Communication presented at the International Conference on Education and New Developments – END 2015 - that took place between 27 - 29 June, Porto, Portugal (http://end-educationconference.org/).
Disha NEET Physics Guide for classes 11 and 12.pdf
InSchool - Early School Leaving - Contributions from Portugal
1. WORKING TOGETHER TO REDUCE EARLY SCHOOL LEAVING
5 COUNTRIES, 2 YEARS, 1 AIM
EARLY SCHOOL LEAVING – CONTRIBUTIONS FROM
PORTUGAL
June 2015
Anabela Mesquita
Paulino Silva
Diana Vieira
1
2. Agenda
• Early school leaving – Introduction
• Early school leaving in Portugal
• InSchool Project
• Measures against ESL
• Good practices identified in Portugal
• @ ISCAP – good practiced exported and imported
• Evaluation of good practice imported
• Future
Anabela Mesquita, Paulino Silva, Diana Vieira 2
3. Early school leaving -
Introduction
Serious matter at the individual and at a macro level since it is connected to
unemployment, social exclusion, and poverty while impeding productivity and
competitiveness.
Shrinking workforce - Europe needs to make full use of its human resources. Young
people who leave education and training prematurely are bound to lack skills and
qualifications, and to face serious, persistent problems on the labour market.
2012 - nearly five and a half million young people (18 and 24) had not finished
upper secondary education and were not in education and training.
Unemployment rate of these leavers is 40.1%, compared to 23.2% overall youth
unemployment in Europe
Anabela Mesquita, Paulino Silva, Diana Vieira 3
4. Early school leaving -
Introduction
There are many reasons why some young people give up education and training
prematurely: personal or family problems, learning difficulties, or a fragile socio-
economic situation.
The way the education system is set up and the environment of each school are
also important factors.
project InSchool – Innovation in Early School Leaving was developed
There is not a single reason for ESL, there are no easy answers. Policies to reduce
early school leaving must address a range of triggers and combine education and
social policy, youth work and health related aspects such as drug use or mental
and emotional problems
Anabela Mesquita, Paulino Silva, Diana Vieira 4
5. Early School Leaving in Portugal
• Although the tendency for the indicator of early school leavers
to decrease in all European countries in the last 20 years,
during this period Portugal has presented average values
above those of the EU.
• Southern countries, like Spain, Turkey and Portugal, present
the higher figures for this indicator.
• Countries with lower rates (between 4% and 9%) are Finland
(8,9%), Holland (8,8%), Luxembourg (8,1%), Austria (7,6%),
Sweden (7,5%), Lithuania (6,5%), Poland (5,7%), Czech
Republic (5,5%), Slovakia (5,3%) and Slovenia (4,4%).
• Spain (24,9%), Malta (22,6%) and Portugal (20,8%) are
those with the highest values, showing more difficulties
concerning the inclusion of a young population in basic
education.
• The average figure for Europe (27 countries) was 12,8% in
2012 Anabela Mesquita, Paulino Silva, Diana Vieira 5
7. • Aims to
• share best practices within the partnership,
• to produce best practice manual,
• to enable partners to observe the application of best
practices through benchmarking,
• to involve stakeholders and
• to enable all partners to import and apply at least one
innovative aspect of best practice.
Outcomes are / were
* 5 workshops held in each of the partner countries,
* a good practices guide,
* a website and
* the identification of aspects of best practice that would
be imported to each partner organization.
Anabela Mesquita, Paulino Silva, Diana Vieira 7
8. • Partner
• UK (Bury College) (Coordinator),
• Romania (IPA, SA S.C.),
• Portugal (ISCAP / IPP),
• Italy (E.RI.FO.) and
• Turkey (Nahit Mentese Girls Technical and Vocational High School)
• Started in October 2013 and will end in September 2015.
• Activities
• An analysis of the situation of ESL in each partner country was
carried out.
• Identification of a set of good practices already taking place in
partner countries.
