Overcoming MSW Students' Reluctance to Engage in Research

Social work students are typically reluctant to engage in research. The research partnership model takes a service-learning approach, allowing students to work with data from a community agency and resulting in a final paper with all the sections of an empirical journal article. Use of this model in teaching social work research enhances student motivation, learning, and skills through hands-on activities within an authentic context, and by using group support with individual accountability, structured and incremental learning opportunities, and teaching from a strengths-based perspective.     

Pre-service primary teachers’ shame experiences during their schooling time: characteristics and effects on their subject-choices at university

Educational Studies in Mathematics - Emotions play an essential role in pre-service teachers’ competence development, particularly in mathematics. However, the emotion of shame in mathematics...     

新疆少数民族中职学生德育工作方法探索与实践——以新疆农业职业技术学院为例

为提升少数民族青年整体素质,新疆维吾尔自治区阿克苏、和田等地区启动了“两后生”整建制免费教育培训和就业工程.越来越多的少数民族学生进入职业学校.由于这一群体的特殊性,学校思想政治教育和学生管理工作出现了新挑战.基于中职少数民族学生特点,结合近年来“两后生”教育管理实践,提出加强少数民族学生教育管理的对策.     

The performance impact of intra-firm organizational design on an alliance's NPD projects

This research contributes to the intra-organization, inter-organization, and new product development (NPD) management literature by studying the impact of a firm's internal organizational design on the communication within and performance of NPD projects conducted with strategic alliance partners. The empirical data were collected from three in-depth case studies of network lead companies (NLCs) operating in different industries. The three NLCs have different internal organizational designs, ranging from very flexible “organic” to very rigid “mechanistic.” In each NLC, a successful new-to-firm product development project was chosen for further detailed investigation. First, we identify the role the alliance's NPD project characteristics and industry characteristics play in determining the “intensity level” and “media richness” of communication required between the alliance's NPD project partners. Then, we examine how the internal organizational design influences the actual intensity and media richness of communication of the alliance's NPD project that matches our assumptions of what is required.     

Measuring Mathematical Competences of Engineering Students at the Beginning of Their Studies

This article reports about our efforts to determine engineering students' competence in mathematics. Our research is embedded in a larger project, KoM@ING–Modeling and developing competence: Integrated IRT based and qualitative studies with a focus on mathematics and its usage in engineering studies, within the program Modeling and Measuring Competencies in Higher Education (KoKoHS). KoKoHS provides the umbrella organization of several research projects addressing the modeling and measuring of competences at the college level. KoM@ING aims to model the role of engineering students' mathematical competences for their studies from both a quantitative and a qualitative perspective.

Here, we report the development of a large-scale instrument assessing engineering freshmen's competence in mathematics by applying Rasch analysis to determine measures for item difficulties and student abilities. Several analyses were performed to provide insights into the measures' reliability and validity. In particular, to examine cognitive validity, we scrutinized students' think-aloud protocols when solving the items to investigate their problem solving abilities as a proxy for item difficulty. Overall, we found first evidence that our instrument is suitable to assess engineering freshmen's competence in mathematics. This instrument may be helpful to conduct further research and to inform those concerned with college organization and policy.     

First-Year Non-STEM Majors’ Use of Definitions to Solve Calculus Tasks: Benefits of Using Concept Image over Concept Definition?

Six US first-year university students in humanities or social science degree programmes were interviewed while solving 4 tasks on continuity and asymptotes in a required mathematics course. The focus was on how the students referred to the definitions or to the concept images when solving the tasks and if partial understandings appeared. Partial understanding denotes when the definition or the concept image has correct parts but essential parts are missing or incoherencies occur. Some students confused continuity with differentiability or perceived it as a graph not having holes, which is also reported by other studies. Another misconception that emerged is to perceive points on the x-axis as non-continuous. The partial understandings of asymptotes were related to the vertical asymptote as it was confused with a function property. Some students referred to the definitions when correctly solving some of the tasks and some students with coherent concept images were successful solving some of the tasks even when they did not refer to the definitions.