Knowledge-intensive consumer services. Understanding KICS in the innovative global health-care sector

This paper explores a case of knowledge-intensive consumer services (KICS). Services have become less neglected in the economics of technical change and innovation studies in general; nevertheless, the advance of this agenda has been uneven. A significant emphasis has been on knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS). Despite their direct impact on social needs and individual desires, innovation in consumer-oriented services continues to be relatively under-theorized and under-researched. This paper brings into focus the sources and patterns of innovation in those innovative services that target human satisfaction and well-being as a final goal. We show evidence from a little-explored health industry, oral care. We address Malo Clinic, a company specialized in the most complex patient situations and a rare instance of an internationalized firm in the health services business. On the basis of a 20-year thread of corporate history, we find that a wide array of qualitative (interviews, newspaper coverage, marketing material) and quantitative evidence (papers, patents, trademarks) illuminates some of the features that may characterize a particular class of dynamic activities tending to consumers’ needs, expectations and quality of life. We argue that these key characteristics may be on course to become more general as the learning economy spreads to fully embrace the realm of the service sphere. One conclusion is that both the technological and non-technological capabilities underpinning more types of innovation are increasingly becoming coupled in consumer-relevant services.     

Sleep and Cognition in Preschool Years: Specific Links to Executive Functioning

This study investigated the prospective links between sleep in infancy and preschoolers' cognitive performance. Mothers of 65 infants completed a sleep diary when infants were aged 1 year, and children completed two subscales of the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence at 4 years, indexing general cognitive ability and complex executive functioning. Consistent with hypotheses, children getting higher proportions of their sleep at night as infants were found to perform better on executive functions, but did not show better general cognition. Relations held after controlling for family socioeconomic status and prior cognitive functioning. These findings suggest that the special importance of sleep for higher order cognition, documented among adults, may appear very early in life.     

The viralization of online education: Learning beyond the time of the coronavirus

PROSPECTS - In response to the global crisis resulted from the spread of the coronavirus in Brazil, many schools and universities suspended face-to-face classes and began to offer remote classes...     

Unterrichtsbezogene Überzeugungen und handlungsleitende Kognitionen von Lehrpersonen

Die hier vorgestellte Studie untersucht den Zusammenhang zwischen unterrichtsbezogenen und handlungsleitenden Kognitionen anhand einer Stichprobe von 20 deutschen und 18 schweizerischen Mathematiklehrpersonen. Die untersuchten unterrichtsbezogenen überzeugungen fokussieren auf das konstruktivistische und das rezeptive Lehr-Lernverst?ndnis der Lehrpersonen, die spezifischen Kognitionen auf das konkrete didaktische Handeln in einer Unterrichtseinheit zur Einführung in die Satzgruppe des Pythagoras. In früheren Untersuchungen zeigte sich, dass sich deutsche Lehrpersonen konstruktivistischer als schweizerische Lehrkr?fte einsch?tzten, ihren Unterricht aber eher als fragend-entwickelnd beschrieben. Ausgehend von diesem Befund werden in der Untersuchung deutsche und schweizerische Lehrpersonen hinsichtlich ihrer überzeugungen und handlungsleitenden Kognitionen vergleichend untersucht. In einem zweiten Schritt wird nach Zusammenh?ngen zwischen beiden Facetten professionellen Lehrerwissens gefragt. Die Ergebnisse verweisen darauf, dass sich die deutschen Mathematiklehrpersonen in ihren überzeugungen st?rker als jene in der Schweiz an einem konstruktivistischen Verst?ndnis von Lehr-Lernprozessen orientieren, dieses sich aber sowohl bei deutschen als auch bei schweizerischen Lehrpersonen kaum in den handlungsleitenden Kognitionen widerspiegelt. Als Erkl?rung für diese geringe Korrespondenz zwischen unterrichtsbezogenen überzeugungen und handlungsleitenden Kognitionen kommen u.a. belastende Rahmenbedingungen und eine geringe Selbstwirksamkeit der Lehrpersonen in Frage. Daher werden in einem dritten Schritt Zusammenh?nge zwischen unterrichtsbezogenen überzeugungen und handlungsleitenden Kognitionen unter Kontrolle belastender Rahmenbedingungen und der Selbstwirksamkeit der Lehrpersonen untersucht. Dabei zeigen sich, allerdings in erster Linie nur bei schweizerischen Lehrpersonen, einige erwartungskonforme systematische Zusammenh?nge zwischen konstruktivistischen überzeugungen und handlungsleitenden Kognitionen.     

