Cross‐national Similarities and Differences in Employee Perceptions of Issues in the Work Environment

This exploratory study examines cross‐national similarities and differences in employee perceptions of issues in the work environment in 17 organizational work settings in seven Asia‐Pacific countries; Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States. Employees at these 17 sites indicated their degree of agreement with statements about 60 work environment issues which previous research has shown impact performance. Resulting data were compared using coefficients of concordance as described by Gibbons (1971) at three levels of analysis. Analysis indicated that differences and similarities in responses did not reflect those one would expect to find based on previous well‐known research concerning cultural differences in those same countries (Hall, 1976; Hofstede, 1980, 2001). This suggests that relying primarily on national cultural differences is not a sufficient guide for the design of performance improvement interventions in various countries and that other context factors need to be taken into account. Possible hypotheses for future research are offered.     

The impact of colonial and postcolonial Ghanaian language policies on vernacular use in schools in two northern Ghanaian communities

Many ‘alternative primary education’ programmes operating in the developing parts of the world use children’s first language as the medium of instruction. Programme sponsors often base their vernacular language policy on literature that highlights the cognitive and other benefits that accrue from using children’s first languages as the medium of instruction during their early stages in school. Working within a postcolonial discursive framework the paper examines the attitudes of community members, parents, school authorities and schoolchildren toward the use of the vernacular as a medium of instruction in the Shepherd School Programme, an alternative primary education programme, that has been implemented to provide improved educational access for schoolchildren in seven rural northern Ghanaian agri‐pastoral communities.     

Assessing Learning Outcomes: Student Employees in Student Affairs

Erin Bentrim, Kim Sousa‐Peoples, Garrett Kachellek, and Wendy Powers report the results of assessing the effect of students' work experiences on their personal and academic development.     

Organizational learning facilitated by instructional leadership,tight coupling and boundary spanning practices

Three organizational learning mediation processes are proposed as mechanisms for organizational change in this article. These include instructional leadership, tight coupling and boundary spanning. Whilst each of these processes has received attention in the research literature, we propose that their power arises from their particular combination rather than the occurrence of each in isolation. We illustrate the ways in which these processes might combine to create an organizational learning environment required for the kind of changes needed to raise student achievement. We do this with reference to a case study of a New Zealand school that dramatically improved the learning outcomes of students in reading. We describe the practices of a new principal, who was relatively inexperienced in school management but experienced in curriculum leadership. The case study illustrates how through her instructional leadership the principal was able to span the boundaries of her organization so that within a relatively short space of time the school became a more tightly coupled system that learnt to improve the learning outcomes of its students.     

The Impact of Victimization and Witnessing Violence on Physical Aggression Among High‐Risk Adolescents

Relations among witnessing violence, victimization, and physical aggression were investigated within a high‐risk sample of 1,156 sixth graders. Longitudinal, multilevel analyses were conducted on two waves of data from two cohorts of students in 37 schools from four communities. The sample was 65% male and 67% African American. Neighborhood concentrated disadvantage, witnessing violence, victimization, and physical aggression were strongly and positively correlated at the school level. Contrary to hypothesis, exposure to violence did not mediate the effects of neighborhood concentrated disadvantage on changes in physical aggression. As expected, witnessing violence and physical aggression had bidirectional longitudinal effects on each other at the student level. In contrast, there were no cross‐variable relations between changes in violent victimization and aggression over time.     

MEASURING KINDNESS AT SCHOOL: PSYCHOMETRIC PROPERTIES OF A SCHOOL KINDNESS SCALE FOR CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS

In this study, we sought to create and validate a brief measure to assess students’ perceptions of kindness in school. Participants included 1,753 students in Grades 4 to 8 attending public schools in a large school district in southern British Columbia. The School Kindness Scale (SKS) demonstrated a unidimensional factor structure and adequate internal consistency. The pattern of associations of the SKS to a corpus of theoretically relevant constructs obtained via student self‐reports (classroom supportiveness, optimism, happiness, prosocial and social goals, satisfaction with life, and academic self‐efficacy) provided evidence for convergent and discriminant validity. Furthermore, the SKS was significantly and positively associated with teacher reports on students’ empathy, social skills, and peer acceptance. Analyses by gender and grade indicated that girls perceived significantly higher levels of kindness in school than did boys, and that students’ perceptions of kindness in school decreased from fourth to eighth grade, with fourth‐grade students reporting the highest levels of kindness in school and eighth‐grade students reporting the lowest levels. The theoretical importance of investigating students’ perceptions of kindness in the school context and the practical implications of this research for informing educational efforts to promote social and emotional competencies in school communities are discussed.     

Sleep and Cognition in Preschool Years: Specific Links to Executive Functioning

This study investigated the prospective links between sleep in infancy and preschoolers' cognitive performance. Mothers of 65 infants completed a sleep diary when infants were aged 1 year, and children completed two subscales of the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence at 4 years, indexing general cognitive ability and complex executive functioning. Consistent with hypotheses, children getting higher proportions of their sleep at night as infants were found to perform better on executive functions, but did not show better general cognition. Relations held after controlling for family socioeconomic status and prior cognitive functioning. These findings suggest that the special importance of sleep for higher order cognition, documented among adults, may appear very early in life.     

Benefits,Challenges, and Opportunities of Conducting a Collaborative Research Course in an International University Partnership: A Study Case Between Kansas State University and Tallinn University of Technology

A globalized world requires research to transcend geographical boundaries; this includes training students in international collaborative research. The purpose of this project was to identify the benefits, opportunities, and challenges of students from two universities (Kansas State Univ. and Tallin Univ. of Technology) working on an international research project together. For this purpose, six graduate students from the Center for Sensory Analysis and Consumer Behavior, Kansas State Univ., partnered with 20 Food Science major students from a Product Development class at Tallinn Univ. of Technology. Students worked together by distance in a partnership developing a rye bread sensory lexicon for systematically understanding the sensory properties of this product category, conducting Landscape analysis by using sensory mapping techniques on rye bread products from Northeast Europe for capturing the market complexity and to identify opportunity for new product development and new products concepts. Students from Kansas then went to Estonia for further meetings. After the trip, students and professors were asked for their feedback. Results showed that students identify learning food trends from another country as the main benefit of their international collaboration, followed by intercultural skills and knowledge transfer. Language and difference in time zones, as well as educational backgrounds, were identified by students as the main challenges of the collaboration. When US students were asked to rate the learning outcomes stated in the syllabus, understanding the cultural characteristics of Estonia was the one scored highest. Professors mentioned this opportunity is unique because it gives a cultural component programs usually not only an offer and a chance to develop time management skills by working across divergent time zones, but also to practice options for managing language barriers. This project shows that it is possible to setup a partnership between students across different countries and have a positive outcome that includes unique learning experiences for students; especially in terms of time and project management.