Innovation in services in networks of organizations and in the distribution of services

Three approaches of studying innovation in services are recognized: the assimilation, demarcation and synthesis approach. The synthesis approach attempts to arrive at a theory relevant for service and manufacturing. Gallouj and Weinstein [Gallouj, F., Weinstein, O., 1997. Innovation in services. Research Policy 26, 537-556] were one of the first to take this approach. This article contributes to the synthesis approach by revising their theory to enable reasoning about recent innovation trends in networks of organizations and in the distribution of services. The theory revision is based on several case studies. Implications for the study of innovation are discussed in terms of results from recent demarcation studies.     

A retrospective study of social relations in a Danish primary school class taught in ‘udeskole’

The use of the ’outdoors’ in pre-school and school settings is becoming an increasingly important field of education and researchers have emphasised the positive influence of the ‘outdoors’ on various social aspects. However, the facilitative conditions for such positive influences are not studied exhaustively. Therefore, we explored the conditions in ‘udeskole’ influencing pupils’ social relations based on an extreme case called the ‘Nature Class’. In the ‘Nature Class’ the pupils (third to fifth grades) were taught outside the classroom one day a week. Five pupils and two teachers were interviewed seven years after the period of udeskole to explore the conditions influencing social relations during the third to ninth grades. We applied a conventional qualitative content analysis and identified six conditions important for the improvement of the social relations. Four of them—‘play’, ‘interaction’, ‘participation’ and ‘pupil-centered tasks’—were important conditions for the positive social relations during the ‘Nature Class’ project. Two conditions—‘cooperation’ and ‘engagement’—seem to be consequences of the improved social relations during the ‘Nature Class’ project which positively influenced the pupils’ abilities to cooperate and the pupils’ strong engagement in the subsequent school years.     

Do Parents’ Causal Attributions Predict the Accuracy and Bias in their Children’s Self‐Concept of Maths Ability? A longitudinal study

The present study investigated the extent to which parents’ causal attributions predict the accuracy of, and bias in, their children’s self‐concept of maths ability. Participants were 207 children and their 182 mothers and 167 fathers, who were assessed during the children’s first and second primary school years. The results showed that the more parents thought that their children succeeded because of ability, the more accurate the children’s self‐concept of maths ability became. In contrast, the more the parents attributed their children’s success to effort, the less accurate and more optimistic the children’s self‐concept of ability became.     

Assessing highly‐creative ability1

This paper presents a psychological perspective of the educational dilemma of assessing highly (high‐level) creative ability (with some connections to contemporary philosophical debate). Assessment of highly‐creative ability is a topic of longstanding debate involving questions of what constitutes creativity; whether the creative mental process is essentially intuitive or essentially rational; whether creative ability could or should be reduced to quantifiable parameters; and whether the most important aspects of creative achievement reside in the initial thinking (invention of ideas) or in the subsequent process of development of the idea (making a work of art, design, etc) or in the end product (the work of art or design itself). The debate is fueled by various philosophical, psychological and educational perspectives, all of which are continuously evolving. As a consequence, learning objectives and assessment criteria are ambiguous and confound the enhancement of creative ability that is the primary purpose of higher education. This paper traces the research and development path that led to an innovative ‘authenticative assessment’ approach to assessing highly‐creative ability that offers a promising solution.     

Entry points when undergraduate research mentors reflect on their role: a qualitative case study

Abstract

Graduate students and postdoctoral researchers are increasingly taking on mentoring roles in undergraduate research (UR). There is, however, a paucity of research focusing on how they conceptualize their mentoring role. In this qualitative interview study, we identified three entry points that mentors reflect on to define their role: (1) What are the goals of UR? (2) What do the students expect from me? and (3) How should I use my expert knowledge? We discuss how academic developers can use these entry points together with a set of reflective lenses to stimulate critical reflection on the mentoring role and help the mentors to define their role and help the mentors to define their role.     

