Adult education and society today

This article explores some of the critical questions arising out of the massive changes currently taking place in post-compulsory education and training in Aotearoa New Zealand. In particular it focuses on the establishment of the new qualifications framework within the specific economic and political context of the late 1980s and early 1990s. This new framework was designed to be more comprehensive in scope than anything comparable elsewhere in the world. Its protagonists see in it the basis of a system that offers new incentives to everyone to learn and a vast extension of educationaland training opportunities to people of all ages- truly a system of lifelong learning, focused on meeting the needs of the individual learner. Whilst not rejecting the progressive aspects of the reforms, this article seeks to expose some of the realities which may be too readily ignored as governments and planners engage in the rhetoric of utopian thinking. In particular, in the first place, it examines some of the ways in which the historical and material conditions of late-capitalism, and the discourses to which these conditions give rise, are influencingthe changes, and in the second place it undertakes a critique of ideologies underlying the reform process.     

Legitimizing research, technology and innovation policies for transformative change: Combining insights from innovation systems and multi-level perspective in a comprehensive ‘failures’ framework

The recent policy debates about orientating research, technology and innovation policy towards societal challenges, rather than economic growth objectives only, call for new lines of argumentation to systematically legitimize policy interventions. While the multi-level perspective on long-term transitions has attracted quite some interest over the past years as a framework for dealing with long-term processes of transformative change, but the innovation systems approach is still the dominant perspective for devising innovation policy. Innovation systems approaches stress the importance of improving innovation capabilities of firms and the institutional settings to support them, but they are less suited for dealing with the strategic challenges of transforming systems of innovation, production and consumption, and thus with long-term challenges such as climate change or resource depletion. It is therefore suggested to consider insights from transition studies more prominently in a policy framework that is based on the innovation systems approach and the associated notion of ‘failures’. We propose a comprehensive framework that allows legitimizing and devising policies for transformative change that draws on a combination of market failures, structural system failures and transformational system failures.     

Modularisation approaches in Initial Vocational Education: evidence for policy convergence in Europe?

One response to challenges of national vocational training systems has been a move towards greater flexibility within vocational training systems. This article focuses on an investigation of modularisation as a tool for achieving this flexibility. Many European countries have introduced modular forms into their vocational training system. We investigate whether the global trends set out are producing policy convergence in modularisation in differing countries. This study selects seven European countries to make a detailed analysis and entailed an analysis of each country’s Initial Vocational Education and Training programmes. The methodology involved both primary and secondary data collection. The findings demonstrate policy convergence that can be attributed to similar challenges at national level. Modularisation in some countries takes a ‘radical’ form. Other countries have followed a mixed approach. It is clear that no two countries have adopted the same form of modularisation, although some countries have cited common challenges in the modularisation process.     

The impact of global and local context information on the processing of deceptive actions in game sports

In basketball, the defender’s reaction to a pass is slower and more error prone if the attacking player gazes into the opposite direction. This so-called head-fake effect might be modulated by context information, that is, the frequency and the sequence of head fakes occurring. Accordingly, the present study investigates the head-fake effect for different frequency proportions (20% vs. 50% vs. 80%). The results show that the head-fake effect decreases when the head fake occurs more often. Furthermore, a potential influence of previous fake experience (i.e., congruency-sequence effect) on the size of the head-fake effect was investigated. Importantly, previous fake experience did not cause the frequency-based modulation of the general size of the head-fake effect. These findings bare important implications for sports practice, especially when it comes to instructing players about the tactical use of deceptive actions.     

Training als Verflechtungsgeschehen

The contribution is based on praxeographic observations of volleyball team’s training processes. We suggest to reflect on the training processes as practices in which more knowledge is used than the practitioners themselves are aware of. It becomes clear in this perspective that the competencies to participate are developed by the participants mutually enabling each other to do so. Competencies are therefore to be understood as constitutively relational and cannot be ascribed to isolated individuals. Their training takes place in socio-material arrangements of successively complex exercises in which the structures characteristic of the game and the respective competencies are addressed and practiced in various, barely reflected techniques calling on dispositions generated before. In these arrangements, the players learn to deal with the urgency and possibilities of interaction. Through experience, they develop an embodied, preconscious sense for the game which enables them to adjust to complex gameplay as a team even under enormous time pressure. At the level of linguistic articulation and awareness, however, training is often rationalized by methodologically individualistic (action-theoretical) or holistic (structuralist) assumptions so that the implicit knowledge mobilized in the training practice remains largely unreflected and is instead reduced to explicit components in the respective reflective training procedures.     

The transition from education to employment in the context of stratification in Japan – a view from the outside

In many industrial nations, the processes of transition from education or training to employment are very important. Using Japan as a case study, this article considers these processes from an external perspective. The main criterion used is the issue of stratification within the education and training system. A detailed analysis of the transition process demonstrates that there is little differentiation between school students in Japan, making Japan's a very homogeneous education system by comparison with its international competitors. However, a type of indirect and/or informal stratification results from a ranking system for educational establishments and employers, reinforced by cooperation between individual educational establishments and specific employers.     

Reasoning and working memory as predictors of school grades

The present paper contributes to individual difference research in the field of working memory (WM) and reasoning and their contribution to the prediction of real-life criteria. Therefore, a broad WM test battery, a well-established measure of reasoning, and school grades were applied. It is argued that abilities as assessed with the WM component coordination are relevant for good performances at school, especially for science courses. The verbal task of the WM component storage in the context of processing was assumed to be relevant for the prediction of performance in language courses. As expected, reasoning turned out to be the best predictor of school grades. However, it was also confirmed that variance shared by coordination and reasoning can explain school performance, especially as concerns science courses. The verbal storage in the context of processing task significantly accounted for variance in language courses above and beyond reasoning. Thus, the present study provided further insights into the differential validity of different WM components.