Antecedents of Norwegian beginning teachers’ turnover intentions

This study aims at exploring several individual, organizational, and contextual factors that may affect beginning teachers’ turnover intentions during their first years of practice. The sample consists of 227 beginning teachers (69% female and 31% male) from 133 schools in Norway. The results show four important antecedents of beginning teachers’ turnover intentions: collective teacher efficacy, teacher–principal trust, role conflict, and affective commitment. Our findings suggest that organizational and contextual factors, and not necessarily individual competence perceptions, have a significant impact on beginning teachers’ turnover intentions. Also the findings suggest that beginning teachers should be studied separately from more experienced teachers. Implications for school leadership are discussed.     

User-innovators and “local” information: The case of mountain biking

In a study of innovations developed by mountain bikers, we find that user-innovators almost always utilize “local” information - information already in their possession or generated by themselves - both to determine the need for and to develop the solutions for their innovations. We argue that this finding fits the economic incentives operating on users. Local need information will in general be the most relevant to user-innovators, since the bulk of their innovation-related rewards typically come from in-house use. User-innovators will increasingly tend to rely on local solution information as the stickiness of non-local solution information rises. When user-innovators do rely on local information, it may be possible to predict the general nature of the innovations they might develop.     

Wie schneiden SINUS-Schulen bei PISA ab?

In Reaktion auf die Ergebnisse der TIMS-Studie wurde das BLK-Modellversuchsprogramm SINUS konzipiert und 1998 mit 180 Schulen über fünf Jahre betrieben. Im vorliegenden Beitrag berichten wir über zentrale Ergebnisse der summativen Evaluation des Programms. Ziel des Programms war es, (1) die Professionalisierung der Lehrkr?fte zu unterstützen, (2) die Qualit?t des mathematisch-naturwissenschaftlichen Unterrichts zu verbessern und (3) die Lernprozesse und Lernergebnisse der Schülerinnen und Schüler zu f?rdern. Zur überprüfung der Ausgangslage und der Wirkungen des Programms diente ein Vergleich mit einer repr?sentativen Schulstichprobe. Dazu wurden an den SINUS-Schulen Erhebungen mit nationalen PISA-Instrumenten durchgeführt. Die Ergebnisse der Abschlusserhebung im Jahr 2003 zeigen, dass SINUS im Verlauf der Programmzeit auf allen untersuchten Ebenen Wirkungen entfaltet hat. Dies betrifft die erfolgreiche Umsetzung der Projektinhalte auf Seiten der Lehrkr?fte, die positive Wahrnehmung des Unterrichts auf Seiten der Schülerschaft sowie die Interessen, Haltungen und Kompetenzen der Schülerinnen und Schüler an SINUS-Schulen. Die schulartspezifischen Analysen zeigen jedoch, dass SINUS nicht in allen Schularten die gleiche Wirksamkeit erzielt hat. In erster Linie scheinen die Hauptschulen, die Schulen mit mehreren Bildungsg?ngen und die Integrierten Gesamtschulen profitiert zu haben.     

Transition systems and non-standard employment in early career: comparing Japan and Switzerland

Even though Japan and Switzerland are characterised by comparatively low youth unemployment rates, non-standard forms of employment are on the rise, posing a risk to the stable integration of young labour market entrants. Drawing on the French approach of societal analysis, this paper investigates how country-specific school-to-work transition systems stratify the risk of non-standard employment in early career differently in Japan and Switzerland. Our results reveal that in Japan, young entrants who completed university education are least at risk of becoming employed in non-standard work. On the contrary, it is the highly educated university graduates who mainly enter the labour market via non-standard employment in Switzerland, where vocational education promotes smooth transitions into standard employment relationships. Our findings suggest that the transition systems of the two countries differ in the way they revert to non-standard forms of employment. However, while job insecurities may not endanger labour market integration of highly skilled university graduates holding good career prospects in Switzerland, they may go hand in hand with social exclusion processes for the low-educated young entrants lacking bargaining power in the segmented Japanese labour market.     

An unexpected large continental source of reactive bromine and chlorine with significant impact on wintertime air quality

Halogen atoms affect the budget of ozone and the fate of pollutants such as hydrocarbons and mercury. Yet their sources and significances in polluted continental regions are poorly understood. Here we report the observation of unprecedented levels (averaging at 60 parts per trillion) of bromine chloride (BrCl) at a mid-latitude site in North China during winter. Widespread coal burning in rural households and a photo-assisted process were the primary source of BrCl and other bromine gases. BrCl contributed about 55% of both bromine and chlorine atoms. The halogen atoms increased the abundance of ‘conventional’ tropospheric oxidants (OH, HO₂ and RO₂) by 26%–73%, and enhanced oxidation of hydrocarbon by nearly a factor of two and the net ozone production by 55%. Our study reveals the significant role of reactive halogen in winter atmospheric chemistry and the deterioration of air quality in continental regions where uncontrolled coal combustion is prevalent.     

The role of socioscientific issues in biology teaching: from the perspective of teachers

ABSTRACT

Previous research has documented that students who engage with socioscientific issues can acquire some of the complex competences and skills typically related to scientific literacy. But an emerging field of research on science teachers’ understanding and use of socioscientific issues, has documented that a range of challenges hinders the uptake of socioscientific issues. In this study, we investigated the interpretation and implementation of socioscientific issues among Danish biology teachers. We conducted five in-depth group interviews and validated the emergent themes from the teachers’ talk-in-interaction by distributing a questionnaire. Our findings suggest that the participating teachers generally harbour a content-centred interpretation of socioscientific issues which manifests itself in at least three separate ways. First, the teachers generally use socioscientific issues as a vehicle to teach factual biological content. Second, the teachers emphasised mastery of factual content in their assessment. Third, the teachers tended to reduce socioscientific issues to specific biological contents in a way may preclude students from engaging with the real socioscientific issue. Our findings are particularly significant for science educators, policy-makers and curriculum designers, as we argue that key aspects of this content-centred interpretation may be a coping strategy used to navigate a divided curriculum.     

Expertise of Team Leaders in Analysing Team Conflicts

Team leaders are expected to adequately analyse team conflicts. Both content and analytical depth of cognitive processes determine team leaders’ performance and are assumed to differ with level of expertise. A study is reported in which team leaders at four different levels of expertise (novices, semi-experts, experts, mediators) were compared in their analysis of a team conflict presented in a computer-based simulation. Few differences were found between novices and semi-experts, whereas team leaders and mediators differed both in content and in analytical depth of cognitive processes. It is not the amount of practice time itself, which substantially impacts the content and depth of team leaders’ analyses of conflicts. Rather the quality of experience is crucial for developing the ability to conduct an elaborated analysis of team conflicts.     

Why space matters in technological innovation systems—Mapping global knowledge dynamics of membrane bioreactor technology

Studies on technological innovation systems (TISs) often set spatial boundaries at the national level and treat supranational levels as a geographically undifferentiated and freely accessible global technological opportunity set. This article criticizes this conceptualization and proposes instead to analyze relevant actors, networks and processes in TIS from a relational perspective on space. It develops an analytical framework which allows investigating innovation processes (or ‘functions’) of a TIS at and across different spatial scales. Based on social network analysis of a co-publication dataset from membrane bioreactor technology, we illustrate how the spatial characteristics of collaborations in knowledge creation vary greatly over relatively short periods of time. This finding suggests that TIS studies should be more reflexive on system boundary setting both regarding the identification and analysis of core processes as well as in the formulation of policy advice.