A real options perspective on R&D portfolio diversification

This paper shows that the conditionality of investment decisions in R&D has a critical impact on portfolio risk, and implies that traditional diversification strategies should be reevaluated when a portfolio is constructed. Real option theory argues that research projects have conditional or option-like risk and return properties, and are different from unconditional projects. Although the risk of a portfolio always depends on the correlation between projects, a portfolio of conditional R&D projects with real option characteristics has a fundamentally different risk than a portfolio of unconditional projects. When conditional R&D projects are negatively correlated, diversification only slightly reduces portfolio risk. When projects are positively correlated, however, diversification proves more effective than conventional tools predict.     

II. DEVELOPMENT OF ADOPTED CHILDREN WITH HISTORIES OF EARLY ADVERSITY

This chapter first presents a review of research on the development of adopted children, focusing on meta‐analytic evidence and highlighting comparisons between adopted children with and without histories of early adversity. Some methodological issues arising from this literature are considered as well. Second, 7 longitudinal studies of adopted children's development are described, and the convergence of findings across the longitudinal studies and with the cross‐sectionally based meta‐analytic evidence is discussed. Third, the role of the adoptive family in supporting adopted children's development is explored.     

Source use and argumentation behavior in L1 and L2 writing: a within-writer comparison

The aim of this study was to test whether Cummins’ Linguistic Interdependence Hypothesis (LIH) might also apply to writing, by determining to what extent writers’ text quality, source use and argumentation behavior are related in L1 and L2, how effective writers’ behavior is and whether their L2 proficiency influenced the relations between them. To answer these questions, twenty students wrote four short argumentative source based essays each in L1 (Dutch) and four in L2 (English). A within-writer cross-linguistic comparison of their texts revealed that their L1 and L2 writing competencies appear to be related. Furthermore, writers’ source use behavior differed to some extent between languages, but the strong positive correlations found between source use features suggest that in most cases this was more a person than a language effect. Similarly, for argumentation behavior, results showed some learner specific features (e.g. inclusion of titles and reference lists), but differences between languages for others (e.g. the inclusion of both arguments and counter-arguments). Effects of the different source use and argumentation features studied on text quality were limited and no clear effect of L2 proficiency on writers’ behavior or their influence on text quality were found. Overall, in line with earlier research, these findings provide some additional support for Cummins’ LIH and the idea that writers might have a common underlying source for writing related knowledge and practices which they can apply in multiple languages.

     

Instructional design and project management: complementary or divergent?

This paper reports the results of a study to identify the extent to which organizations that develop educational/training products are committed to project management, as measured by their project management implementation maturity, as a methodology that is separate and distinct from the processes of instructional design. A Web survey was conducted among 103 public and private sector organizations worldwide that develop educational/training products. Results show no significant difference by project management maturity level in the roles of instructional designer and project manager, although there is some relationship between maturity level and how organizations perceive the skills/competencies of project managers versus those of instructional designers. Further, organizational decision-makers have very specific expectations about the formal education and training of educational/training product development project leaders. The findings should be of value to institutions of higher education in evaluating programs that prepare students for careers in instructional design.     

Constructivism in Mathematics Classrooms: Listening to Ghanaian Teachers’ and Students’ Views

One of the challenges of implementing a new curriculum is how to bridge the gap between the underlining principles of the curriculum and the cultural and social orientations of the society which includes teachers and students. This article reports on a study that explored how the cultural and social orientations of teachers and students can influence the implementation of a constructivist curriculum in mathematics classrooms. The data for the study came from 250 students and 41 mathematics teachers, using questionnaires, observations, and interviews. The results showed that inasmuch as mathematics teachers and their students acknowledge the importance of student’s active participation and teamwork, these practices have not been fully conceptualised into the Ghanaian mathematics classroom due to some cultural factors. Two main cultural factors were discovered from the analyses of the results. Firstly, the culture of acknowledging only correct answers in class has a negative impact on individual students’ confidence and participation during mathematics lessons. Also, the culture of teamwork is not fully accepted within Ghanaian classrooms as most students find it difficult working in groups and accepting and appreciating each other’s view. It was evident in all lessons that students were ridiculed by their peers when they provide a wrong answer to a question and this affected individual students’ participation in the classroom. Therefore, we suggested that teachers should be pro-active in promoting a classroom environment which is free from fear and intimidation to motivate students to be actively involved in the classroom discourse.     

Spontaneous partitioning: Pre-schoolers and discrete items

This study addresses the question of whether a dealing strategy that is widely used by young children in clinical interviews occurs in less structured situations. Our findings are that it did not in the setting we examined, namely the performance of a routine counting task, by pre-schoolers with the opportunity of sharing sweets when the task was completed. We discuss reasons for the apparent discrepancies between the results for clinical interviews and less structured situations.     

University Knowledge Production and Innovation: Getting a Grip

Today universities are increasingly seen as motors of innovation: they not only need to provide trained manpower and publications to society, but also new products, new processes and new services that create firms, jobs, and economic growth. This function of universities is controversial, and a huge and still expanding literature has tried to understand it. The approach of this paper is integrative; it uses the existing literature to answer a number of straightforward questions about the creation of innovations with university knowledge production: how does this happen, to what extent, and if it is desirable. In this way this article grounds the issue. Creating innovation with university knowledge production is relevant, justified and important but this has not been, is not and will not become the core function of universities. The existing literature, in other words, overestimates the importance of university knowledge production - in general, and for innovation in particular.     

Dipe-D: A Tool for Knowledge-Based Query Formulation in Information Retrieval

The paper reports the development of Dipe-D, a knowledge-based procedure for the formulation of Boolean queries in information retrieval. Dipe-D creates a query in two steps: (1) the user's information need is developed interactively, while identifying the concepts of the information need, and subsequently (2) the collection of concepts identified is automatically transformed into a Boolean query. In the first step, the subject area—as represented in a knowledge base—is explored by the user. He does this by means of specifying the (concepts that meet his) information need in an artificial language and looking through the solution as provided by the computer. The specification language allows one to specify concepts by their features, both in precise terms as well as vaguely. By repeating the process of specifying the information need and exploring the resulting concepts, the user may precisely single out the concepts that describe his information need. In the second step, the program provides the designations (and variants) for the concepts identified, and connects them by appropriate operators. Dipe-D is meant to improve on existing procedures that identify the concepts less systematically, create a query manually, and then sometimes expand that query. Experiments are reported on each of the two steps; they indicate that the first step identifies only but not all the relevant concepts, and the second step performs (at least) as good as human beings do.