30 years after Bayh–Dole: Reassessing academic entrepreneurship

On the 30th anniversary of enactment of the Bayh–Dole Act in the U.S., we consider the rationale for academic entrepreneurship and describe the evolving role of universities in the commercialization of research. We also discuss and appraise the effects of legislative reform in several OECD countries relating to academic entrepreneurship. The article synthesizes papers from the special section and outlines an agenda for additional research on various aspects of academic entrepreneurship in terms of system, university and individual levels. We also consider measurement and methodological issues that must be addressed in additional research.     

Experience and reality in religious education

A central task of religious education is to show how the puzzlements to human intelligence and the experiences that are associated with spirituality, are compelling in relation to our development as human beings. There are always more theories than objects or events to be explained, and while the spiritual ‘data’ that gives rise to our puzzlements and experience is elusive and meagre, the supply of literature, teaching, ritual and other forms of articulation is torrential. To understand the nature of religious education we need firstly to ask about the nature of spiritual experience itself at its broadest level and then to identify and co-ordinate the kinds of material that will sensitise pupils to this experience and help them to articulate it. This should provide a basis for evaluation of the material against the context of their own life experiences. In this respect religious education is no different in structure to other areas of the curriculum.     

Slow thinking and deep learning: Tversky and Kahneman's taxi cabs

This article is based on classroom application of a problem story constructed by Amos Tversky in the 1970s. His intention was to evaluate human beings' intuitions about statistical inference. The problem was revisited by his colleague, the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. The aim of this article is to show how popular science textbooks can serve as a source for rich classroom activity, with a little care in the implementation by teachers. Kahneman describes the problem as ‘standard’ and answers using a fixed point number. I describe how I have encouraged my students to challenge the certainty of this assertion by identifying ambiguities that are left unexplained in the story. This way, I claim to stimulate individuals to indeed move towards Thinking, Fast and Slow, the title of Kahneman's book.     

Turning Heads: changes in the preferred learning styles of school leaders and managers in the 1990s

The study focuses upon the learning style preferences of 310 school leaders and managers collected, on the basis of opportunity sampling, over the last 3 years (1991–94), and identifies a trend towards the activist learning style preference, and away from the reflector, theorist, and pragmatist preferences described by Honey & Mumford. It suggests that the trend is significant, and relates at least in part to the subjects’ responses to legislative, societal and cultural changes since the Education Reform Act, 1988. The paper concludes that there are increased pressures upon school leaders and managers to act, to act decisively, to act quickly, and to act in concert as whole school management teams, that such action has overall priority, and that this leads to a decrease in the perception that analysis, synthesis and planning are relevant and necessary functions in the leadership and management of schools.     

Supporting behaviour support: developing a model for leading and managing a unit for teenagers excluded from mainstream school

In the UK, mainstream schools can decide to exclude students because of their behaviour. Students are then placed in pupil referral units (PRUs, sometimes known as short-stay schools) until their needs can be more thoroughly assessed so that they can then be placed appropriately. This article outlines the development of one particular approach to leading and managing a PRU for students aged 11–14. Beginning with the idea that staff and students all have a range of needs to be met, the approach draws on psychoanalytic ideas of containment, holding and attachment, as well as recent neuro-developmental research, to demonstrate how students' needs can be best met through meeting the professional needs of staff. A range of interventions and areas of practice are then described to illustrate how containment, management and support are operationalised in day-to-day practice. Specific areas of impact of these interventions for students and their families are then highlighted.     

Enhancing resilience in youth through a 10-day developmental voyage

The present study sought to examine the potential for resilience to be enhanced in a group of youth participating in a developmental voyage, and to identify the factors that contribute to increased resilience following the voyage. Two studies are reported. Study 1 revealed that voyage participants experienced increased resilience over the course of the voyage. Study 2 sought to replicate and extend these findings by assessing the extent to which increased resilience was maintained five months following the voyage and was associated with other psychosocial variables (i.e. self-esteem, social effectiveness, self-efficacy, belonging, social support and perceived weather). The findings revealed that increased resilience was maintained five months following the voyage. A regression revealed that the predictors explained 37% of the variance in increased resilience. Increased social effectiveness, self-efficacy and less positive perceptions of the weather were the only variables to make unique contributions.     

Testing the persuasiveness of evidence: Combining narrative and statistical forms

This study provides an experimental test for the conclusions of the Allen and Preiss (1997) meta‐analysis that statistical evidence is more persuasive than narrative evidence. This investigation extends that finding to consider the case where a message combines statistical and narrative evidence to determine if a combination of evidence is more effective than a single form of support. This investigation using 15 messages and 1,270 participants finds that a message combining narrative and statistical evidence is more persuasive than a message using either narrative or statistical evidence alone.     

Search markets and search results: The case of Bing

Bing and Google customize their results to target people with different geographic locations and languages but, despite the importance of search engines for web users and webometric research, the extent and nature of these differences are unknown. This study compares the results of seventeen random queries submitted automatically to Bing for thirteen different English geographic search markets at monthly intervals. Search market choice alters a small majority of the top 10 results but less than a third of the complete sets of results. Variation in the top 10 results over a month was about the same as variation between search markets but variation over time was greater for the complete results sets. Most worryingly for users, there were almost no ubiquitous authoritative results: only one URL was always returned in the top 10 for all search markets and points in time, and Wikipedia was almost completely absent from the most common top 10 results. Most importantly for webometrics, results from at least three different search markets should be combined to give more reliable and comprehensive results, even for queries that return fewer than the maximum number of URLs.