Traditional education and methods of access: Transcripting extrainstitutional education

Innovative Higher Education - The evaluation of training and education sponsored by the Armed Forces, business, and industry as well as prior learning assessment has been systematically...     

How Team Interlock Ecosystems Shape the Assembly of Scientific Teams: A Hypergraph Approach

ABSTRACT

Today’s most pressing scientific problems necessitate scientific teamwork; the increasing complexity and specialization of knowledge render “lone geniuses” ill-equipped to make high-impact scientific breakthroughs. Social network research has begun to explore the factors that promote the assembly of scientific teams. However, this work has been limited by network approaches centered conceptually and analytically on “nodes as people,” or “nodes as teams.” In this article, we develop a “team-interlock ecosystem” conceptualization of collaborative environments within which new scientific teams, or other creative team-based enterprises, assemble. Team interlock ecosystems comprise teams linked to one another through overlapping memberships and/or overlapping knowledge domains. They depict teams, people, and knowledge sets as nodes, and thus, present both conceptual advantages as well as methodological challenges. Conceptually, team interlock ecosystems invite novel questions about how the structural characteristics of embedding ecosystems serve as the primordial soup from which new teams assemble. Methodologically, however, studying ecosystems requires the use of more advanced analytics that correspond to the inherently multilevel phenomenon of scientists nested within multiple teams. To address these methodological challenges, we advance the use of hypergraph methodologies combined with bibliometric data and simulation-based approaches to test hypotheses related to the ecosystem drivers of team assembly.     

Where Theories of Mind Meet Magic: The Development of Children's Beliefs about Wishing

In two studies, we probed children's beliefs about wishing. In Study 1, we gathered initial data on 50 3- to 6-year-old children's concepts of wishing and beliefs about its efficacy, with both a semistructured interview and a variety of tasks. Results revealed considerable knowledge about wishing in young children, along with an age-related decrease in beliefs about its efficacy. Parents were not found to encourage differently the beliefs of children at different ages, nor were they found to begin actively discouraging such beliefs at any particular age. A moderate relation was found between environmental supports for wishing and children's beliefs in its efficacy. In Study 2, we continued to probe these issues and also address the nature of the broader conceptual context in which children situate their beliefs about wishing. Participants were 92 3- to 6-year-old children. Results of this study suggest that children may reconcile beliefs in the efficacy of wishing with knowledge about everyday mental-physical relations by situating these beliefs more within their emerging beliefs about magic than within their theories of mind.     

Effectiveness of peer tutors vs. resource teachers

The purpose of this study was to determine whether mildly handicapped students working on a one-to-one basis with tutors would show a greater academic gain than students working in a small group with the resource teacher. By using a pretest-posttest control design it was found that after a three-month period, students who had tutors did show a more significant gain in reading (especially in the area of reading recognition). Teachers advised that no more than two tutors from one classroom be assigned to the tutor program, and teachers further felt that they could not supervise more than two tutorial pairs.     

Sensitivity to auditory and visual stimuli during early reading development

An investigation was conducted into the visual and auditory temporal processing profiles of two groups of 4‐ to 6‐year‐old children: pre‐alphabetic children, who showed no alphabetic ability (failing to read any non‐words in a test), and those who demonstrated some alphabetic ability. This alphabetic group showed higher scores in reading and spelling attainment than the pre‐alphabetic group. They were also faster than the pre‐alphabetic group in reacting to the onset and offset of auditory and visual stimuli. However, when age was used as a covariate, only reaction times (RTs) to the offsets of visual stimuli were found to be faster in the alphabetic than the pre‐alphabetic group. This suggests that responses to the offset of visual stimuli are becoming more rapid during the same developmental period when alphabetic ability is beginning to be acquired. Within the alphabetic group, after accounting for age, visual and auditory onset RTs were strongly correlated, whereas within the pre‐alphabetic group there were high correlations between visual and auditory offset RTs. It is therefore suggested that a strong association between RTs to visual and auditory onsets may be beneficial during early alphabetic acquisition, when phoneme–grapheme associations are established. Multiple regression analyses showed visual offset RT as the only variable to account for a significant amount of variance in spelling attainment after age was taken into account, which may relate to Frith's (1985) contention that spelling is important in driving early alphabetic ability.     

Education the Handmaid of Philosophy

Abstract

This article addresses how we might teach for global citizenship in world history classrooms. Despite the name, secondary world history courses in the United States have not consistently focused on global interconnections, multiple perspectives, and inquiry into global issues. We explore why this might be, as well as suggest specific learning activities and curricular topics in world history that could help meet global citizenship goals.     

Lifelong learning among older professionals: How competence strategies and perceptions of professional learning affect pastors’ participation

One of the challenges of keeping older employees up to date and ensuring their continued involvement in the workplace is to provide them with relevant learning opportunities. This article aims to understand the usefulness of the concept of LLL for a group of older employees (50+). This is done using interviews and a document study on the Church of Norway (CofN) to understand how the concept of LLL is interpreted and acted upon by employers and older pastors. We assume that changes occurring outside the Church provoke the need for new knowledge and new ways of working. We ask how these older professionals perceive their learning opportunities and try to ascertain how the concept of LLL is helping them to tackle the ongoing changes. The article adds to the research on the interplay between competence strategies of employers and attitudes of older employees in a well‐established profession. Results of our study show that new strategies open up for greater participation. However, older pastors’ greatest motivation for learning seems to be their ordination vows, which include a commitment to continued learning through personal studies. This influences the kind of activities in which they participate, their expectations concerning the recognition of their learning and their views on the Church as a learning organisation. We conclude that older pastors do benefit from LLL initiatives in the workplace, but they also benefit from belonging to a profession with a conscious commitment to learning.