• Each partner selected at least one of these good practices and
implemented it in their own organization.
Anabela Mesquita, Paulino Silva, Diana Vieira 8
10. Measures against ESL addressed in the report from the European Commission
(2013) (http://ec.europa.eu/education/policy/strategic-framework/doc/esl-group-
report_en.pdf)
Anabela Mesquita, Paulino Silva, Diana Vieira 10
11. Smooth transition between
educational levels
Transition between educational levels is critical for students - a time when they
move from often smaller and more supportive schools to larger schools, where the
academic and social demands are higher.
The cost of failing is high. Unsuccessful school transitions contribute to high
dropout rates, low on-time graduation rates and low achievement.
Through a questionnaire administered to all secondary and VET schools in Porto
region, we identified some good practices. Present some results in next slide
Then we present the good practice exported and the one imported
Necessary to provide tools and support to smooth this transition.
Anabela Mesquita, Paulino Silva, Diana Vieira 11
12. Good practices identified in
schools
• Education offered by study area and not by course, at
the beginning of the 10th grade - allows student to try
the possible available areas before committing to just
one.
• A systematic accompaniment of students by
coordinators of the different courses which integrate
each study area as well as by the direction board and
office of vocational guidance and counselling with the
objective to understand the best way to follow at the
end of the 10th grade.
• Promotion of the proximity between student and
teacher. Teacher is seen as a tutor that supports and
accompanies the student.
Anabela Mesquita, Paulino Silva, Diana Vieira 12
15. Self-efficacy
• People's beliefs about their capabilities to produce
designated levels of performance
• This concept is useful to predict human
performance in several areas, although its
predictive power is enhanced when specific
measures of each domain of human functioning are
used.
• Additionally, as self-efficacy is a judgment of
personal capability, it is not considerate a trait and
it can change over time.
Anabela Mesquita, Paulino Silva, Diana Vieira 15
16. Self-efficacy
• Studies show that students’ self-efficacy is related to academic
achievement and/or dropout, both internationally (e.g. Bandura,
2006; Brown, Tramayne, Hoxha, Telander, Fan & Lent, 2008;
Pajares, 2007) as well as in Portugal (e.g. Vieira & Polydoro, 2009;
Vieira 2010).
• The student self-efficacy questionnaire was validated to
Portuguese context (Vieira, Polydoro, & Coimbra, 2009; Vieira,
Caires & Polydoro, 2011) and it is composed of 20 items.
• This measure is useful to rapidly screening student’s self-efficacy,
though, facilitating the identification of the students at risk of
poor academic performance and/or ESL.
• The administration of this questionnaire at the beginning of the
academic year allows the identification of students with lower
self-efficacy and the prevention of poor academic performance
and/or ESL by the implementation of activities aimed to enhance
students self-efficacy based on its sources.
Anabela Mesquita, Paulino Silva, Diana Vieira 16
18. Smooth transition between
educational levels
Bury College already had experience in this area and had developed a website to
deal with this situation - http://bethebest.burycollege.ac.uk/
Portugal – ISCAP (higher education) - decided to import and adapt this good
practice
Anabela Mesquita, Paulino Silva, Diana Vieira 18
19. LIVE THE BEST @ ISCAP
Anabela Mesquita, Paulino Silva, Diana Vieira 19
20. Participants
Inschool Project Team (Anabela, Diana and Paulino)
A Web Solutions Company (Bynet)
ISCAP Students Union
Comissions of students from each degree
Other ISCAP students
Anabela Mesquita, Paulino Silva, Diana Vieira 20
21. Structure of the website
Anabela Mesquita, Paulino Silva, Diana Vieira 21
29. Evaluation of the website
Developed a survey. Questions based on literature review
Received 43 responses
Students graded this website with 8 / 10. The majority graded it between 7 and 10.
