Globalization and the freedom of knowledge

This article considers the transmission of knowledge in higher education. It takes the metaphor of the music industry that pre‐selects the music people can buy. The sales potential is the leading principle in the selection process. Often the small producer is excluded because his or her music is not of commercial interest. The end‐customer does not know what he or she is missing because he or she has never heard the music. It is to be feared that a similar market principle will also influence the selection of knowledge and affect the capacity of higher education institutions to freely generate and transmit new knowledge. The globalization of higher education risks homogenizing the cultural traditions of the non‐Western world through a process of Western cultural domination. On the other hand, the Internet, via open source software like LINUX, might serve to democratize higher education and allow greater grassroots input.     

Distributing and Showing Farmer Learning Videos in Bangladesh

Purpose: To describe the results of showing farmer learning videos through different types of volunteers.

Design/Methodology/Approach: Semi-structured interviews with volunteers from different occupational groups in Bangladesh, and a phone survey with 227 respondents.

Findings: Each occupational group acted differently. Shop keepers, tillage service providers, agricultural input and machine dealers reached fairly small audiences. Tea stall owners had large, male audiences. Non-governmental organisations and community-based organisations, reached more women. The cable TV (dish-line) operators showed the videos on local TV, but some were reluctant to do so again. The Union Information Service Centres showed the videos and reached women viewers. Half of the official government extension agents surveyed also showed the videos publically.

Practical Implication: This video featured maize, wheat and rice seeding machinery. Because the machinery is complex and requires hands-on training, this first video aimed to expose tillage and sowing service providers and farmers to the machinery, without trying to teach them how to use it. But some farmers were so interested that they watched the video many times to learn more about the equipment. Before farmers and service providers decide to buy machinery for direct seeding, they still want to see and learn from demonstration plantings, to examine first-hand how the crop behaves when planted with the new equipment.

Originality/Value: Video can be an effective way of sharing high-quality information with a large audience, if properly distributed.     

Mergers and acquisitions: Their effect on the innovative performance of companies in high-tech industries

This study examines the post-M&A innovative performance of acquiring firms in four major high-tech sectors. Non-technological M&As appear to have a negative impact on the acquiring firm's post-M&A innovative performance. With respect to technological M&As, a large relative size of the acquired knowledge base reduces the innovative performance of the acquiring firm. The absolute size of the acquired knowledge base only has a positive effect during the first couple of years after which the effect turns around and we see a negative effect on the innovative performance of the acquiring firm. The relatedness between the acquired and acquiring firms’ knowledge bases has a curvilinear impact on the acquiring firm's innovative performance. This indicates that companies should target M&A ‘partners’ that are neither too unrelated nor too similar in terms of their knowledge base.     

Teachers' education, classroom quality, and young children's academic skills: results from seven studies of preschool programs

In an effort to provide high-quality preschool education, policymakers are increasingly requiring public preschool teachers to have at least a Bachelor's degree, preferably in early childhood education. Seven major studies of early care and education were used to predict classroom quality and children's academic outcomes from the educational attainment and major of teachers of 4-year-olds. The findings indicate largely null or contradictory associations, indicating that policies focused solely on increasing teachers' education will not suffice for improving classroom quality or maximizing children's academic gains. Instead, raising the effectiveness of early childhood education likely will require a broad range of professional development activities and supports targeted toward teachers' interactions with children.     

Infant joint attention, temperament, and social competence in preschool children

Infant joint attention has been observed to be related to social-emotional outcomes in at-risk children. To address whether this relation is also evident in typically developing children, 52 children were tested at 12, 15, 24, and 30 months to examine associations between infant joint attention and social outcomes. Twelve-month initiating and responding to joint attention were related to 30-month social competence and externalizing behavior, even when accounting for 15-month temperament ratings, 24-month cognition and language, and demographic variables. These results suggest that, in addition to associations with language and cognition, infant joint attention reflects robust aspects of development that are related to individual differences in the emergence of social and behavioral competence in childhood.     

