Ambidexterity lost? Compromising innovation and the exploration/exploitation plan

Although innovation is central to a firm's success and a top priority for most technology managers, firms commonly report disappointment that innovation outcomes do not match their original plans. This paper examines the difference in intended innovation and realized innovation using an exploration/exploitation framing. Its focus is on changes to defined innovation plans that occur after planning phases end. Extant literature and field research form the basis for hypotheses that are then tested using a large scale survey of an entire population of small and medium-sized high-technology enterprises (SMEs).Findings of compromised exploration in favor of exploitation, during the development phase, is quantified. Firms divert resources away from novel emergent exploration and into existing product development, thereby undercutting innovation plans. Intended innovation, established during the planning stages, is found to be compromised.Our hypotheses, that agency and resource dependence underpin a shifting between explorative and exploitative development, have support. The paper's theoretical contributions include the application of novel agency and resource dependence perspectives onto innovation. It informs ambidexterity research by indicating where, how much, and why erosion in the balance of exploration/exploitation occurs and provides new avenues for research into low innovation outcomes.     

Problem solving in Swedish mathematics textbooks for upper secondary school

The aim of this study is to analyse how mathematical problem solving is represented in mathematical textbooks for Swedish upper secondary school. The analysis comprises dominating Swedish textbook series, and relates to uncovering (a) the quantity of tasks that are actually mathematical problems, (b) their location in the chapter, (c) their difficulty level, and (d) their context. Based on an analysis of 5,722 tasks from the area of calculus, it is concluded that the textbooks themselves contain very few tasks that can be defined as mathematical problems, and that those that are mathematical problems are found at the end of a chapter at the most difficult level, and are presented in a pure mathematical context. Implications are discussed.     

The impact of sub-skills and item content on students’ skills with regard to the control-of-variables strategy

The so-called control-of-variables strategy (CVS) incorporates the important scientific reasoning skills of designing controlled experiments and interpreting experimental outcomes. As CVS is a prominent component of science standards appropriate assessment instruments are required to measure these scientific reasoning skills and to evaluate the impact of instruction on CVS development. A detailed review of existing CVS instruments suggests that they utilize different, and only a few of the four, critical CVS sub-skills in the item development. This study presents a new CVS assessment instrument (CVS Inventory, CVSI) and investigates the validity of student measures derived from this instrument utilizing Rasch analyses. The results indicate that the CVSI produces reliable and valid student measures with regard to CVS. Furthermore, the results show that the item difficulty depends on the CVS sub-skills utilized in item development, but not on the item content. Accordingly, previous instruments that are restricted to a few CVS sub-skills tend to over- or underestimate students’ CVS skills. In addition, these results indicate that students are able to use CVS as a domain general strategy in multiple content areas. Consequences for science instruction and assessment are discussed.     

First Experiences with Reading Primary Literature by Undergraduate Life Science Students

Learning to read and understand research articles (primary literature) is an important step in the enculturation of higher education students into the scientific community. We presume, based on ideas from the field of genre analysis, that it is important for the development of reading skills to become conscious of the rhetorical structures in research articles. So, we determined how well science students are able to identify 2 important elements of this rhetorical structure: conclusions and grounds. First-year undergraduate life science students who followed a course called ‘Biomedical Research’ made assignments in which they had to identify these 2 elements. We analysed the answers of 20 students in detail and compared their answers with 2 expert readers. Furthermore, we conducted task-based interviews with 4 students to gain more insight into their reading strategies and to determine how they identify conclusions and grounds. Our results show that students and experts defined conclusions and grounds in different ways. Students and experts agreed on the most important conclusion of the articles. However, students identified a wide range of sentences which were not seen as conclusions by the experts. The grounds students mentioned mostly matched their conclusions. Students sometimes failed to mention important grounds for a particular conclusion. In conclusion, our study shows the differences between student and expert readers of primary literature. Based on our results, we formulated criteria for the design of a teaching strategy that aims to improve students' skills for reading primary literature.