Anabela Mesquita, Paulino Silva, Diana Vieira 29
30. STRENGTHS WEAKNESSES
Website very dynamic and attractive
Video tour only for one master (want to see
videos of other courses)
Links provided are useful
The list of resources is not complete
Excellent structure of menus and buttons
Images with quality
There are also some functionalities that the
site does not have and respondents would
like to find them there (but didn’t say what
were those functionalities)
Information is concise, important and
relevant
Involvement of different stakeholders –
teachers, students, students’ union
Accessible
Need to disseminate the existence of the siteTexts are easy to read, graphs and
animation are used in an adequate way
The site meets students’ needs One respondent said that the website has too
much information on some issues and scarce
on othersThe content of the site is useful
Anabela Mesquita, Paulino Silva, Diana Vieira 30
31. Suggestions for improvement
Add practical informations such as:
How to acquire the card to enter the parking
Create a FAQ section
Access to important documents
Ex. Form to ask the bus pass sub23
Anabela Mesquita, Paulino Silva, Diana Vieira 31
32. Future
Disseminate its existence – facebook, teachers, students
Continuously improve the website
Compare resuls with those of the Bury colleage (concerning the website). Identify
differences and similarities.
In 6 months -re-evaluate its impact in early school leaving
Anabela Mesquita, Paulino Silva, Diana Vieira 32
Early school leaving (ESL) is a serious matter not only at the individual level but also at a macro level since it is connected to unemployment, social exclusion, and poverty while impeding productivity and competitiveness (European Commission, 2014a). With its shrinking workforce, Europe needs to make full use of its human resources. Young people who leave education and training prematurely are bound to lack skills and qualifications, and to face serious, persistent problems on the labour market.
In 2012, nearly five and a half million young people between 18 and 24 years old had not finished upper secondary education and were not in education and training. On average, the unemployment rate of these early school leavers is 40.1%, compared to 23.2% overall youth unemployment in Europe (European Commission, 2014b). ESL creates great hardship for the individuals and huge costs for European economies and welfare states. Tackling early school leaving is a stepping stone towards improving the opportunities of young people and for supporting smart, sustainable and inclusive growth.
There are many reasons why some young people give up education and training prematurely: personal or family problems, learning difficulties, or a fragile socio-economic situation. The way the education system is set up and the environment of each school are also important factors. Since there is not a single reason for ESL, there are no easy answers. Policies to reduce early school leaving must address a range of triggers and combine education and social policy, youth work and health related aspects such as drug use or mental and emotional problems (European Commission, 2014a).
It was in this scenario that the project InSchool – Innovation in Early School Leaving was developed. Its aims are to contribute to the identification and implementation of some of good practices already available in Europe. In fact, if we take a close look to what is going on in Europe and in some schools, we notice that there are a lot of initiatives, some of them already with positive results. In this paper, we will present the project, its aims, as well as some of these initiatives that are taking place in Portugal. Statistics show that the figures for Portugal as ESL is concerned are not favorable. However, organizations, schools and teachers are aware of this problem and are motivated to mitigate this phenomenon as long as the reasons for these figures concern learning difficulties and the educational environment. Finally, we expect that the good practices presented may be inspiring for other schools and contexts.
Early school leaving (ESL) is a serious matter not only at the individual level but also at a macro level since it is connected to unemployment, social exclusion, and poverty while impeding productivity and competitiveness (European Commission, 2014a). With its shrinking workforce, Europe needs to make full use of its human resources. Young people who leave education and training prematurely are bound to lack skills and qualifications, and to face serious, persistent problems on the labour market.
In 2012, nearly five and a half million young people between 18 and 24 years old had not finished upper secondary education and were not in education and training. On average, the unemployment rate of these early school leavers is 40.1%, compared to 23.2% overall youth unemployment in Europe (European Commission, 2014b). ESL creates great hardship for the individuals and huge costs for European economies and welfare states. Tackling early school leaving is a stepping stone towards improving the opportunities of young people and for supporting smart, sustainable and inclusive growth.
