to 2017. It addresses course and participant characteristics as well as the results of an assessment aimed to determine both student satisfaction and effective skill transfer to the work environment. This unique professional training initiative may serve as a model in an area where librarians and professors are seldom seen to collaborate in online training on an equal footing.

Latin American educational policy has relied on the assumption that better preparation can help school leaders improve their professional performance, thus improving quality of schools. Training programs for present or future school leaders have proliferated in the region, often publicly financed, but without enough evidence of their impact. Using data for seven Latin American countries from the Third Regional Comparative and Explanatory Study (TERCE), we seek to determine the association between school leaders' formal education and training received, with well recognized dimensions of school leadership practices reported by their teachers. We estimated linear regression models for each country in Latin America to determine the relationship between principals' preparation with indicators of educational leadership practices. Our results show that in most observed indicators of leadership practices the effect of education or training is marginal. We provide possible explanations for this finding, emphasizing the weaknesses in principals' initial selection processes and their deficiencies. We also consider schools' precarious conditions to support principals in order to put the knowledge they learned in training activities into practice. We point out the need to continue conducting specific studies on the effects of training on educational leadership among school leaders in the region, overcoming TERCE information restrictions.

Literacy is a pivotal aspect of education and critical for economic development as well as individual and community well-being. Innovative programming that taps into culturally relevant local resources can increase literacy and strengthen social-emotional skills. This article describes the work of LitWorld, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that works with a broad coalition of national and international partners to ensure that young people worldwide can experience the joy and transformation of reading, writing, and storytelling. LitWorld's year-round, child-centered programming encourages self-expression, builds understanding of self, and cultivates confidence, using literacy as a tool and pathway for self-empowerment and advocacy. LitWorld partners with over 50 community-based organizations around the world, seven of which are in Latin American countries (Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Peru). The LitClub, the cornerstone of LitWorld's programs, allows children to form a community of strength through weekly 90-minute sessions. In the first year, the members of a LitClub will focus on how they fit within LitWorld's 7 Strengths--guiding principles that we believe exist in every human being. The 7 Strengths of Friendship, Belonging, Kindness, Curiosity, Courage, Confidence, and Hope need to be nurtured in order for children to believe they have a voice, their voice is important, and they are the ultimate change agents of their own lives. The second year builds on these principles and asks members to think of themselves in relation to the rest of the world.

The preparation, convocation, and implementation of the Second Vatican Council sparked changes at theological and organisational levels in the Catholic church. Both types of changes created a new structure for the relationship of different elements within the church and between the church and the world. This was not the first time the Catholic leadership redefined its relationship with the secular world--to agree in eliminating the pontifical states in the First Vatican Council in 1870 is one example--but is the first time that an internal change promoted such a positive relationship with the world. The church understood both (1) that she could collaborate in the well-being of the world, and also (2) that she could find many things for her own well-being in the secular world (LG 44). The idea of a self-contained organisation in opposition to the world was over with the advent of the Vatican II.

This study seeks to explain macrolevel drivers of adolescent fertility rate using a panel data set derived from 17 Latin American countries over a period of 16 years (1997-2012). While many studies of adolescent fertility have focused on individual-level explanations, this study explores whether adolescent fertility rate is correlated to country-level determinants, specifically legislation adoption that guarantees access to school-based sexuality education, emergency contraception, and abortion. After controlling for other country-level factors, we find that countries that have adopted legislation on school-based sexuality education and those with legal access to abortion (under one or more restrictions) have lower adolescent fertility rates.

School leadership has a core position within education policy worldwide. Comparative research in this area has been mainly focused on developed countries and has tended to neglect the situation of developing nations, including Latin American countries. Considering the above, this article presents the current status of school leadership policies in eight systems of Latin America: Argentina, Ceará/Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Dominican Republic and Peru. The results highlight that, while in the majority of these systems measures aimed in this direction have been implemented, school leadership policies are still at an early stage, with several problems, contradictions, and lack of internal and external coherence. The article ends with a discussion about the tensions embedded on the translation of the Anglo-Saxon discourse of school leadership to the particular context of Latin America and suggests the need to rethink a regional local-response to the goal of promoting principal leadership.

Purpose: This paper aims to present an approach to achieve accessible and inclusive Virtual Education for all, but especially intended for students with disabilities. This work proposes main steps to take into consideration for stakeholders involved in the educational process related to an inclusive e-Learning. Design/methodology/approach: The paper pays particular regard to accessibility in Virtual Education. This work is based on the activities prepared from years 2012 to 2015 within the initiative called ESVI-AL. This initiative was carried out in conjunction with Latin American and European Universities; for this paper, experiences and best practices from the initiative were used to prepare the proposed approach. Findings: The aim of ESVI-AL initiative was to offer products that can help in the development of an accessible and inclusive e-Learning education. Among the main results were reports, case studies, practical guidelines, training courses and software to install virtual campuses with accessibility features. Social implications: Nowadays, few countries have laws promoting and enforcing accessibility for e-Education and e-Society. This work aims to sensitize educators from different countries and raise awareness on the importance of working together toward an inclusive society based on accessible e-Learning. Originality/value: Based on a literature review and ESVI-AL initiative results, a descriptive overview was prepared as a starting point for the four identified main actors of an educational project, namely, educators, technical staff, quality auditors and students, with special emphasis on students with disabilities.

What is the relationship between Indigenous peoples and violent reactions to contemporary states? This research explores differing, culturally informed notions of attachment to land or place territory. Mechanistic ties and organic ties to land are linked to a key distinction between Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous peoples. Utilizing the Minorities at Risk (MAR) data set, a subset relationship is explored addressing propensity for Indigenous peoples to rebel against state encroachment of their lands. The results of this research must be considered with the serious limitations of MAR in mind. Within the marginalized groups in the Americas, 28 have an attachment to a place territory. Of these 28 groups, 22 are Indigenous and of the 22 groups, 13 have exhibited some form of rebellious behavior between 1945 and 2003. The power of attachment to place territory, specifically the organic attachment most often displayed by Indigenous peoples of the Americas, is a strong tie surviving 500 years of European encroachment. The findings are indicative of an attachment that Indigenous peoples retain to their specific homelands. The findings suggest a plethora of future research questions. (Contains 8 tables, 3 figures, and 41 notes.)

In 1997, the Santiago office of UNESCO implemented an assessment of student achievement in Latin America, working in collaboration with 13 Latin American ministries of education. Using a common sampling methodology and survey instruments, researchers in each country collected representative samples of data on third- and fourth-grade achievement in language and mathematics, as well as background surveys from students, parents, teachers, and principals. This article uses these data and multilevel modeling to assess the relative effectiveness of private and public schools in 10 of these countries. In particular, the article argues that many prior studies have misrepresented the private school effect by failing to control for the characteristics of student peer groups. In these studies, the achievement gap between the two sectors may partly or entirely reflect the effects of better peer group characteristics, as opposed to any substantive impact of private school practices or efficiency on the outcomes of their students. The results suggest that conditioning on a complete set of student, family, and peer characteristics explains a large portion of the observed difference in achievement between public and private schools. Across the 10 countries considered in this article, the mean private school effect is approximately zero, ranging between -0.2 and 0.2 standard deviations. The relative consistency of the findings is striking, given the diversity in the size and institutional features of the private sector across countries.