Task-related and social regulation during online collaborative learning

This study investigated how students collaborate in a CSCL environment and how this collaboration affects group performance. To answer these questions, the collaborative process of 101 groups of secondary education students when working on a historical inquiry task was analyzed. Our analyses show that group members devote most of their efforts to regulation of task-related activities. For example, by formulating plans or strategies or monitoring task progress. Group members also engaged in social activities often (e.g., disclosing personal information, joking). Less attention was paid to exchange of task-related information (e.g., asking task-related questions) and regulation of social activities (e.g., planning and monitoring the collaboration). Exploratory factor analysis was used to identify the interrelationships between the different collaborative activities. This analysis showed that collaborative activities can be grouped in four broad categories: discussion of information, regulation of task-related activities, regulation of social activities, and social activities. These activities were then used to predict group performance using multiple regression analysis. No effect of discussion of information and regulation of task-related activities on group performance were found. Regulation of social activities positively affected group performance, whereas social interaction negatively affected group performance. As in this study no inferences could be made about the causal relation between collaboration and performance, future research should attempt to focus on this relationship, for example by investigating more closely how different individual and group factors affect collaboration and group performance.     

The international branch campus as transnational strategy in higher education

The international branch campus is a phenomenon on the rise, but we still have limited knowledge of the strategic choices underlying the start of these ventures. The objective of this paper is to shed light on the motivations and decisions of universities to engage (or not) with the establishment of international branch campuses. As a point of departure, institutional theory has been selected to frame the potential motives for starting an international branch campus. Secondary literature, including professional journals and university reports and websites, has been analysed to obtain information that alludes to the motivations of universities for adopting particular strategies. It was found that university managements’ considerations can be explained by the concepts of legitimacy, status, institutional distance, risk-taking, risk-avoidance and the desire to secure new sources of revenue. We argue that universities should avoid decisions that are based largely on a single dimension, such as legitimacy, but rather consider a broad spectrum of motivations and considerations.     

Departments as Teams: Functioning,variations and alternatives

Complex, multi-dimensional and often conflicting reform has led in The Netherlands to a situation in which the management of schools is no longer seen as the exclusive preserve of senior management. In order to manage changes within schools it is deemed necessary to expand the management function to other levels of the organization. In this context teams are held increasingly responsible for carrying out the middle management function, in particular in the educational domain of schools. In this article the results of Dutch research into these teams, in particular subject departments, and the way they carry out the middle managment function are presented and compared to results of similar research in other educational settings. The article ends with a reflection on the desirability of departmentalisation. The functioning of departments will be compared with the functioning of teams within different contexts, in particular interdisciplinary teaming. Finally, suggestions for future research into departmentalisation and its alternatives are made.     

User-design: A case application in health care training

User-design is an important new theoretical process for the creation of training, software, and computer systems in many contexts. However, the implementation of user-design has not been sufficiently explored. This case study details the implementation of user-design methodology in home healthcare through the context of diffusing a new laptop patient record-keeping system with home nurses. In many ways the theoretical advantages and disadvantages of user-design are borne out in this exploration. The case study examines inefficiencies in the process, frustrations over responsible participation and design, and the increased ownership built during the design phase which paid off in the long run during implementation of the new system.     

What Makes Informal Mentorship in the Medical Realm Effective?

Informal mentoring is based on a natural match between a junior individual and a senior one who share mutual interests. It usually aids in the professional and personal development of both parties involved. We reviewed the literature regarding factors that make informal mentoring effective within the medical realm, by searching a major academic search engine, Web of Knowledge, for the term “informal mentor*”. Our main research questions concerned the factors that lead to a successful informal mentorship process. A salient finding arising is that the success of informal mentorships hinges on the communication skills of mentor and protégé, their level of commitment, and the chemistry between the partakers. Good informal mentorships impose requirements on both mentors and protégés and rest on shared expectations.     

Sonic Sturdiness: The Globalization of “Chinese” Rock and Pop

To theorize further global and regional flows of popular culture, this article provides a critical analysis of “authentic” rock music from Beijing as well as “commercial” pop from Hong Kong. Following Appadurai, I theorize rock as a hard cultural form, which, under the scrutinizing eyes of the West, demands localization when it travels to places outside its perceived homeland, the West. By comparing hardcore punk from Beijing to Cantopop, I discuss whether the soft relates to the hard as pop does to rock. I conclude it does not. The transient, intertextual, and multivocal opaque voice of pop demands a different theorization. I therefore recast Appadurai's hard–soft distinction into a clear–opaque dualism as a more accurate theoretical tool for understanding cultural globalization.     

Towards an integrated model for developing sustainable assessment skills

One of the goals of current education is to ensure that graduates can act as independent lifelong learners. Graduates need to be able to assess their own learning and interpret assessment results. The central question in this article is how to acquire sustainable assessment skills, enabling students to assess their performance and learning throughout life, and preparing them to meet their own future learning needs. This article presents an integrated model for developing sustainable assessment skills, consisting of three components: conditions necessary for the development of sustainable assessment skills, elements of sustainable assessment and instructional methods for guiding students in the development of sustainable assessment skills. The article concludes with suggestions for future research to further develop the proposed model.     

Crossing borders in educational innovation: Framing foreign examples in discussing comprehensive education in the Netherlands, 1969–1979

In the Netherlands, crossing borders to study comprehensive schools was an important strategy in the 1970s, a decisive period for the start and the end of the innovation. According to policy-borrowing theory, actors that engage in debating educational issues are framing foreign examples of comprehensive schooling to convince their audiences. Framing therefore became the leading concept behind our study of the intellectual debate, examined through the leading Dutch scientific journal Pedagogische Studiën (Educational Studies), and the public debate, examined through recordings of television programmes. Assuming that those debates were influential in the political middle school process, our analyses show that foreign examples indeed functioned as a framing device in the form of legitimisation, glorification, sensationalisation and caution. However, the impact of framing differed. In the phase of cross-national attraction, the reform-minded perspective in the scholarly debate had a stimulating effect on the development of the plans, but little influence on the governmental decision-making process. This contrasts with the frames that were brought forward by television programmes. Although the negative frames, such as “a factory-made sausage”, were rejected by the programmes, such frames could linger in people’s minds as a means to interpret ideas about middle schools. At the end of the 1970s, the middle school was reduced to a minor feature of educational policy and, eventually, the middle school experiments were brought to a close. As a result, the foreign solution of introducing comprehensive education was never transferred to the Netherlands.     

Distance matters! Cumulative proximity expansions for ranking documents

In the information retrieval process, functions that rank documents according to their estimated relevance to a query typically regard query terms as being independent. However, it is often the joint presence of query terms that is of interest to the user, which is overlooked when matching independent terms. One feature that can be used to express the relatedness of co-occurring terms is their proximity in text. In past research, models that are trained on the proximity information in a collection have performed better than models that are not estimated on data. We analyzed how co-occurring query terms can be used to estimate the relevance of documents based on their distance in text, which is used to extend a unigram ranking function with a proximity model that accumulates the scores of all occurring term combinations. This proximity model is more practical than existing models, since it does not require any co-occurrence statistics, it obviates the need to tune additional parameters, and has a retrieval speed close to competing models. We show that this approach is more robust than existing models, on both Web and newswire corpora, and on average performs equal or better than existing proximity models across collections.