Read Two Impress and the Neurological Impress Method: Effects on elementary students’ reading fluency,comprehension, and attitude

This seven-week study examined the effects of the Neurological Impress Method and Read Two Impress on reading comprehension, fluency, and students’ attitude toward reading. The 57 first-, second-, and third-grade students were randomly assigned to three conditions and were pre- and posttested on eight reading measures. Several 3 × 2 factorial analyses of variance revealed significant interaction effects on retell, comprehension questions, and the multidimensional fluency scale as well as time effects on words read correctly per minute and word recognition accuracy. Moreover, a comparison of mean difference effect sizes favored the treatment groups on all reading fluency and comprehension measures. The interventions, however, had little effect on students’ attitude toward reading. Practical implications and future research directions are also discussed.     

Understanding the evolution of e-government: The influence of systems of rules on public sector dynamics

Electronic government has been defined as the use of information and communication technologies in government settings. However, it is neither a homogeneous nor a static phenomenon. Recent empirical studies have identified two important dynamics in e-government evolution. First, e-government in general has evolved from its initial presence on the Internet to more transactional and integrated applications. Second, at the aggregate level and as a general trend, national governments have started adding technological and organizational sophistication and state and local governments have followed. Based on the study of systems of rules, this paper argues that these two dynamics in the evolution of e-government are, at least in part, the result of pressures from public managers attempting to solve problems and from citizens, businesses, and other stakeholders, attempting to control the actions of public managers. Both forces, related to performance and accountability, respectively, have promoted change in the systems of rules governing the design, implementation, and use of e-government initiatives. Specifically, they have generated a cycle that continually increases technological and organizational sophistication in e-government initiatives and have also promoted the episodic and evolving adoption of similar features across levels of government. These two related evolutionary dynamics and the characterization of e-government as systems of rules and standards have some important policy implications, which are briefly discussed at the end of the paper.     

Faculty support for the objectives of university-industry relations versus degree of R&D cooperation: The importance of regional absorptive capacity

The growing importance of regions in the analysis of innovation and the pressure on European universities to interact with their environment justify this article. It argues that faculty support for the objectives of university-industry relations (UIR) does not vary across disciplines and does not respond to university encouragement in a region with low absorptive capacity. These results are in contrast with those obtained in studies of technology leading countries like the USA. Furthermore, incentives for UIR may generate unpredicted dynamics while instruments to cooperate are not significant. Finally, support for the objectives of UIR should not be confused with the degree of R&D cooperation. The former is sensitive to university age while the latter is sensitive to gender, discipline, commitment to R&D and university encouragement. Empirical evidence is obtained from a sample of faculty from the Valencian Community (Spain) and analysed through a set of models for discrete choice.     

Certain Changes to Training Companies Due to Social Web Development

Companies use many different marketing strategies in order to make their products known and place their corporate images and brandings in the market. Besides, nowadays, being on the Intemet is a must for every company striving for success. The development and implementation of Web 2.0 or social web are threatening the basis of the ways of mixing with other people. A company devoted to open and distance learning, such as Master-D Corporation, a clear example of how a proper and planned use of the different possibilities offered by the Web 2.0, based on blogs, allows a company to achieve bigger market shares and brand positioning following the win-win principle. Blogs are, undoubtedly, channels of communication that prove the power of attraction of good information. These changes are affecting everybody and, in particular, companies and institutions related to people＇s education, teaching and training for their inclusion in society and labor market. This essay brings up some reflections in two ways： The first one deals with some reasons why education is also related to the concept of ＂company＂; and the second one deals with how these changes generated by Web 2.0 are affecting some training companies, represented in this case by Master-D,     

End-user oriented strategies to facilitate multi-organizational adoption of emergency management information systems

Response to large-scale emergencies is a cooperative process that requires the active and coordinated participation of a variety of functionally independent agencies operating in adjacent regions. In practice, this essential cooperation is sometimes not attained or is reduced due to poor information sharing, non-fluent communication flows, and lack of coordination. We report an empirical study of IT-mediated cooperation among Spanish response agencies and we describe the challenges of adoption, information sharing, communication flows, and coordination among agencies that do not share a unity of command. We analyze three strategies aimed at supporting acceptance and surmounting political, organizational and personal distrust or skepticism: participatory design, advanced collaborative tools inducing cognitive absorption, and end-user communities of practice.