People have the right to receive a quality of education that promotes, among other things, reading comprehension and the development of critical thinking. In Ecuador, there is a need to implement strategies and design educational programs to encourage and facilitate the development of these skills. This research focuses on the relationship between reading comprehension and the development of critical thinking, with a particular interest in the education of high school students in Ecuador. This research aims to analyze the relationship between reading comprehension and critical thinking, based on the experiences of a sample of high school students of both genders, aged between 12 and 16 years, from five schools in different regions of Ecuador. The study adopts a quantitative, retrospective, and correlational approach. The surveys, administered to a sample of students, showed that teachers actively encourage reading and implement timely educational strategies and teaching methods to develop critical thinking, recognizing its crucial role in future professional performance.

Transparency is a communicative process whose aim is to provide citizens with information that will promote their participation in public affairs. However, its application is often reduced to a legally stipulated administrative act. In contrast, this article sets out the principles, attributes and evidence of transparency from a communication perspective, taking into consideration that transparency is treated as a process through which recipients obtain, understand and use information. This study focuses on the transparency of local town councils, although most of the concepts could be applied at other levels of public administration. To establish this framework, the legislation and application of transparency in three countries (Spain, Ecuador and Colombia) was studied using the Infoparticipa method designed with a communication approach in mind. A comparative study was then carried out using methods designed in other disciplines. Through this approach, the benefits of transparency were categorized to define six principles—disclosure, strengthening, visibility, comprehensibility, dissemination and humanism—and eight attributes of transparent information: veracity, timeliness, accessibility, usability, intelligibility, universality, pluralism and plurality. For each attribute, the evidence of its application was determined. This framework clarifies the perspective of transparency for participation from a communication approach.

El acceso a la información es un nuevo derecho de las personas. La transparencia de las administraciones públicas, como valor y práctica, comporta beneficios en términos de democracia y desarrollo. La metodología Infoparticipa se ha diseñado y experimentado en España para evaluar e impulsar mejoras y se ha concebido como una auditoría cívica. Ahora se ha aplicado en Ecuador, adaptándola a su estructura administrativa y legislación, y se postula como estándar para el área iberoamericana.

Through the strategic use of health communication from their websites, government institutions can achieve greater promotion and prevent health issues for citizens, at whom such websites are aimed. Thus, the transparency of these sites is essential to favor issues such as participation, accountability, and good governance. In the present study, through content analysis, we examined how active transparency and communication in health is built through analyzing the information provided by the different administrative levels with competencies in this field (government, regions, and municipalities) from the following countries: Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Spain. The results were projected according to a double axis of analysis. On the one hand, we offer a description of the levels of management of this phenomenon (structural characteristics and available resources). On the other hand, we developed indices based on each of the countries to compare the typologies grouped in these Ibero-American countries. As a general conclusion, the results evinced insufficient transparency in common; however, the deficit was less in countries that had a public health system.

The objective of this research is to analyze the role of two different digital media in the message development for care of the environment in Ecuador in the context of the United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP 26). To address this qualitative research, we worked on a comparison of contents, complemented with text analysis and interviews with experts related to protecting the environment and journalists who generated content on this topic. In one case, the journalistic coverage had limitations, and, in the other, some superficial issues were addressed. In both cases, the wording was relatively complex, and each medium adapted the news to its ideological bias. It is necessary to change how journalism has been built; in other words, we need to “build” environmental journalism in Ecuador. Independent spaces for analysis, specialized personnel in topics related to this area, and professional training processes, research, and dissemination of content to raise citizens’ awareness of environmental issues are required.