Developmental trends for object and spatial working memory: a psychophysiological analysis

This study examined developmental trends in object and spatial working memory (WM) using heart rate (HR) to provide an index of covert cognitive processes. Participants in 4 age groups (6-7, 9-10, 11-12, 18-26, n=20 each) performed object and spatial WM tasks, in which each trial was followed by feedback. Spatial WM task performance reached adult levels before object WM task performance. The differential developmental trends for object and spatial WM found in this study are taken to suggest that these WM components are separable. Negative performance feedback elicited HR slowing that was more pronounced for adults than for children. The development of performance monitoring as indexed by covert HR slowing following performance feedback contributes to WM performance.     

Cognitive brain potentials in kindergarten children with subtyped risks of reading retardation

Cognition-related brain responses to meaningful and meaningless figures were registered in 5-year-old kindergarten children who either had been subtyped as being at-risk of developing an L- or P-type dyslexia (LAL versus LAP) or who were not at-risk. While identifying, naming, or categorizing pictures, event-related potentials (ERP) were registered. Three cognition-related components were found: the N460, the P780, and the Slow Wave (SW). LAP-children produced weak N460 activity across tasks, whereas LAL children, and to a lesser degree, non-risk children produced robust task-dependent activity. This finding may indicate that LAP-children lack semantic input while processing the figures. P780 latencies to frequently occurring figures were found hemisphere-dependent: LAP-children showed longer latencies in the right than in the left hemisphere, whereas the distribution was reversed in the LAL and non-risk children. It was also found that the right hemisphere is generally responsible for a lion's share of the processing of figures and therefore it seems that the right hemisphere of LAP-children invests ample time in doing so. Whereas LAP-children showed largest SW amplitude differences between frequent and infrequent stimuli at posterior locations, LAL children did so at frontal locations. Assuming that the SW represents working-memory processes, it may be that working-memory in LAP-children deals with figure-relevant visual-spatial information and with figure-derived concepts in LAL children. Overall, the findings suggest that LAL and LAP represent two different groups of kindergartners at risk of dyslexia and that these differences, to some degree, fit with the presumed etiology of L- and P-type dyslexia.     

Examining features of how professional development and enactment of educative curricula influences elementary science teacher learning

This research examines factors influencing elementary science teacher learning as they participate in professional development with and enactment of educative curricula in comparison with learning following limited professional development and enactment of traditional curricula. Using a randomized cluster design (125 teachers and 2,694 students in 4th—5th grades) that met the What Works Clearinghouse standards without reservations, teacher learning was conceptualized using four outcomes. Data were analyzed using standard single-level multiple regression models and possible mediation models for the teacher outcomes were considered using piecewise multiple regression and path analytic approaches. Treatment group teachers experienced greater increases in content knowledge, views of science inquiry, beliefs about reform-based teaching, and teaching self-efficacy than comparison group teachers. The findings indicate that what teachers learn from the combination of professional development and teaching with educative curriculum varies according to what their knowledge and beliefs are on entering the experience. Surprisingly, high entry-level self-efficacy was associated not only with lower learning gains for the teachers, but also for their students. Finally, teachers' space science learning and that of their students are implicated as mediators of the positive effect of the professional development and educative curriculum enactment on teacher beliefs about reform science teaching. This work refines and extends a theoretical framework of teachers' participatory relationship with curricula.     

The directional links between students’ academic motivation and social integration during the first year of higher education

European Journal of Psychology of Education - Previous theoretical research proposed a link between students’ academic motivation and students’ experiences of social integration, but...     

Beyond the Blockbuster: Good Exhibitions in Small Packages

Many American and European art museums are now featuring small, highly-focused shows in their exhibition programs. In 1990, the Indianapolis Museum of Art organized an exhibition that reunited, for the first time in a century, the four landscape paintings created by neo-impressionist Georges Seurat during the last summer of his life. Using Seurat at Gravelines: The Last Landscapes as an example, this article addresses the advantages — for museums and their visitors — of the small temporary exhibition.