Evaluation of an adaptive tutorial supporting the teaching of mathematics

ABSTRACT

Adaptive tutorials enable engaged, personalised and interactive online learning that includes instant adaptive feedback. By integrating an adaptive tutorial into a large and diverse engineering mathematics course, we explored its potential to support and guide students’ learning from afar. The aim of this study was to assess whether students provided with an adaptive tutorial, could benefit from its use and whether they would engage in and take responsibility for their learning. Comparisons were made between students who did and did not use the tutorial. Quantitative and qualitative data analyses determined the impact of including an adaptive tutorial in a blended learning environment, where 58% of students engaged with the tutorial and 74% of them completed it. Improved confidence and understanding was reported by 98% of the participants. A comparison of examination results indicated that median scores for students who utilised the tutorial were significantly higher than those who did not.     

‘The idea is nice… but not for me’: First-year students’ readiness for large-scale ‘flipped lectures’—what (de)motivates them?

Higher Education - The flipped classroom is proposed as an answer to challenges in higher education. However, studies that explore its influence on first-year student motivation are largely...     

Inter-firm R&D partnering in pharmaceutical biotechnology since 1975: Trends, patterns, and networks

This paper analyses a large, longitudinal database on inter-firm R&D partnerships formed in the high-tech pharmaceutical biotechnology industry since 1975. Our research indicates an overall growth in the number of annually, newly established R&D partnerships where research partners consistently prefer contractual partnerships to equity-based alliances. In the networks that develop through these R&D partnerships, small, entrepreneurial biotechnological companies take a leading role during the 1980s when biotechnology first became relevant for the pharmaceutical industry. The 1990s, however, show a different pattern with established, large pharmaceutical companies becoming more dominant, acting as nodal players with multiple partnerships with a variety of other companies.     

The impact of the French policy mix on business R&D: How geography matters

Based on a spatial extension of an R&D investment model, this paper measures the macroeconomic impact of the French R&D policy mix on business R&D using regional data. Our measure takes into account not only the direct effect of policies but also indirect effects generated by the existence of spatial interaction between regions. Using a unique database containing information on the levels of various R&D policy instruments received by firms in French NUTS3 regions over the period 2001–2011, our estimates of a spatial Durbin model with structural breaks and fixed effects reveal the existence of a negative spatial dependence among R&D investments in regions. In this context, while a-spatial estimates would conclude that all instruments have a crowding-in effect, we show that national subsidies are the only instrument that is able to generate significant crowding-in effects. On the contrary, it seems that the design, size and spatial allocation of funds from the other instruments (tax credits, local subsidies, European subsidies) lead them to act (in the French context) as beggar-thy-neighbor policies.     

Instruments for evaluating school psychologists' functioning and service

The evaluation of school psychological services is both a responsibility and an opportunity too long ignored. Unique problems must be overcome in evaluating school psychologists, but the task is not insurmountable. This paper describes and presents examples of five data collection devices which can be used in the evaluation effort: the vignette-based questionnaire, the role-model questionnaire, the services received questionnaire, the teacher interview, and nonobtrusive measurement.     

Persisting students’ explanations of and emotional responses to academic failure

ABSTRACT

Academic failure is an important and personal event in the lives of university students, and the ways they make sense of experiences of failure matters for their persistence and future success. Academic failure contributes to attrition, yet the extent of this contribution and precipitating factors of failure are not well understood. To illuminate this world-wide problem, we analysed institutional data at a large, comprehensive Australian university and surveyed 186 undergraduate students who had failed at least one unit of study in 2016, but were still enrolled in 2017. Academic failure increased the likelihood of course attrition by 4.2 times. The students who failed and persisted attributed academic failure to a confluence of dispositional, situational, and institutional factors. There was a compounded effect of academic failure on already-vulnerable students resulting in strong negative emotions. Viewing persistence as an interaction between individuals and their sociocultural milieu opens up different avenues for research and considerations for support.