There are many reasons why some young people give up education and training prematurely: personal or family problems, learning difficulties, or a fragile socio-economic situation. The way the education system is set up and the environment of each school are also important factors. Since there is not a single reason for ESL, there are no easy answers. Policies to reduce early school leaving must address a range of triggers and combine education and social policy, youth work and health related aspects such as drug use or mental and emotional problems (European Commission, 2014a).
It was in this scenario that the project InSchool – Innovation in Early School Leaving was developed. Its aims are to contribute to the identification and implementation of some of good practices already available in Europe. In fact, if we take a close look to what is going on in Europe and in some schools, we notice that there are a lot of initiatives, some of them already with positive results. In this paper, we will present the project, its aims, as well as some of these initiatives that are taking place in Portugal. Statistics show that the figures for Portugal as ESL is concerned are not favorable. However, organizations, schools and teachers are aware of this problem and are motivated to mitigate this phenomenon as long as the reasons for these figures concern learning difficulties and the educational environment. Finally, we expect that the good practices presented may be inspiring for other schools and contexts.
The indicator of early leavers from education and training is one that best expresses the educational inequalities between countries. Although the tendency for this indicator to decrease in all European countries in the last 20 years, during this period Portugal has presented average values above those of the EU. Nevertheless, the gap has diminished in the last decade. Furthermore, according to Eurostat (2013), it is possible to see that southern countries, like Spain, Turkey and Portugal, present the higher figures for this indicator. The inequalities of this indicator show that there are great differences among EU countries. The countries with lower rates (between 4% and 9%) are Finland (8,9%), Holland (8,8%), Luxembourg (8,1%), Austria (7,6%), Sweden (7,5%), Lithuania (6,5%), Poland (5,7%), Czech Republic (5,5%), Slovakia (5,3%) and Slovenia (4,4%). Spain (24,9%), Malta (22,6%) and Portugal (20,8%) are those with the highest values, showing more difficulties concerning the inclusion of a young population in basic education. The average figure for Europe (27 countries) was 12,8% in 2012 (Observatório das Desigualdades, 2010; Eurostat, 2014).
Another indicator that should also be considered is the tertiary educational attainment. According to the Eurostat (2014) the figure for Portugal (27,2%) is lower than the average figure for Europe (35,8%). Actually only the countries Turkey, Slovakia, Romania, Austria, Malta, Italy, Croatia, Czech Republic and Bulgaria show worst figures. The figures presented reveal that ESL is a real problem in Europe, mostly in southern countries. Nevertheless, this problem is already been tackled and in some situations, with positive results. The InSchool project emerged both as a result of the consciousness of this problematic reality and as an opportunity to identify, share and transfer already existing good initiatives. In the following section we present the project and the initiatives identified in Portugal as well as one identified in UK and being transferred to Portugal.
The project InSchool – Innovation in Early School Leaving project (http://inschoolproject.org/) aims to share best practices within the partnership, to produce best practice manuals, to enable partners to observe the application of best practices through benchmarking, to involve stakeholders and to enable all partners to import and apply at least one innovative aspect of best practice. The expected tangible outcomes are 5 workshops held in each of the partner countries, 4 good practices guides, a supportive website and the identification of aspects of best practice that would be imported to each partner organization.
The partners of this project are: UK (Bury College) (Coordinator), Romania (IPA, SA S.C.), Portugal (ISCAP / IPP), Italy (E.RI.FO.) and Turkey (Nahit Mentese Girls Technical and Vocational High School), It started in October 2013 and will end in September 2015.
In order to address the objectives, an analysis of the situation of ESL in each partner country was carried out. Additionally, consortium also identified a set of good practices already taking place in their own countries. The following step was to allow each partner to select at least one of these good practices and implement it in their own organization. In the next section we describe the best practices / initiatives identified in the Portuguese partner as well as the initiative that was imported.
