Why openness makes research infrastructure resilient

• Open research infrastructure provides the building blocks of scientific progress, which must be available to everyone, with no barriers to access.
• Organizations enabling open research infrastructure must endorse these fundamental principles: equity, value, trust, interoperability, sustainability, and community governance.
• Finding ways to invite co‐creation and community participation engenders a strong sense of ‘buy‐in’ and is therefore essential to developing successful research infrastructure.

     

Does money matter for schools?

There is considerable disagreement in the academic literature about whether raising school expenditure improves educational outcomes. Yet changing the level of resources is one of the key policy levers open to governments. In England, school expenditure has increased by about 40% since 2000. Thus assessing whether such spending has had an impact on educational outcomes is of paramount importance. We address this issue using data of better quality than what are often available in similar studies and test our identification assumption by use of a falsification test. We find that the increase in school expenditure over recent years has had a consistently positive effect on outcomes at the end of primary school. Back-of-envelope calculations suggest that the investment may well be cost-effective. There is also some evidence of heterogeneity in the effect of expenditure, with higher effects for students who come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.     

Higher growth through the Blue Ocean Strategy: Implications for economic policy

Higher growth is a key goal of companies, governments, and societies. Economic policies often attempt to attain this goal by targeting companies of certain sizes that operate in specific industries and focus on a specific business activity. This approach to policy making has considerable shortcomings and seems to be less than fully effective in increasing economic growth. We suggest a new approach to policy making that stems directly from the entrepreneurial perspective. This approach examines a successful business strategy framework - the Blue Ocean Strategy - to discover conditions for high growth. We test the propositions on empirical data for two cases of successful high-growth business, namely Slovenian gazelles and Amazon.com. The results reveal a gap between the macro level of economic policy making to achieve higher growth and the micro level of business growth. The findings call for a change in the focus of economic policies on specific size companies, industries, and business activities to intraindustry cooperation, collaboration between companies of different sizes, value innovation, and creation of uncontested markets.     

Tackling early school leaving: Principals’ insights into Portuguese upper secondary schools

This article addresses Early School Leaving (ESL) as a phenomenon that is identified in the EU and European countries such as Portugal as being the result of school disaffection that can be associated with social and educational problems. The relevance of this problem at the European level is highlighted by the large number of European guidelines on the matter and by the inclusion of ESL as one of the main questions to be addressed by the Horizon 2020. Based on interviews, this article questions possible relationships between how principals perceive both ESL and the measures to deal with it and the culture of the school as an identity of differentia specifica (ethos). It should be emphasised that the approaches of these principals to ESL and the school‐based practices addressing it are quite diverse and relate to the ethos of the schools; students’ trajectories and the complex relationship between education and the labour market. The principals manifest their investment and implication in the provision of adequate measures for their specific contexts and see teachers and external partners as key actors.     

Popular press and forensic genetics in Portugal: expectations and disappointments regarding two cases of missing children

Two cases of missing children in Portugal (Joana and Maddie) have recently highlighted the dilemmas and contingencies associated with the technology of "genetic fingerprinting" for forensic purposes in the context of criminal investigations. The purpose of this article is to analyze the popular press's discourses and representations around forensic genetics in the context of those two highly mediatized criminal investigation cases. The symbolical construction and representation of forensic genetics by the media presents a form of public exposure to beliefs on forensic genetics' characteristics and potential. These are blended with popular cultural contexts that are constructed with reference to images of a super-science which may carry consequences in the public understanding of forensic science. The media coverage of both cases and their actual disclosure resembles the patterns ofa CSI effect, insofar as real science's capabilities and limitations are placed against fictionalized representations of forensic science.     

Information literacy in continuing professional development of medical practitioners: a Croatian example

OBJECTIVES: This paper reports on the training of medical practitioners in information literacy. The course is carried out by an academic medical library in collaboration with its parent institution and the local physicians' licensing body. SETTING: The University of Zagreb Medical School (UZMS) developed an extensive continuing education programme for residents and practitioners, in partnership with the Croatian Chamber of Physicians. Within this programme, the Central Medical Library (CML) offers a hands-on course on searching and appraisal of medical information. DESCRIPTION: Continuing professional development (CPD) helps physicians update and develop the skills and knowledge they require in their everyday practice. The ability to locate, critically evaluate, and use medical information is an important component of CPD. The CML has developed a course entitled "Finding and Appraisal of Medical Information" which has been reviewed and accepted by its parent institution and the physicians' chamber. The course has been introduced in 2005 on a half-year base. OUTCOME: The course provides participants with the information on the most important medical information resources and with the basic skills needed for their effective usage. An evaluation questionnaire is used to assess the effectiveness of the course.     

Teachers' Interpersonal Role Identity

This article investigates the link between teachers' appraisal of specific interpersonal situations in classrooms and their more general interpersonal identity standard, which together form their interpersonal role identity. Using semi-structured and video-stimulated interviews, data on teachers' appraisals and interpersonal identity standards were collected and analyzed using appraisal and interpersonal circumplex theory. Results show a variety of interpersonal identity standards, although the majority of the teachers mentions standards focusing on the codes steering and being friendly. The situation “reacting to student positive behavior” evoked most appraisals that confirmed identity standards. For 13 of the 29 teachers, their identity standard matched with their appraisals. In most cases, however, this match was only to some extent (10 teachers) and sometimes not at all (six teachers). The results suggest that teachers can enhance their relationship with students by becoming more aware of the meanings teachers attach to this relationship in specific situations.     

Assembling and assessing the 'child-student': The 'child' as a criterion of assessment

The assessment of literacy continues to be the focus of debate. Attention has been given to textual features of students' writing, such as vocabulary, grammar and generic structures. We demonstrate how students' success in school is also dependent on their enactment of the category 'child'. We examine the micro-sociological issue of how students and a teacher interpret and deploy practices appropriate to their status as 'child-student' and 'adult-teacher'. Drawing on work that examines the day-to-day, moment-by-moment enactment of institutional and folk theories of the 'child', we interrogate classroom talk and students' writing for the versions of the 'child' constructed there, the manner in which suppositions about the nature of childhood are enacted, and the implications of normative presumptions about the nature of the 'child' for students' assessment.     

Networks in Education: An Analysis of Selected Discourses

‘Network’ is a fashionable and current term in every field of contemporary society and education is no exception. In this paper, the concept of network (and other associated concepts, such as partnership and collaboration) is reviewed. Such revision regards selected theoretical contributions and is explored in terms of the use of the concepts in legal documents and in the discourses of aldermen and educational officers from Portuguese municipalities, offering a critical and multi-layered perspective. The analysis reveals the various layers of the network concept, often appearing vague and diffuse. It is a floating signifier disputed by different discourses and embodied by different meanings. This, in turn, brings major research problems linked to the use of the concept of network in education.