Ownership concentration and innovativeness of corporate ventures

Corporate venture investments are an established means for incumbent firms to access radical innovation. Drawing from a behavioural agency framework, we distinguish two mechanisms that govern the relationship between corporate venture investment and radical innovation, the safety net that corporate sponsors provide and control incentives. While the safety net induces a gap between the radical innovation success of corporate ventures (CVs) and ventures without a corporate sponsor, the superior radical innovation success of CVs decreases with the corporate sponsor’s incentives to control the venture. The impact of the safety net and control incentives further depends on the corporate sponsor’s position vis-à-vis her aspiration level.     

Designing innovative learning environments to foster communities of learners for students in initial vocational education

In this study, the concept of ‘community of learners’ was used to improve initial vocational education. The framework of a ‘community of learners for vocational orientation’ that we present offers both a theoretical understanding of teaching–learning processes in initial vocational education and heuristics for the design of innovative learning environments for optimising these processes. In a design research study, we investigated if, and how, learning environments designed on the basis of these heuristics fostered communities of learners for vocational orientation, in which students experience to learn in a shared, meaningful, reflective and transfer-oriented way. We examined students’ perceptions of the learning environment and their learning activities during eight curriculum units specifically designed to foster the communities of learners. During almost all of the units that we designed, students found themselves learning in a more shared, meaningful, reflective and transfer-oriented way than during regular units. We conclude that the proposed heuristics had been useful starting points for the design of innovative learning environments that foster communities of learners for vocational orientation. In addition, we show how the heuristics can be elaborated for a particular school, based on practical and pedagogical content knowledge of teachers, as well as students’ perceptions of the learning environment and their learning activities.     

Peer teaching: Academic achievement of teacher-led versus student-led discussion groups

Problem-based small-group discussions are the cornerstone of health sciences education at the University of Limburg (The Netherlands). In each of three courses, fifteen discussion groups of about eight students were randomly assigned a staff-tutor (control condition) or student-tutor (experimental condition).In two of the courses no significant differences in cognitive test achievement between the two conditions were found. In one course students tutored by staff-tutors performed significantly better than students tutored by student-tutors. However, no significant differences in test performance were found between students tutored by high-achieving versus average-achieving student-tutors. These findings contradict the congruence hypothesis from information processing theory. Several other explanations are explored.     

Learn to Lead: Mapping Workplace Learning of School Leaders

In recent years policy makers’ interest in the professional development of school leaders has grown considerably. Although we know some aspect of formal educational programs for school leaders, little is known about school leaders’ incidental and non-formal learning in the workplace. This study aims to grasp what workplace learning activities school leaders value most, what work-related questions incite them to learn, what outcomes they achieve through workplace learning and what conditions support workplace learning of school leaders. In order to generate answers to the research questions, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 Dutch school leaders in secondary education, which also served as a form of reflection for the respondents. Results show that school leaders mostly value workplace learning through working on improvement and innovation and through reflection. In addition to outcomes for the school leader, working on improvement and innovation also leads to learning outcomes for teachers, and seems to provide opportunities for teachers to influence changes in the school. On the other hand, teachers take little or no part in reflection. Here, school leaders find peace and stability to reflect with fellow school leaders. If adjusted to a specific context, the methods used in this study might be transferred to other contexts, to study workplace learning of all kinds of leaders.     

Students’ Ability to Connect Function Properties to Different Types of Elementary Functions: An Empirical Study on the Role of External Representations

Recent research on the phenomenon of improper proportional reasoning focused on students’ understanding of elementary functions and their external representations. So far, the role of basic function properties in students’ concept images of functions remained unclear. We add to this research line by investigating how accurate students are in connecting functions to their corresponding properties and how this accuracy depends on function types and representations. A large group of 10th graders evaluated for different function types, represented in either a graphical, a formulaic, or a tabular mode, the correctness of statements about their general properties and behavior. Results show that students succeeded rather well in making the right connections between properties and functions. Errors depended not only on the type of function for which the properties were evaluated but also on the kind of representation in which the function was presented. These results highlight the importance of function properties in students’ concept images of functions and suggest positive effects of making these properties explicit to students.     

Higher Education

Instructions for authors

Higher Education     

The Development of Attention to Objects and Scenes: From Object-Biased to Unbiased

Selective attention is the ability to focus on goal-relevant information while filtering out irrelevant information. This work examined the development of selective attention to natural scenes and objects with a rapid serial visual presentation paradigm. Children (N = 69, ages 4–6 years) and adults (N = 80) were asked to attend to either objects or scenes, while ignoring the other type of stimulus. A multinomial processing tree model was used to decompose selective attention into focusing and filtering components. The results suggest that attention is object-biased in children, due to difficulty filtering attention to goal-irrelevant objects, whereas attention in adults is relatively unbiased. The findings suggest important developmental asymmetries in selective attention to scenes and objects.