Exercise promotes several health benefits, such as cardiovascular, musculoskeletal and cardiorespiratory improvements. It is believed that the practice of exercise in individuals with psychiatric disorders, e.g. schizophrenia, can cause significant changes. Schizophrenic patients have problematic lifestyle habits compared with general population; this may cause a high mortality rate, mainly caused by cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. Thus, the aim of this study is to investigate changes in physical and mental health, cognitive and brain functioning due to the practice of exercise in patients with schizophrenia. Although still little is known about the benefits of exercise on mental health, cognitive and brain functioning of schizophrenic patients, exercise training has been shown to be a beneficial intervention in the control and reduction of disease severity. Type of training, form of execution, duration and intensity need to be better studied as the effects on physical and mental health, cognition and brain activity depend exclusively of interconnected factors, such as the combination of exercise and medication. However, one should understand that exercise is not only an effective nondrug alternative, but also acts as a supporting linking up interventions to promote improvements in process performance optimization. In general, the positive effects on mental health, cognition and brain activity as a result of an exercise program are quite evident. Few studies have been published correlating effects of exercise in patients with schizophrenia, but there is increasing evidence that positive and negative symptoms can be improved. Therefore, it is important that further studies be undertaken to expand the knowledge of physical exercise on mental health in people with schizophrenia, as well as its dose-response and the most effective type of exercise.

Objective: This article analyzes the contribution of a narrative intervention program in linguistic performance (measured by the percentage of correct consonants [PCC], mean length of utterance [MLU], and auditory memory [AM]) of children. Patients and Methods: A group of 14 children with primary language impairments participated in this study. The children were divided into two groups (seven children in each): the narrative intervention group (experimental group) and the control group. All children were treated by the same speech-language therapist. The narrative intervention program consisted of eight weekly group sessions. Outcome measures of PCC, MLU, and AM (of pseudowords, words, sentences, and orders) were taken before and after intervention. A qualitative assessment of the intervention effects from the perspective of the children's parents was also included. Results: The results suggest improvements in PCC and MLU but no support for intervention effectiveness on these measures. In AM, the results indicate a significant intervention effect on words and orders. Parents reported in-tervention to be favorable/very favorable. Conclusion: The narrative intervention program was effective in enhancing children's AM. However, further investigation is required to provide clinical evidence for speech and language therapists to employ this program for children with primary language impairments.

Evolution is a key concept of biology, fundamental to understand the world and address important societal problems, but research studies show that it is still not widely understood and accepted. Several factors are known to influence evolution acceptance and understanding, but little information is available regarding the impacts of the curriculum on these aspects. Very few curricula have been examined to assess the coverage of biological evolution. The available studies do not allow comparative analyses, due to the different methodologies employed by the authors. However, such an analysis would be useful for research purposes and for the development of appropriate educational policies to address the problem of a lack of evolution acceptance in some countries. In this paper we describe the steps through which we developed a valid and reliable instrument for curricula analysis known as FACE: “Framework to Assess the Coverage of biological Evolution by school curricula.” This framework was developed based on the “Understanding Evolution Conceptual Framework” (UECF). After an initial pilot study, our framework was reformulated based on identified issues and experts’ opinions. To generate validity and reliability evidence in support of the framework, it was applied to four European countries’ curricula. For each country, a team of a minimum of two national and two foreign coders worked independently to assess the curriculum using this framework for content analysis. Reliability evidence was estimated using Krippendorf's alpha and resulted in appropriate values for coding the examined curricula. Some issues that coders faced during the analysis were discussed and, to ensure better reliability for future researchers, additional guidelines and one extra category were included in the framework. The final version of the framework includes six categories and 34 subcategories. FACE is a useful tool for the analysis and the comparison of curricula and school textbooks regarding the coverage of evolution, and such results can guide curricula development.

For the purposes of professional development clinical education is crucial to speech-language pathologists (SLP). There is limited information about clinical education of SLP students in Portugal. The aim of this study was to describe and compare the mutual perceptions of Portuguese SLP’s clinical educators and students’ of SLP in a Portuguese private University Clinic. Five SLP clinical educators and nine students participated in a one on one semi-structured interview. Content analysis was used to explore interview data.  The analysis led to the identification of four themes shared by both groups. Findings from this study provided an insight about clinical education characteristics and challenges reported by clinical educators and students in Portugal and to compare those results with others mentioned in other countries. The findings of this study suggest that clinical educators and students identify, in general, similar characteristics regarding effective/non-effective clinical educator profile and benefits regarding clinical education process. The sample provides preliminary data on Portuguese clinical educator’s and student’s experience of clinical education.

This study aimed to analyse irony and metaphor comprehension of Portuguese school age children and analyse some of their individual differences, investigating if such factors may play a role in the comprehension of these two language elements. Two European-portuguese versions of stories from the instrument ‘Stories from Everyday Life’ were used to assess irony and metaphor comprehension in a sample of 30 children with 8 years in a Portuguese private educational institution. Individual differences (e.g., gender, number of siblings, parents’ educational levels and family history of speech and/or language disorders) were also considered. Children were able to understand metaphors and irony, as previously observed in other studies (e.g. Dews & Winner, 1997; Özçalışkan, 2007; Özçalişkan, 2005; Özçalışkan, 2007; Stites & Özçalişkan, 2013 Pexman & Glenwright, 2007). Results regarding individual differences on children’s performances showed that: i) male children performed better in both stories; ii) two children who presented a family history of speech and/or language disorders obtained lower scores than their peers; iii) two children whose parents had lower educational level than other families of participants performed worse than their peers; and iv) children who had more siblings performed better in both stories. Children’s performances on both stories were positively correlated. No significant gender differences were found regarding irony and metaphor comprehension, however, a slight advantage was found in male children. The number of siblings was positively associated with metaphor and irony comprehension. More research is needed to clarify the influence of developmental and social variables in metaphor and irony comprehension.