A bridge over troubled waters: Bridging organisations and entrepreneurial opportunities in emerging sectors

Bridging institutions or organisations are regarded as having positive effects in the Sectoral Systems of Innovation (SSI) literature, particularly in compensating for weaknesses in these systems. Yet, we know little about the organisational practices that make their role effective, or the types of innovation paths that they may facilitate within a system. This paper shows how bridging organisations may promote neglected areas of creativity and potential disruptive innovation. These blocked opportunities tend to emerge at the boundaries of SSI: where old sectors overlap and new trajectories form. We draw on the social networks, entrepreneurship and disruptive innovation literature and analyse an intervention in the UK electronic games industry: the evaluation of business propositions exploiting new gaming platforms such as mobile telephones, DVD and film. Using an innovative co-productive research design, the study shows how the effectiveness of bridging organisation activity depends on key design choices and brokerage capabilities.     

Cases of incongruity: exploring the divide between adolescents’ beliefs and behavior related to academic dishonesty

The past several decades of research has produced many important insights into prevalence and correlates of academic dishonesty. While these studies have offered important contributions to our understanding of such cheating, we are in need of research that allows us to hear what students have to say about it. This paper begins to fill the relative void of student voices by presenting results from individual interviews with a sample of adolescents who acknowledge cheating despite believing that is wrong to do so. Specifically, the present investigation uses a multi‐case research design to explore the phenomenon of belief–behaviour incongruity, as it relates to academic dishonesty, among a demographically and academically diverse group of high school students. Four distinct cases of BBI are presented, each representing a complex configuration of psychological, social, cultural and situational factors: unable, under‐interested, under pressure and unrepentant. Educational implications and suggestion for further research are discussed.     

Human contact in the classroom: Exploring how teachers talk about and negotiate touching students

In a “risk society,” as defined by Beck [(1992). Risk society, towards a new modernity (M. Ritter, Trans.) Newbury Park, CA: Sage, see also Castel, R. (1991). From dangerousness to risk. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality (pp. 281–298). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press], teachers are risky individuals who, “must become permanent objects of their own suspicion” [Jones, A. (2003b). Touching children: Policy, social anxiety, and the ‘safe’ teacher. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 19(2), 112]. The purpose of this study was to explore how four experienced, female teachers for whom “touching” students is a natural component of their teaching, talked about how they made choices about when and how to engage in the risky behavior of touching children. Findings are organized along two axes. The first represents how participating teachers perceived contexts as facilitating or constraining human contact. The second illustrates what conversations about human contact revealed about participants’ teaching selves. This study contributes to the literature on teacher–student relationships as well as the literature on teachers’ decision-making. Implications for future research in teacher decision-making, teacher–student relationships, and teacher education are discussed.     

Attenuation of the CS-preexposure effect after a retention interval in preweanling rats

The effects of flavor preexposure and retention interval were assessed in 6- and 12-day-old rats. Conditioned aversions to a flavor appeared at both ages. The conditioning of the younger pups was unaffected by conditioned stimulus (CS) preexposure and was not evident after a 10-day retention interval. For the 12-day-old rats, preexposure to either the flavor CS or a different flavor attenuated aversion strength when the rats were tested soon after conditioning. Other 12-day-old rats that were tested 10 days after conditioning also expressed substantial aversions, but with a retention interval of this length, the aversions were equivalent for animals preexposed to the CS and those not preexposed before conditioning. This loss of the CS-preexposure effect over a long interval, which has also been observed in adult rats, identifies the locus of this effect as postacquisition and perhaps at the stage of memory retrieval.     

Climbing the Staircase: science education for the knowledge economy

Science and technology are widely regarded as the dominant drivers of transformation to a ‘knowledge’ economy and society — a transition in which higher education has a critical role. This paper reviews the influence of successive NZ governments intention to ‘proactively steer’ the tertiary education system towards the achievement of this critical role, and describes an initiative at the Auckland University of Technology (AUT) specifically designed to meet New Zealand's needs for a well trained, articulate and flexible workforce of scientists, engineers, technicians and support staff. The ‘staircasing’ model is the culmination of an effort to adapt, modify and extend traditional models of professional science and technology education to provide a mechanism for ‘life‐long learning’ through a flexible and responsive network of purpose‐built courses.     

