全球化中为了可持续增长的职业教育

在全球经济紧密联系的背景下,实现可持续的经济增长成为世界发展的核心目标。在这一过程中,职业教育与培训通过促进智慧专业化及地区经济和生产一线的创新发挥着关键性的杠杆作用。在未来发展中,职业教育与培训应充分重视与更广泛的外部主体建立合作伙伴和联系网络,形成促进技能供需动态平衡的技能生态体系,并注重教学组织的有效性和创新。     

International trends in health science librarianship: part 3 - the Nordic countries

This is the third in a series of articles exploring international trends in health science librarianship in the first decade of the 21st century. The invited authors carried out a survey of librarians in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland to identify common developments in their countries. A focus on pedagogy was seen as the most important trend. Future issues will track trends in Southern Europe and Latin America. JM.     

The history of reductionism versus holistic approaches to scientific research

For centuries, reductionism has been the subject of much discussion among scientists and philosophers, and has come to be an integral part of modern science. In its strongest form the world may be seen as a series of reductive levels: social groups, multicellular living things, cells, molecules, atoms, and finally as the smallest parts the elementary particles. In contrast, holism, in the form of systems theories, builds on the idea that systemic relations arising at complicated stages of integration may produce new and unpredictable characteristics of the system. This paper presents a brief historical overview, and explains some of the basic distinctions which are necessary in analyzing what reductionism is all about.     

Narrow identity resources for future students: the 21st century skills movement encounters the Norwegian education policy context

21st century skills is a global network of corporate and governmental influences that promotes competences suited to fit the future knowledge economy. Through a discourse analysis of an influential Official Norwegian Report, ‘The School of the Future. Renewal of Subjects and Competences’ (NOU 2015:8), this paper explores how ideas of 21st century skills are translated into the Norwegian education policy context. Firstly, the paper analyses the context-specific reasons for receptiveness by investigating discursive warrants. Secondly, the paper identifies how the policy document constructs a set of preferred subject positions that constitute an image of an ideal student. Thirdly, the paper investigates the discursive framing of these subject positions. We find that the policy document constructs an image of an ideal student who is creative, responsible, cooperative, engaged, self-regulated and in complete control of herself, her learning and her future. This image draws on more pronounced neo-liberal discourses, but also well-established discourses in the Norwegian context, such as social democratic progressivism. This intertwining of discourses shows how traits of homogeneity related to global ideas, as well as heterogeneity related to the Norwegian policy context, are both visible in the Norwegian translation of 21st century skills.     

From words to text: inference making mediates the role of vocabulary in children’s reading comprehension

We examined the relationship between inference making, vocabulary knowledge, and verbal working memory on children’s reading comprehension in 62 6th graders (aged 12). The effect of vocabulary knowledge on reading comprehension was predicted to be partly mediated by inference making for two reasons: Inference making often taps the semantic relations among words, and the precise word meanings in texts are selected by readers on the basis of context. All independent variables were significantly and moderately correlated with reading comprehension. In support of our prediction, the link between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension was significantly mediated by inference making even when verbal working memory was controlled. An alternative mediation hypothesis (vocabulary as a mediator of the effect of inference making on comprehension) was not supported by the data. The study replicates and extends the findings of earlier work (Cromley & Azevedo, 2007; Segers & Verhoeven, 2016; Ahmed et al., 2016).     

Inclusive and exclusive knowledge practices in interdisciplinary,international education

This study provides a critical engagement with the principle of inclusion, as manifest in three international, interdisciplinary master programmes in Denmark. Initially, it is proposed that one focuses on the knowledge practices found in international, interdisciplinary education, asking to what extent these suggest inclusion in the sense that all students are treated as equals. The alternative is an exclusive learning environment where certain groups are singled out for special treatment, which will often request from them assimilation into the dominant practice. A conceptual point of departure is provided by the educational sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, which motivates the identification of ‘normative centres’ (Graham, L., and R. Slee. 2008. “An Illusory Interiority: Interrogating the Discourse/s of Inclusion.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 40 (2): 277–293. doi:10.1111/j.1469-5812.2007.00331.x, 283) related to the two themes of interdisciplinarity and international-ness. The topics are subsequently pursued in an empirical analysis, drawing on 19 qualitative research interviews with lecturers involved in the three master courses. This leads to the conclusion that exclusive knowledge practices can be found in all programmes. At the same time, the interviews reveal a reality that is multi-centred, suggesting that interdisciplinarity is as ‘troublesome’ (Land, R. 2012. “Crossing Tribal Boundaries: Interdisciplinarity as a Threshold Concept.” In Tribes and Territories in the 21st Century, edited by P. Trowler, M. Saunders, & V. Bamber, 175–185. Abingdon: Routledge) in higher education as the question of internationalisation.     

The Education‐Tolerance Relationship: is it biased by social desirability?

A hypothesis in the literature suggests that the well‐documented education‐tolerance relationship is upwardly biased because of social desirability in responses. The main argument is that highly educated individuals have a better understanding of which opinions are less socially acceptable and will tend to hide their true reactions when certain items are brought up in survey interviews. They present themselves as more tolerant than they in fact are, making the relationship appear artificially large. This article reviews the possibility of such a bias in the effect of educational background on intergroup attitudes. A model is developed that takes into account potential distortions, when no direct measures for social desirability are available. We make use of the LISREL framework for specifying competing hypotheses about education and social‐desirability mechanisms. Alternative measurement models are compared in analyses based on data from a recent Norwegian survey on attitudes toward new immigrants. When hypothesized additional links are allowed for, the estimated effect of education on intergroup attitudes does not go down. Thus, the main results question the assumption usually made.     

Scaling Up Innovative Technology-Based Mathematics

We report on the initial attempts at evaluating at scale a particular technological/curricular innovation that enables more students to develop deeper knowledge. The methods, issues, and findings of the current pilot experiment speak not only to the success of SimCalc MathWorlds, the focus of our research program, but also to the evaluation at scale of a broad class of representationally innovative technologies and to the merit of long-term investment in design-based research. In particular, we present conditions and findings from a completed pilot experiment involving 21 seventh-grade mathematics teachers from Texas. Pilot outcomes suggest that (a) innovative representational technologies can have an important impact on student learning, (b) considerable impact can be found across a wide range of teachers and conditions, and (c) these gains can be detected even in the absence of other desirable conditions. In particular, detection of student gains does not, in our case, depend on having a long-term context of learning, long-term teacher professional development, or a shift to learner-centered constructivist pedagogy. The full experiment will replicate and extend our experimental design with a wider range of teachers and schools, model the factors that contribute to classroom success with such technology, and explore what happens as research support fades away.     

Inclusive discourses in early childhood education?

This article explores the discursive formation of inclusion in early childhood education and after‐school (recreation) centres in a Danish municipality. While inclusion has been a central educational issue in research and practice for well over quarter of a century, with continuing emphasis worldwide on ‘initiatives by governments’, this interest has centred on the school environment and institutions of higher education. Thus, despite increasing recognition of the significance of preschool and after‐school‐care, inclusion in these environments remains peripheral to the main debate.