School internships play an essential role in music teacher education (MTE), but knowledge about these internships on an international scale is sparse. This qualitative survey study presents detailed information about school internships in European MTE based on responses from music teacher educators at twenty-four institutions in seventeen European countries. Findings show that, despite differences between institutions and countries, the structure and content of school internships share many similarities. Broader variation was found in the types of assessment materials student teachers are required to complete, but these also remain generally congruent. The possibility for student teachers to complete a school internship abroad is inconsistent across institutions, and established practices for their organization and implementation are lacking. Opportunities for the furtherdevelopment of domestic school internships are discussed, as are ways to facilitate school internships abroad.Keywords: School internships, music teacher education, international music pedagogy, mentoring
Loneliness represents a negative feeling that arises when individuals perceive a discrepancy between actual and desired social relationships. Using a qualitative approach, the present study explored the meanings and personal experiences of loneliness in children and early adolescents in Italy. Participants included 139 children and early adolescents aged 8–14 years (M = 10.76 years, SD = 1.71; 70 girls, 57.6%) who completed an online semi-structured interview. Results from the descriptive analysis provided evidence of the multidimensional nature of loneliness, defined and experienced through different dimensions (e.g., cognitive, emotional, and regarding interpersonal context). Additionally, participants discussed loneliness in relation to both their family and peers. Some children and adolescents expressed experiencing loneliness voluntarily. Children and early adolescents reported to feel sadness, anger and other emotions as boredom, happiness, and fear in associations with loneliness. Gender and grade differences were also found. Primary school children and boys defined and experienced loneliness using the physical separation dimension. Middle school childrens defined more frequently loneliness using the cognitive dimension. Overall, the present study offers a richer understanding of the meanings and experiences of loneliness in youth and highlights the importance of considering developmental, gender, and cultural factors when studying loneliness.
We analyze the impact of the institutional environment on the leverage of European listed SMEs for the period 2005-2018. We use a broad range of institutional quality, judicial efficiency and corruption measures, along with several firm-specific and macro control variables, to identify different transmission channels on leverage. By performing a panel data analysis into the fixed effects filter estimator framework, along with several model specifications and robustness tests, the results show that better institutions, stronger judicial effectiveness and higher corruption decrease leverage. In terms of active transmission channels, increased investment under regimes of better institutional quality tends to increase leverage. Higher judicial efficiency accompanied by increased profitability tends to decrease, while higher institutional quality accompanied by higher investments tends to increase leverage, bringing more bank credit. Increasing profitability under regimes of decreased corruption decreases leverage. This last finding is even more pronounced for medium enterprises, as opposed to micro enterprises. The most significant factors associated with leverage are profitability, asset structure, cost of borrowing, stock market development and size, while an age effect is rejected. Pecking order theory seems to better fit the European SMEs capital structure choices under several institutional states.
Given a filtration of the module of vector fields on a smooth manifold, we define a pseudodifferential calculus where the order of a vector field is given by the filtration. We show that pseudodifferential operators have a well-defined principal symbol for a subset of the unitary representations of the osculating groups. We prove a Rockland-type theorem, showing that the invertibility of the principal symbol is equivalent to maximal hypoellipticity. This answers affirmatively a conjecture due to Helffer and Nourrigat.