Abstract

Whilst various studies have examined participation on the Internet as a key element of a new emergent civic engagement, informally or formally through national and local governments’ online measures, less has been done to measure or suggest ways of overcoming social and technological constraints on online civic participation. Additionally, few studies have looked at the relationship between the actual implementation of such initiatives in classrooms and the messages which are conveyed indirectly as a result of teachers’ own conceptions of classroom strategies, which are perhaps better described as a “hidden curriculum”. This paper reports on these constructions through a set of detailed quantitative and qualitative case studies of the implementation of civic engagement through online activity in several regions of Portugal. The data, obtained through questionnaires, were used to produce novel composite scores reflecting the participatory and media literacy strategies of schools, as well as teachers and students’ media literacy and online civic actions. We present empirical results from a study population consisting of 12 public secondary school principals, 131 teachers, and 1,392 students in grades 11 and 12, suggesting that students’ online civic engagement and media literacy levels are affected by their teachers’ classroom practices and further training and by the implementation of a project-based approach to media education.

Abstract

Studying electronic bibliographic resources for basic education involves thinking about search mechanisms that meet the needs of young users. Through the investigation carried out during the educational research project «Digital libraries», it became evident that the collections explored use a language better suited to higher education. Faced with this problem, the following question arose: What are the criteria for classifying electronic bibliographic resources for basic education? The proposed investigation was non-experimental, with a non-probabilistic sample of case studies; the sample comprised 250 resources from 10 bibliographic collections. The analysis assessed resources according to: accessibility, the curricular axis to which it is addressed, and format; pedagogical, functional, technological and aesthetic aspects. The results show a mean of 3.76, which indicates that the bibliographic collections provide quality resources, although it is necessary to improve educational and functional aspects. Classifying electronic resources for basic education requires the consideration of pedagogical needs, graphical and technological qualities and, especially, the dynamic way in which information is conceived nowadays. This confirms the need to establish a set of indicators that enable teachers to select electronic resources based on basic education curricular axes.