Crowdfunding as Donations to Entrepreneurial Firms

The bulk of today's (“preorder-,” “reward-,” “gift-,” and “donation-based”) crowdfunding raises funds for small, private entrepreneurial ventures without granting funders private claims to the projects’ income or the ability to guarantee the realization and delivery of project outcomes. We theorize and show empirically – via a mixed-method approach applied to a representative and remarkably informative case – that the payoff structure for crowdfunders, akin to a public good contribution problem, leads to the tangible value of main project outputs exerting little influence on contributions to crowdfunding. This then raises the question of which funder motivations fund seekers may have to address to crowdfund their projects. We demonstrate the especially large role of non-pecuniary motivations and pinpoint three particular motivations that profit-seeking entrepreneurs may stimulate to be financed through crowdfunding. The findings hold important implications for entrepreneurs’ crowdfunding strategies, platform design, and our understanding of how this funding institution works in general. The study also adds to emerging research on the implications of the public good nature of crowdfunding.     

Efficacy of the Getting Ready Intervention and the Role of Parental Depression

Research Findings: This study reports the results of a randomized trial of a parent engagement intervention (the Getting Ready intervention) on directly observed learning-related social behaviors of children from low-income families in the context of parent–child interactions. The study explored the moderating effect of parental depression on intervention outcomes. Participants were 204 children and their parents as well as 29 Head Start teachers. Semistructured parent–child interaction tasks were videotaped 2 times annually over the course of 2 academic years. Observational codes of child behaviors included agency, persistence, activity level, positive affect, distractibility, and verbalizations. Practice or Policy: When gender and disability concerns were controlled, those in the treatment condition experienced a significant decline in activity level relative to children in the control group. Furthermore, compared to children of nondepressed mothers and to control children, those in the experimental condition whose parent reported elevated levels of depression showed greater gains in positive affect and in verbalizations.     

Balancing Faculty and Student Preferences in the Assignment of Students to Groups

This article describes a practical methodology for assigning students to groups where the goal is to create diversity within the groups while taking into consideration the preferences of the students. A motivating application of this work is the assignment of students to first‐year seminars. In this common scenario, students select and rank a small subset of seminars from the list of those available. The academic institution then attempts to assign students to a seminar on their list, while maintaining course capacities. Faculty are interested in having seminars that are balanced with regards to gender and the number of international students, while students are interested in being assigned to one of their higher ranked seminars. In this article, we develop a simple multi‐objective convex quadratic program that can determine assignments that are well balanced and satisfy the highest preferences of the students. The advantage of our approach is that the model can be submitted directly to a standard optimization software package, eliminating the need for a specialized algorithm.     

Choosing schools: explorations in post-primary school choice in an urban Irish working class community

This paper examines post-primary school choice processes in the urban Irish working-class community of Portown. Here, there is an awareness of hegemonic neoliberal ideals and how school choice becomes a significantly classed space characterised by market ideologies and structural inequality. This critical ethnography explored the world through participant observation, semi-structured interviews over a 3-year period. The data examined here are drawn specifically from investigations into school choice processes. It deploys identity theories as thinking tools to examine the classed nature of engagement with school choice markets. The findings delineate three distinct groups of choosers in this school community: passive transitioners, active choosers and second-schoolers. The findings of the study reveal the entwined and co-constructed nature of identity and social class as well as examining the role played by school choices and differential access to economic, cultural and social resources in these processes.     

A cross-lag analysis of longitudinal associations between preschool teachers’ instructional support identification skills and observed behavior

The present study examined the pattern of association(s) over time between (a) knowledge of and observational skills in identifying teacher–child interactions, and (b) observed behavior in the domain of instructional interaction for 405 preschool teachers enrolled in a professional development study. Teacher's knowledge/observational skills and observed instructional support behaviors with children were assessed in the fall and spring over a two-year period. During this time, the teachers were also randomized into a college course focused on interactions, then re-randomized into a coaching intervention, also focused on instructional interaction. Cross-lagged analyses suggest that prior observed behavior was the stronger predictor of change in both knowledge/observation skills and in later observed behavior, and that both the course and the coaching interventions contributed to improvements in teachers observed instructional support behavior. Mediational analyses of the course effects indicated longer-term impact on observed instructional behavior were through immediate impacts on those same behaviors, whereas long-term impacts on knowledge were through immediate impacts on both observed instructional behavior and knowledge. The results have implications for the design, delivery, and focus of professional development for early childhood educators.     

From Common Sense Concepts to Scientifically Conditioned Concepts of Chemical Bonding: An Historical and Textbook Approach Designed to Address Learning and Teaching Issues at the Secondary School Level

This paper selects six key alternative conceptions identified in the literature on student understandings of chemical bonding and illustrates how a historical analysis and a textbook analysis can inform these conceptions and lead to recommendations for improving the teaching and learning of chemical bonding at the secondary school level. The historical analysis and the textbook analysis focus on the concepts of charge, octet, electron pair, ionic, covalent and metallic bonding. Finally, a table of recommendations is made for teacher and student in the light of four fundamental questions and the six alternative conceptions to enhance the quality of the curriculum resources available and the level of student engagement.     

Why not? Examining college students’ reasons for avoiding an online course

A large number of studies have compared learning outcomes in fully online courses to those in face-to-face courses. Fewer studies have examined why students choose to enrol in fully online courses to begin with, and no study has yet addressed the question of why some students choose not to register in online courses. This study contributes to scholarly understanding of online education by examining for the first time why students may choose to take a large lecture course face-to-face, when they know that the same course is offered by their institution online in the same semester, for the same credit and at the same tuition cost. Through a survey, 48 students in a face-to-face offering of an introductory Educational Psychology course reported why they chose to attend lectures and tutorials in person when they could have earned the same credit without doing so. A majority of respondents suggested that they believed they would learn better face-to-face, and expressed informal theories about why this would be the case. We examine these informal theories, and the possible implications they may have for future research and institutional planning with regard to online course offerings.     

The Random‐Effect DINA Model

The DINA (deterministic input, noisy, and gate) model has been widely used in cognitive diagnosis tests and in the process of test development. The outcomes known as slip and guess are included in the DINA model function representing the responses to the items. This study aimed to extend the DINA model by using the random‐effect approach to allow examinees to have different probabilities of slipping and guessing. Two extensions of the DINA model were developed and tested to represent the random components of slipping and guessing. The first model assumed that a random variable can be incorporated in the slipping parameters to allow examinees to have different levels of caution. The second model assumed that the examinees’ ability may increase the probability of a correct response if they have not mastered all of the required attributes of an item. The results of a series of simulations based on Markov chain Monte Carlo methods showed that the model parameters and attribute‐mastery profiles can be recovered relatively accurately from the generating models and that neglect of the random effects produces biases in parameter estimation. Finally, a fraction subtraction test was used as an empirical example to demonstrate the application of the new models.