Peers and Spheres of Influence: Situating Rob Kling

In this article we employ a number of bibliometric techniques to capture Rob Kling's intellectual impact and influences over the course of his varied career. We analyze his many publications in terms of type, topic, impact, and rate of co-authorship. We provide a detailed deconstruction of his citation identity (all those scholars whom he cited) and also his citation image makers (all those scholars who cited his work). In addition, we analyze acknowledgment data to gain deeper insights into the sociocognitive networks that sustained, and were sustained by Kling throughout his career.     

Predictors of student success in Higher Education: Secondary school internal scores versus national exams

In many countries entrance to Higher Education is determined by the performance of students in secondary school and/or the scores obtained in national exams. The relative weight of these two scores on the admission decision is a relevant policy topic, given its implication on who is admitted to university. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relative predictive power of these two measures on the academic performance of students in Higher Education. It makes use of a dataset of Bachelor students from Portuguese Higher Education institutions with detailed information about their characteristics and past achievement results. The measure of academic achievement considered is the Bachelor's final average score. The main finding is that the scores given by teachers in secondary school are better predictors of subsequent performance than the access exam scores. The relevance of factors like working status, social support and gender vary with the reputation of the degree and the type of Higher Education institution, university versus polytechnic. A noteworthy result is that the added predictive contribution of parents' education is always negligible when past success measures are already taken into account.     

Is there a linear relationship between R&D intensity and growth? Empirical evidence of non-high-tech vs. high-tech SMEs

To investigate whether there is a similar relationship between R&D intensity and growth in high-tech and non-high-tech small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), we examine two samples of SMEs in manufacturing industries, applying the two-step estimation method. Our findings are that R&D intensity restricts the growth of high-tech SMEs at lower levels of R&D intensity and stimulates their growth at higher levels. However, R&D intensity restricts the growth of non-high-tech SMEs regardless of the level of R&D. The relationships obtained between other determinants considered in the literature and the growth of high-tech and non-high-tech SMEs allow us to conclude that (i) smaller, younger, non-high-tech SMEs grow more quickly than larger, older, non-high-tech SMEs, which does not occur in the case of high-tech SMEs; and (ii) financing restrictions are especially important in financing the growth of high-tech SMEs, compared with non-high-tech SMEs.     

Retrieval Practice Consistently Benefits Student Learning: a Systematic Review of Applied Research in Schools and Classrooms

Given the growing interest in retrieval practice among educators, it is valuable to know when retrieval practice does and does not improve student learning—particularly for educators who have limited classroom time and resources. In this literature review, we developed a narrow operational definition for “classroom research” compared to previous reviews of the literature. We screened nearly 2000 abstracts and systematically coded 50 experiments to establish a clearer picture of benefits from retrieval practice in real world educational settings. Our review yielded 49 effect sizes and a total n?=?5374, the majority of which (57%) revealed medium or large benefits from retrieval practice. We found that retrieval practice improved learning for a variety of education levels, content areas, experimental designs, final test delays, retrieval and final test formats, and timing of retrieval practice and feedback; however, only 6% of experiments were conducted in non-WEIRD countries. Based on our review of the literature, we make eight recommendations for future research and provide educators with a better understanding of the robust benefits of retrieval practice across a range of school and classroom settings.

     

Deaf children's informal knowledge of multiplicative reasoning

Multiplicative reasoning is required in different contexts in mathematics: it is necessary to understand the concept of multipart units, involved in learning place value and measurement, and also to solve multiplication and division problems. Measures of hearing children's multiplicative reasoning at school entry are reliable and specific predictors of their mathematics achievement in school. An analysis of deaf children's informal multiplicative reasoning showed that deaf children under-perform in comparison to the hearing cohorts in their first two years of school. However, a brief training study, which significantly improved their success on these problems, suggested that this may be a performance, rather than a competence difference. Thus, it is possible and desirable to promote deaf children's multiplicative reasoning when they start school so that they are provided with a more solid basis for learning mathematics.     

Nation and National Museums,a Contested Relationship: An Analysis of U.S. National Museums in the Twenty‐first Century

The motivation for this article arose from the wish to share our outside perspectives on how national museums in the U.S. mediate ideas of national identity. We are four students out of a larger group of 15 German students in Cultural Studies at Leuphana University of Lueneburg. We conducted empirical research on various national museums within the Smithsonian Institution and also on the soon‐to‐be‐opened National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York City. The objective of our research was to explore the role that American national museums play in a globalized world by investigating how such museums address changing national identities over time.     

Environmental Perception as a Diagnostic Probe of Environmental Complexity Levels

Purpose: Educational methods to diagnose and improve the level of environmental conception are required. The present work reports a methodology based on studies about the environmental perception of a university public, divided into general students and those related to the forest sciences, who are involved with disciplines and researches related to e.g. environmental management.

Design/Methodology/Approach: The environmental perception obtained from the graphical representation of environment and the most relevant actions indicated by the students to achieve the environmental conservation, divided in four levels of complexity, were correlated using principal component analysis.

Findings: The students from both groups having the highest scores in environmental perception prioritize actions related to the comprehension and responsibility levels, while the ideal scenario would be to indicate actions related to competence and citizenship. Thus, the complex concept about environment of the students is still incipient and, therefore, educational strategies can be traced based on the profiles obtained.

Practical Implications: The method for environmental perception can be designed for different populations and a scheme relating environmental perception with four levels of actions on behalf of the environmental conservation is proposed to diagnose environmental conceptions, as well as to guide educational strategies about socio-ecological system.

Originality/Value: A semi-quantitative method was developed to estimate, clearly and directly, the level of complexity about the environmental knowledge of university students and, consequently, to predict the actions on behalf of the environmental conservation that they would probably perform.