Participatory democrats argue that citizen engagement at the local level serves an important educational function. Through involvement in participatory mechanisms, citizens develop various skills, become better informed, and cultivate a greater sense of political efficacy. There has been considerable debate in the academic literature over the extent to which participation can produce these benefits, but deliberative and participatory theoretical approaches have been criticised for neglecting power dynamics within participatory mechanisms themselves, and for overlooking structural inequalities between women and men. Numerous critics have charged that participatory mechanisms tend to mask, but not eliminate, gender inequalities, particularly in societies where these remain firmly entrenched. While the theory on the educational function of participatory democracy is well developed, there remains a lack of empirical work on the impact of participation on women in Latin America, a region that has been at the forefront of democratic innovation. Based on extensive fieldwork in Venezuela, Ecuador and Chile, this article identifies the types of skills that women gain through participation, and questions the extent to which these reproduce traditional gender roles.

Despite the hundreds of Mobile-Assisted Language Learning (MALL) publications over the past twenty years, statistically reliable measures of learning outcomes are few and far between. In part, this is due to the fact that well over half of all MALL-related studies report no objectively quantifiable learning outcomes, either because they did not involve MALL implementation projects, or if they did, learning gains were only based on subjective teacher assessments and/or student self-evaluations. Even more so, the paucity of statistically reliable learning outcome data stems from the short duration of projects and small numbers of students involved. Of the 291 distinct studies examined in this review only 35 meet minimal conditions of duration and sample size, i.e., ten experimental subjects over a period of at least a month. Sixteen of these suffer from serious design shortcomings, leaving only nineteen MALL studies that can reliably serve as a basis for determining the learning outcomes of mobile-based language applications. Of these studies, fifteen can be considered to report unequivocal positive results, with those focusing on reading, listening and speaking without exception evidencing a MALL application advantage. Four studies, all focusing on vocabulary, reported no significant differences.