The Relationship Between Teachers' Perceptions of Student Motivation and Engagement and Teachers' Enjoyment of and Confidence in Teaching

This paper examines teachers' perceptions of their students' motivation and engagement and their enjoyment of and confidence in teaching. Drawing on Martin's Student Motivation and Engagement Scale, 10 facets of motivation and engagement were explored amongst a sample of 1,019 teachers. These facets comprised three adaptive cognitive dimensions of motivation (self‐efficacy, valuing of school, mastery orientation), three adaptive behavioural dimensions (planning, study management, persistence), two impeding dimensions (anxiety, failure avoidance), and two maladaptive dimensions (uncertain control, self‐handicapping). Male teachers tended to report significantly higher student motivation and engagement than female teachers (though effect sizes were small) and primary school teachers reported significantly higher student motivation and engagement than high school teachers (effect sizes were moderate). Adaptive dimensions were more strongly associated with enjoyment and confidence in teaching than impeding and maladaptive dimensions. Of the adaptive dimensions, students' mastery orientation was the strongest correlate of teachers' enjoyment of teaching and students' persistence and students' planning were the strongest correlates of teachers' confidence in teaching. These associations were more marked for male teachers and relatively independent of years spent teaching. Implications for teacher education and professional development are discussed.     

Prosodic awareness and children’s multisyllabic word reading

Prosodic awareness (the rhythmic patterning of speech) accounts for unique variance in reading development. However, studies have thus far focused on early readers and utilised literacy measures which fail to distinguish between monosyllabic and multisyllabic words. The current study investigated the factors that are specifically associated with multisyllabic word reading in a sample of 50 children aged between 7 and 8 years. Prosodic awareness was the strongest predictor of multisyllabic word reading accuracy, after controlling for phoneme awareness, morphological awareness, vocabulary and short-term memory. Children also made surprisingly few phonemic errors while, in contrast, errors of stress assignment were commonplace. Prosodic awareness was also the strongest predictor of stress placement errors, although this finding was not significant. Prosodic skills may play an increasingly important role in literacy performance as children encounter more complex reading materials. Once phoneme-level skills are mastered, prosodic awareness is arguably the strongest predictor of single word reading.     

Imagery,intuition and imagination in quantum physics education

In response to the authors, I demonstrate how threshold concepts offer a means to both contextualise teaching and learning of quantum physics and help transform students into the culture of physics, and as a way to identify particularly troublesome concepts within quantum physics. By drawing parallels from my own doctoral research in another area of contemporary physics—special relativity—I highlight concepts that require an ontological change, namely a shift beyond the reality of everyday Newtonian experience such as time dilation and length contraction, as being troublesome concepts that can present barriers to learning with students often asking “is it real?”. Similarly, the domain of quantum physics requires students to move beyond “common sense” perception as it brings into sharp focus the difference between what is experienced via the sense perceptions and the mental abstraction of phenomena. And it’s this issue that highlights the important role imagery and creativity have both in quantum physics and in the evolution of physics more generally, and lies in stark contrast to the apparent mathematical focus and lack of opportunity for students to explore ontological issues evident in the authors’ research. By reflecting on the authors’ observations of a focus on mathematical formalisms and problem solving at the expense of alternative approaches, I explore the dialectic between Heisenberg’s highly mathematical approach and Schrödinger’s mechanical wave view of the atom, together with its conceptual imagery, at the heart of the evolution of quantum mechanics. In turn, I highlight the significance of imagery, imagination and intuition in quantum physics, together with the importance of adopting an epistemological pluralism—multiple ways of knowing and thinking—in physics education. Again drawing parallels with the authors’ work and my own, I identify the role thought experiments have in both quantum physics education and in physics more generally. By introducing the notion of play, I advocate adopting and celebrating multiple approaches of teaching and learning, including thought experiments, play, dialogue and a more conceptual approach inclusive of multiple forms of representation, that complements the current instructional, mathematical approach so as to provide better balance to learning, teaching and the curriculum.