Curriculum response to the crisis

PROSPECTS - Education is going through a period of crisis related to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic that most probably will follow a continuum organized into distinct phases: emergency, recovery,...     

Sustaining professional learning communities: Case studies

The purpose is to document the ongoing development of two schools in becoming professional learning communities and the effects of meaningful collaboration on teacher learning. The question that guides this research is: How does a school become a sustainable professional learning community? The theoretical framework is based on the work of Senge, Hord, Fullan, Hargreaves and Fink, and Stoll, McMahon and Thomas and includes the areas of professional learning community, change and sustainability. Finally, the study addresses the relationship between professional learning community and school culture. The methodology involves a qualitative case study approach designed to gain information regarding two emerging schools in their journeys toward developing learning community cultures. Findings reveal the stories of each school as they evolved as PLCs and the similarities and differences that emerged. Knowing that sustaining the culture of a PLC is complex, and not to be achieved without determination and growth, we look ahead at challenges to be addressed and further research to be conducted. Finally, we offer some concluding statements and attempt to relate findings to the literature on PLCs. The intent is to identify some of the intricacies in building cultures of learning for adults and students. As we have learned through these two stories, many things happen simultaneously, to greater or lesser degrees, at varying points in time over a period of years that seem to influence the development of a PLC. Such development seems so complex that to be able to describe discrete steps or stages is unlikely. Still we are beginning to see that some categories of activities and issues must be developed before others can emerge.     

The Concept of Metamorphosis and its Metaphors

The article examines a number of links between the metaphorical uses of the concept of metamorphosis in literature and the various changes of the meaning of the concept that took place at the beginning of the modern scientific age between the 17th and 19th centuries, a period during which the notion of metamorphosis resurfaced in conflict with evolutionist thinking. We present the extent to which the concept of animal metamorphosis, the object of multiple redefinitions over the course of this historical period, became the vector of a very strong metaphorical meaning, which emerged in the literature of the period and survives to this day in certain children’s storybooks belonging to what we term the genre of “realistic fiction”. We intend, from a pedagogical standpoint, to identify which specific attributes of these metaphors exist in those storybooks, and to gauge the extent to which those attributes contradict the scientific characteristics and fictional representations of the concept of metamorphosis.     

Know-how transfer mechanisms in franchise networks: a study of franchisee perceptions

Know-how is a critical element of franchising, and its transfer is a key issue for franchisors and their staff. The aim of this paper was to analyse franchisees’ perceptions about know-how transfer in franchise networks. Findings of our qualitative empirical study show that franchisees seem to value the mechanisms used in their network, which include formalised processes (the operations manual, online tools), training (initial and ongoing) and social mechanisms (discovery sessions, meetings and committees). Only the effectiveness of on-field consultants is questioned, which leads to important managerial implications. At the theoretical level, the paper contributes to our understanding of franchise operations by providing a franchisee-centred model of how knowledge is created and disseminated in the networks.     

Effects of foreign acquisitions on R&D activity: Evidence from firm-level data for France

This paper investigates the causal effect of foreign acquisitions on the research and development (R&D) activities of domestic target firms over the period 1994–2004. Using accounting data on French innovative manufacturing firms, we implement appropriate difference-in-difference estimation techniques associated with a matching propensity score procedure. We find that the acquisitions of French firms by foreign companies boost R&D spending. There is a simultaneous rise in the external and in-house R&D expenditures of French acquired firms. R&D is more contracted out to local research providers, in particular to local public laboratories and universities. The increase in internal R&D spending benefits to development, but also basic and applied research. Finally, the growth of the R&D budget is not only financed by internal resources but also receives financing from external partners, especially parent companies. Thus, our results call into question the idea that foreign takeovers hamper the R&D development of target firms and are detrimental to the national innovation system of the host country. First, acquisitions appear to bring efficiency gains enough to counterbalance the various costs of integration and market power effects, pushing firms to invest more in R&D. Acquisitions do not seem to incite managers to take shorter term and more financial driven decisions at the expense of R&D. Second, when motivated by technology sourcing and overseas R&D development, acquisitions might be used to access the specific know-how of target firms and to tap into the knowledge of the national innovation system. Then, purchaser firms could be more likely to develop the innovative capability of target firms and to strengthen their linkages with local partners than to reduce them and relocate R&D abroad.     

Parallel computation approaches for flexible multibody dynamics simulations

Finite element based formulations for flexible multibody systems are becoming increasingly popular and as the complexity of the configurations to be treated increases, so does the computational cost. It seems natural to investigate the applicability of parallel processing to this type of problems; domain decomposition techniques have been used extensively for this purpose. In this approach, the computational domain is divided into non-overlapping sub-domains, and the continuity of the displacement field across sub-domain boundaries is enforced via the Lagrange multiplier technique. In the finite element literature, this approach is presented as a mathematical algorithm that enables parallel processing. In this paper, the divided system is viewed as a flexible multibody system, and the sub-domains are connected by kinematic constraints. Consequently, all the techniques applicable to the enforcement of constraints in multibody systems become applicable to the present problem. In particular, it is shown that a combination of the localized Lagrange multiplier technique with the augmented Lagrange formulation leads to interesting solution strategies.     

Bridging the Gap between the Lab and the Classroom: An Online Citizen Scientific Research Project with Teachers Aiming at Improving Inhibitory Control of School‐Age Children

Online citizen science allows us to bridge the gap between researchers and nonresearchers and to improve the scientific literacy of nonresearchers. The aims of the present study were (a) to determine whether a 5‐week randomized control trial conducted by teachers in their classroom could improve 7‐ to 12‐year‐old children's inhibitory control (IC) and (b) to provide proof of concept that online scientific research projects can provide meaningful results in the context of education. As expected, children in the IC training group improved their IC efficiency to a greater extent than children in the control training group. We provide the first evidence that such online scientific research projects can be effective in improving children's IC abilities and bridge the gap between the lab and the classroom.     

Firm technological responses to regulatory changes: A longitudinal study in the Le Mans Prototype racing

Despite the critical role of regulations on competition and innovation, little is known about firm responses and related effects on performance under regulatory contingencies that are permissive or restrictive. By longitudinally investigating hybrid cars competing in the Le Mans Prototype racing (LMP1), we counter-intuitively suggest that permissive regulations increase technological uncertainty and thus decrease the firms’ likelihood of shifting their technological trajectory, while restrictive regulations lead to the opposite outcome. Further, we suggest that permissive regulations favour firms that innovate their products by sequentially upgrading core and peripheral subsystems, while restrictive regulations (in the long term) favour firms upgrading them simultaneously. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

Gradient descent optimization of smoothed information retrieval metrics

Most ranking algorithms are based on the optimization of some loss functions, such as the pairwise loss. However, these loss functions are often different from the criteria that are adopted to measure the quality of the web page ranking results. To overcome this problem, we propose an algorithm which aims at directly optimizing popular measures such as the Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain and the Average Precision. The basic idea is to minimize a smooth approximation of these measures with gradient descent. Crucial to this kind of approach is the choice of the smoothing factor. We provide various theoretical analysis on that choice and propose an annealing algorithm to iteratively minimize a less and less smoothed approximation of the measure of interest. Results on the Letor benchmark datasets show that the proposed algorithm achieves state-of-the-art performances.