The reasons why Brazilian civil engineering education has not achieved competitive performance worldwide remain unclear. Thus, this study aims to identify what factors influence student performance in civil engineering undergraduate programs in public institutions in Brazil. Multiple linear regression methods were used to analyse the interactions…

Although women's representation in higher education nears parity with men at the undergraduate level, this representation diminishes as one ascends the academic ranks. Because gender gaps in the "elite" activity of international research collaborations might contribute to the underrepresentation of women in the upper ranks, we ask if…

This paper presents a non-parametric imputation technique, named random forest, from the machine learning field. The random forest procedure has two main tuning parameters: the number of trees grown in the prediction and the number of predictors used. Fifty experimental conditions were created in the imputation procedure, with different…

Purpose: This paper aims to investigate the prediction of current and evolutionary perceptions of professional development through five learning strategies at work and through training and how individual and job characteristics predict those strategies. Design/methodology/approach: Variables were measured in a cross-sectional survey, with 962…

The objective of this study was to validate a scale for assessment of academic projects. As a complement, we examined its predictive ability by comparing the scores of advised/corrected projects based on the model and the final scores awarded to the work by an examining panel (approximately 10 months after the project design). Results of…

The validity evidences of thinking and creative styles were analyzed. Two studies are reported, one analyzing the dimensionality of creative styles and the other verifying their external validity. Participants were Brazilians, 1,752 in the first study (55% women) and 128 in the second study (53% women), among whom 45% had demonstrated creative…

Social skills are specific behaviors that individuals exhibit in order to successfully complete social tasks whereas social competence represents judgments by significant others that these social tasks have been successfully accomplished. The present investigation identified the best sociobehavioral predictors obtained from different raters…

Our goal was to investigate the role of body mass index (BMI) and motor competence (MC) in children's physical activity (PA) levels during physical education (PE) classes. We assessed PA levels of 5-to-10-year old children ("n" = 264) with pedometers in four PE classes. MC was assessed using the TGMD-2 and BMI values were classified…

The present article describes a research that determined the factors influencing language schools in Brazil to adopt the Internet as a teaching tool. The theoretical framework used was Rogers, E. (1995). "Diffusion of innovation" (4th ed.). New York: The Free Press. theory of perceived attributes. A survey was carried out with 92…