Longitudinal twin study of early literacy development: Preschool through Grade 1

Grade 1 literacy skills of twin children in Australia (New South Wales) and the United States (Colorado) were explored in a genetically sensitive design (N = 319 pairs). Analyses indicated strong genetic influence on word and nonword identification, reading comprehension, and spelling. Rapid naming showed more modest, though reliable, genetic influence. Phonological awareness was subject to high nonshared environment and no reliable genetic effects, and individual measures of memory and learning were also less affected by genes than nonshared environment. Multivariate analyses showed that the same genes affected word identification, reading comprehension, and spelling. Country comparisons indicated that the patterns of genetic influence on reading and spelling in Grade 1 were similar, though for the U.S. but not the Australian children new genes came on stream in the move from kindergarten to Grade 1. We suggest that this is because the more intensive kindergarten literacy curriculum in New South Wales compared with Colorado, consistent with the mean differences between the two countries, means that more of the genes are “online” sooner in Australia because of accelerated overall reading development.     

How do teachers interpret and transform entrepreneurship education?

During the last decade, entrepreneurship education has become a central curricular topic in many locations in the world. In Sweden, entrepreneurship education was implemented in the curriculum for the first time in 2011, as something that should be included in all upper secondary school programmes. In this article, we focus on one of these programmes, the handicraft programme, investigating how entrepreneurship education is formulated in the latest curriculum and how teachers understand and transform such content in their teaching. Drawing on Bernstein’s concepts of classification and framing, we illustrate how entrepreneurship education in the Swedish curriculum has a ‘dual definition’, representing very different framing and classification, but still clearly belongs in a ‘market relevance’ discourse. This is expressed through the way in which the concept is transformed by teachers in their teaching. We also find that entrepreneurship education has low legitimacy among teachers, particularly when it is classified weakly. The weak framing and classification, taken together with the low legitimacy among teachers, are likely to lead to very different transformations of entrepreneurship education in different educational contexts. In the long run, this could have a negative effect on the equivalence of teaching at upper secondary school.     

The Role of School Climate in Explaining Changes in Social Trust Over Time

School is often ranked highly among social agents that are central to the development of various citizenship values and norms in younger members of society. In this paper, we examined the impact of two dimensions of school climate on changes in social trust among adolescents over time, namely relationships and safety. Using a series of latent change models on 3-wave panel data concerning roughly 850 Swedish adolescents aged 16 to 18 years, we found that experiences of victimization in school mattered most in predicting changes in social trust across 3 time points, when relevant demographic factors and other aspects of the school climate were controlled. In particular, social trust declined most among adolescents who experienced more victimization at school.     

Variation in expert source selection according to different objectivity standards

Several scholars have tried to clarify how journalists handle and implement the abstract objectivity norm in daily practice. Less research attention has been paid to how common abstract professional norms and values, in casu the objectivity norm, may systematically vary when interpreted and implemented in daily journalistic practice. Allgaier’s study “Who is having a voice?” is a most welcome contribution to the, so far, limited literature on variation in the interpretation and implementation of journalistic norms among journalists. Not only does it demonstrate how the interpretation of journalistic norms may vary among journalists, but it goes one step further and demonstrates how variation in the implementation of such norms may affect journalistic products.     

Measuring learning in serious games: a case study with structural assessment

The effectiveness of serious games is often measured with verbal assessment. As an alternative we propose Pathfinder structural assessment (defined as measuring the learners’ knowledge organization and compare this with a referent structure) which comprises three steps: knowledge elicitation, knowledge representation and knowledge evaluation. We discuss practical and theoretical considerations for the use of structural assessment and showcase its application with the game Code Red: Triage. Results suggest that structural assessment measures an individual’s understanding of a domain at least differently from verbal assessment. While verbal assessment may provide a more nuanced picture regarding declarative and procedural knowledge, structural assessment may add an in-depth understanding of the concepts that are regarded important in a domain. In the Discussion we propose four guidelines to effectively use structural assessment in serious games: (1) Determine the appropriateness of the domain for structural assessment, (2) select an appropriate referent for the target group(s), (3) select the number of concepts needed for structural assessment, and (4) consider the analysis of the graphical knowledge representations to obtain in-depth information about the quality of the knowledge structures.