The project InSchool – Innovation in Early School Leaving project (http://inschoolproject.org/) aims to share best practices within the partnership, to produce best practice manuals, to enable partners to observe the application of best practices through benchmarking, to involve stakeholders and to enable all partners to import and apply at least one innovative aspect of best practice. The expected tangible outcomes are 5 workshops held in each of the partner countries, 4 good practices guides, a supportive website and the identification of aspects of best practice that would be imported to each partner organization.
The partners of this project are: UK (Bury College) (Coordinator), Romania (IPA, SA S.C.), Portugal (ISCAP / IPP), Italy (E.RI.FO.) and Turkey (Nahit Mentese Girls Technical and Vocational High School), It started in October 2013 and will end in September 2015.
In order to address the objectives, an analysis of the situation of ESL in each partner country was carried out. Additionally, consortium also identified a set of good practices already taking place in their own countries. The following step was to allow each partner to select at least one of these good practices and implement it in their own organization. In the next section we describe the best practices / initiatives identified in the Portuguese partner as well as the initiative that was imported.
Based on Social Cognitive Theory, self-efficacy is defined as people's beliefs about their capabilities to produce designated levels of performance (Bandura,1986,1997). This concept is useful to predict human performance in several areas, although its predictive power is enhanced when specific measures of each domain of human functioning are used. Additionally, as self-efficacy is a judgment of personal capability, it is not considerate a trait and it can change over time. This malleable characteristic associated with the potential for self-efficacy improvement allows the development of psychological and educational interventions based on the four sources of self-efficacy: Successful Past Performance, Observing Others’ Performance, Verbal Encouragement/ Social Support and Physiological and Emotional states.
Several studies show that students’ self-efficacy is related to academic achievement and/or dropout, both internationally (e.g. Bandura, 2006; Brown, Tramayne, Hoxha, Telander, Fan & Lent, 2008; Pajares, 2007) as well as in Portugal (e.g. Vieira & Polydoro, 2009; Vieira 2010).). The student self-efficacy questionnaire was validated to Portuguese context (Vieira, Polydoro, & Coimbra, 2009; Vieira, Caires & Polydoro, 2011) and it is composed of 20 items. This measure is useful to rapidly screening student’s self-efficacy, though, facilitating the identification of the students at risk of poor academic performance and/or Early School Leaving (ESL). The administration of this questionnaire at the beginning of the academic year allows the identification of students with lower self-efficacy and the prevention of poor academic performance and/or ESL by the implementation of activities aimed to enhance students self-efficacy based on its sources.
Based on Social Cognitive Theory, self-efficacy is defined as people's beliefs about their capabilities to produce designated levels of performance (Bandura,1986,1997). This concept is useful to predict human performance in several areas, although its predictive power is enhanced when specific measures of each domain of human functioning are used. Additionally, as self-efficacy is a judgment of personal capability, it is not considerate a trait and it can change over time. This malleable characteristic associated with the potential for self-efficacy improvement allows the development of psychological and educational interventions based on the four sources of self-efficacy: Successful Past Performance, Observing Others’ Performance, Verbal Encouragement/ Social Support and Physiological and Emotional states.
Several studies show that students’ self-efficacy is related to academic achievement and/or dropout, both internationally (e.g. Bandura, 2006; Brown, Tramayne, Hoxha, Telander, Fan & Lent, 2008; Pajares, 2007) as well as in Portugal (e.g. Vieira & Polydoro, 2009; Vieira 2010).). The student self-efficacy questionnaire was validated to Portuguese context (Vieira, Polydoro, & Coimbra, 2009; Vieira, Caires & Polydoro, 2011) and it is composed of 20 items. This measure is useful to rapidly screening student’s self-efficacy, though, facilitating the identification of the students at risk of poor academic performance and/or Early School Leaving (ESL). The administration of this questionnaire at the beginning of the academic year allows the identification of students with lower self-efficacy and the prevention of poor academic performance and/or ESL by the implementation of activities aimed to enhance students self-efficacy based on its sources.