Evaluation Practices in Teacher Education in Israel

Evaluation procedures and the emphasis on evaluation in teacher education courses in Israel were studied through questionnaires administered to teacher educators, student teachers and practicing teachers. The results show that the emphasis on evaluation is marginal and that evaluation procedures in teacher education have significant effects on practicing teachers.     

Verbal abuse in school. Constructions of gender among 14‐ to 15‐year‐olds

Verbal abuse has been identified as a common element in the life of children in school. This paper explores how this discursive practice is used in the construction of masculinities and femininities among children aged 14–15 through observations and interviews in classes in two schools in Stockholm. Verbal abuse, often with sexual content, contributed to ‘toughness’, a central component of hegemonic masculinity in the schools. Popular, tough boys generated most of the verbal abuse, but were not necessarily regarded as verbally abusive; rather, responsibility for the bulk of verbal abuse was attributed to ‘rowdy’ boys. Girls’ verbal abuse was not similarly advantageous for their femininity; instead, both through being verbally abusive and being the target of abuse, girls risked being positioned negatively. It appears that verbal abuse in school simultaneously orders masculinities and femininities, and structures heterosexual relations between the genders.     

Teaching Family Matters

Teaching family matters is a matter of some political controversy. The New Right—both government and ‘pro‐family’ political pressure groups—seeks to reinforce and revive the traditional nuclear family through education, especially for family life. This is a response to what is perceived as the ‘problem of the family‘—the increase in ‘working mothers’ in lone or two‐parent families, and lone‐parent families as a result of divorce, separation, teenage or underage sex. These changes in the family have indeed occurred. The New Right blames previous administrations, in the liberal/social‐democratic consensual mode, for their creation. But no postwar government was committed to transforming the privacy of the family but to equality of educational opportunity between the sexes as a means of improving job opportunities. Such measures left the family untouched. If the ‘problem of the family’ is to be solved, more attention, from educators amongst others, must be given to the ways in which women as parents are denied equal work opportunities because of the need to bring up the children in the privacy of the family, supporting the work of schools. Family life or moral education should aim to leach about equality of adult responsibility for both work and family.     

What predicts injury from physical punishment? A test of the typologies of violence hypothesis

OBJECTIVE: This study examined the power of child, perpetrator, and socio-economic characteristics to predict injury in cases of reported child physical abuse. The study was designed to assess the validity of the assumption that physically injurious incidents of child physical abuse are qualitatively different from those that do not result in injury, that their generative factors are distinctive, and that the quality of caregiving in these two types of incidents is different. METHOD: A weighted, nationally representative sample of 8,164 substantiated punishment abuse cases in Canada was used. Various models were constructed and evaluated through logistic regression. RESULTS: Of six potential predictors - child age, perpetrator sex, child functioning, parent functioning, economic stress, and social stress - none predicted injury to the child. CONCLUSIONS: The findings suggest that injurious and non-injurious physical abuse cannot be distinguished on the basis of the personal characteristics or circumstances of the child or perpetrator. PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS: A common criterion for child welfare intervention into cases of suspected physical abuse is injury or risk of injury. This criterion assumes that injurious and non-injurious assaults are qualitatively different phenomena, predicted by different risk factors. In the present study an attempt was made to differentiate between injurious and non-injurious cases of punitive physical abuse on the basis of characteristics of the child, perpetrator, family, and social context. None of these factors explained the likelihood of injury, suggesting that the prediction of injury as an intervention criterion may be questionable.     

Authority and Authority Relations in Mathematics Education: A View from an 8th Grade Classroom

Compared to studies in general education, authority has received little attention in mathematics education, despite an increasing interest in sociological perspectives in mathematics classroom research. The subject of authority is particularly important in mathematics education, on the one hand, because of the immense authority mathematics itself seems to possess and pass on to its practitioners, but also, on the other hand, because of the anti-authoritarianism present, to some degree, in many trends in mathematics education such as cooperative learning approaches and constructivist pedagogies. Such an anti-authoritarian stance appears justified by data from an 8th grade mathematics classroom (supplemented with data from a second 8th grade classroom) which suggest that teachers possess immense authority in the eyes of the students and that this and other authority relations are strongly evident in the students non-reflective ways of interacting not only with their teachers but also among themselves. However, theoretical considerations on authority show that the problem may not be authority per se but the way one conceives the notion of authority, that there exist kinds of authority, such as Bennes anthropogogical authority, which can encourage reflective and also fruitful collaborative work.