Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The present longitudinal study addresses the assessment of a training program on phonemic awareness in the acquisition of written language. Fifty-one preschool children participated in this research. The participants were assigned to three different experimental conditions: phonological awareness and graphemes, phonological awareness and control group. Throughout schooling, phonological awareness, letter and word recognition and reading fluency were assessed. Initiating the first year of primary school, the participants are already familiar with the written language, they reach higher levels of phonological awareness and word recognition. Regarding the experimental condition, the group trained in phonological awareness and graphemes sustains higher levels in segmentation and word reading, although the gap is not statistically significant. Additionally, differences are not observed when considering the reading fluency in third grade. These results shall be interpreted taking into consideration the bidirectional causal relationship between phonological awareness and reading, which accelerates the development process in a transparent language such as Spanish.

The present study addresses a review on the origin of research and work strategies implemen- ted on children with Learning Difficulties in several South American countries. Initially, it describes the clinical neurological and psychological investigations, outlining afterwards researches and psychopeda- gogic strategies conducted at schools. The aim is to bring to light a historical perspective of the different strategies that have been developed in each of the studied countries.

There is no genetically determined brain area for writing, alphabetization affects brain regions preadapted for other cognitive functions. Dyslexias, with a well documented genetic basis, are conditioned by cortical developmental anomalies in regions assigned to phonological and orthographic representational matching. There would be a posterior left hemispheric circuit with a ventral component linked to rapid orthographic visual discrimination, and a temporo-parietal dorsal one involved in the more effortful orthography-tophonology matching between lexical and sublexical representations. Disorders in these posterior circuits are specifi c to dyslexia. The anterior circuit, centered by the inferior left frontal gyrus, is associated to the reading effort, when it requires phonoarticulatory recoding. Disorders in other brain areas have been found. Magnocellular disturbs (rapid visual and auditive sequential discrimination) and cerebellar dysfunction (rapid association capacities, procedural learning) also have been described, although they are an inconstant phenomena and barely interpreted. For an adequate interpretation of multiple dyslexia cases, it must be considered the serie of comorbidities that are frequently found, and usually are indicators of a more extended brain disorder.

This communication introduces the fi rst stage of an investigation that focuses on homework and its infl uence on the relationship between families and schools (educational centers). An updated international literature review on the subject is provided. Furthermore, the design of the international investigation (which comprises the present study) is itemized. Finally, authors notify the stage of instrument’s pilot study in Spanish language.

Since the classic simple reading model proposed by Gough and Tunmer (1986), numerous studies have intended to demonstrate the relative and independent contribution of the decodification to the comprehension. The objective of the present study is to specify these relative independence by correlating skills, not of decodification, but of the “lexic-semantic” processing and fl uency, with the reading comprehension in 4th, 5th and 6th grade individuals. The results show, in the hole sample and in each of the three school grades, a positive and moderate correlation between the variables studied. These results and its educative implications are discussed.

The optimal location of sensors involves the selection of type, number and location of sensorsfrom a set of available instruments with certain values of cost, precision and reliability. Theoptimal design not only satisfies economic criteria, but also some requirements on the qualityof key variable estimates. In this work, a methodology for solving the sensor network designproblem based on Estimation of Distribution Algorithms is presented. These algorithms areincluded in the Evolutionary Computation paradigm and substitute the probability distributionestimation of a population composed by potential solutions and its subsequent sampling forthe use of the classic crossover and mutation operators. The performance of the new strategyis evaluated and compared with that provided by other evolutionary techniques for the case ofa steam metering network of a methanol synthesis plant.

The List of luster LC is an eetive tehnique to index high dimension metri spaes. LC is an array-type struture for similarity searh based on lustering. Sparse Spatial Seletion SSS is a new struture based on pivots for similarity searh in metri spaes. This array-type struture has shown good performane during the searh as ompared to other methods. This work shows dierent onstrution strategies on LC ; for instane, the use of SSS as a general seletion method of pivots or enters, among others. The artile also shows the advantages of the use of other tehniques like keeping the distane between the ob jets and the luster enter, apart from revising the eets of reursive appliation of suh methods. Finally, the inuene of the use of Voronoi partitions for the distribution of the ob jets within the struture will be shown. Preliminary experimental results show that the new versions of LC have a better performane in terms of distane evaluation than the original data struture and other renowned strutures. Keywords: Databases, Data strutures, Algorithms, Metri Spaes, Similarity Searh.

The study of prevention and protection against failures is a central problem in Optical Networks due to the growth of capacity demand for data transmission, especially with the Internet traffic. Without protection, failures of links or nodes cause huge losses of data. The ?-Cycle protection is a novel approach based on pre-configured protection cycles to provide a fast recovery for single link failure. This work proposes a Genetic Algorithm to solve the ?-Cycle protection question. Experimental tests carried out on different topologies have shown that this new proposal is a promising approach to achieve better results when compared to a well-known state-of-the-art alternative called Capacitated Iterative Design Algorithm - CIDA.

A computer application that supports the teaching and learning of sportingtechniques is presented. It was developed as a tool to assist sports trainers in identifying,analyzing, relating, and evaluating the learning of sporting techniques. At times trainers fail tovisualize all the details of an athlete’s technical gestures, mainly because of the speed of themovements. Based on this concept of observational method, the developed software is simpleto use and includes digital videos in a natural form for trainers who are not computer experts.To select an adequate video format for analyzing sporting techniques, compression tests andvideo compression with different codecs were made. Once the format had been chosen, itscompression was tested at different video qualities with the selected codec. To verify thefunctionalities of the developed tool, the chosen sport was swimming. The results obtainedwith the tool had excellent usability, since most of the functions were mastered withoutproblems by the trainers.

The use of decision rules and estimation techniques is increasingly common for decision mak-ing. In recent years studies were conducted which applies Genetic Programming (GP) to obtainrules to make predictions. A new branch in the area of Evolutionary Algorithms (EA) is LinearGenetic Programming (LGP). LGP evolves instructions sequences of an imperative programminglanguage. This paper proposes estimation models generation for time series forecasting using LGP.The forecasting result for the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and the price of soybeans per ton showsthe potential of this new proposal.