Gender Differences on Research: The perceptions and use of academic time

Tertiary Education and Management - In the last years, the increasing pressure over higher education institutions to promote alternative non-state funding sources has lead to an increasing...     

The Influence of Need for Closure on Learning and Teaching

A primary goal of educational systems is to provide learners with the information, skills, and dispositions needed to be an effective member of a complex and information-rich society. To effectively address this goal, educators and educational psychologists need to understand both the ability and the willingness of learners to grapple effectively with information. A psychological construct that may illuminate heretofore unexplored aspects of learners’ willingness or reluctance to grapple with information is the need for closure (Kruglanski, Psychol Inq 1(3):181–197, 1990; Kruglanski and Webster, Psychol Rev 103:263–283, 1996; Webster and Kruglanski, J Pers Soc Psychol 76(6):1049–1062, 1994). The purpose of this article is to provide educational psychologists with a theoretical overview of need for cognitive closure, highlighting its applicability to instructional settings. We will also discuss what closure needs may look like within the classroom and the conditions under which they may be exhibited. We argue for the relevance of the need for closure construct for improving educators’ understanding of teaching and learning processes.     

Verbal aggression in violent and nonviolent marital disputes

Recent research suggests that verbal aggression may function as a catalyst to violence between spouses in marital disputes. Communication skills deficiencies may predispose spouses to rely upon verbal aggression in family conflict situations instead of more constructive forms of communication such as argumentation. This suggests a need to understand better the role of verbal aggression in interspousal violence. A study is presented which compared a sample of nonabused wives to a clinical sample of abused wives in terms of self‐reports of the use of verbal aggression by the husband and wife in their most recent dispute. While there were several differences between the two groups, of the ten types of verbally aggressive messages examined, character attacks most clearly differentiated violent from nonviolent marital disputes. Two hypotheses which predicted the degree of verbal aggression in violent and nonviolent disputes and the relationship between husband and wife usage were supported. Implications are discussed especially in terms of studying interspousal violence from a communication orientation.     

Enhancing Force Concept Inventory diagnostics to identify dominant misconceptions in first-year engineering physics

This work presents the results of a study whose aim is to detect systematic errors about the concept of force among freshmen students. The researchers analysed the results of the Force Concept Inventory test, which was administered to two different groups of students. The results show that, although there were significant performance variations between the two groups, they, nonetheless, shared common incorrect answers that were consistently triggered by the same misconceptions. The analysis proposed in this paper could also be applied in other universities to reveal the students’ a priori mindset in Newtonian mechanics and serve as a guideline for developing effective computer simulations or other tools.     

An Example of the Informative Potential of Polar Coordinate Analysis: Sprint Tactics in Elite 1,500-m Track Events

Polar coordinate analysis is a powerful data reduction technique based on the Zsum statistic, which is calculated from adjusted residuals obtained by lag sequential analysis. Its use has been greatly simplified since the addition of a module in the free software program HOISAN for performing the necessary computations and producing easy-to-interpret results in the form of polar coordinate maps. In this study, we provide a simple and practical example of how this technique can be used to analyze tactical behaviors in sport and physical exercise. We studied 158 performances by 82 male runners in thirteen 1,500-m finals held at the Olympic Games, the World Championships in Athletics, and the European Athletics Championships between 2000 and 2012 to investigate associations between the initiation of sprints by race winners and other runners (focal behaviors) and the lap and zone of the track in which the sprints were initiated (conditional behaviors). The significant prospective/retrospective activating/inhibitory relationships shown in the polar coordinate maps confirm the decision to start a sprint is a tactical one and are consistent with a winning strategy consisting of avoiding giving rivals the benefit of the slipstream while conserving sufficient energy for a final winning burst. Polar coordinate analysis is a powerful technique for studying tactical behaviors in the field of sport.     

Assessing the effectiveness of the Eureka Program

The aim of this paper is to test whether participation in a European public initiative to support market-oriented R&D, such as the Eureka Program, has a positive impact on the performance of participating firms and, if so, how long it is before the impact becomes apparent. These issues are explored using a dynamic panel data model covering the period 1994–2003, for a sample of 866 European firms, 284 of which completed a Eureka project during the period of analysis. The results show how the completion of a Eureka project has a positive influence over firm performance measured as return over assets (ROA), although the effect does not manifest itself until a year after project completion. Nevertheless, when the sample is divided by sector, it is obtained that, while manufacturing firms follow the general pattern of a positive effect appearing a year after project completion, the effect in non-manufacturing firms is already apparent during the year of completion.     

Implementing telemedicine through eListening in hospital-in-the-home units

Listening to patients and translating what is heard into an action plan is a mark of a successful hospital-in-the-home unit. This paper recommends eListening as the core element for hospital-in-the-home unit performance and illustrates this suggestion with an empirical study. In order to achieve this, we examine the relative importance and significance of telemedicine technologies and the level of performance related to eListening through an empirical investigation of 252 patients who belonged to a hospital-in-the-home unit (HHU) within a Spanish Regional Hospital. The results are then calculated using structural equation modelling. This leads to the main conclusion that a major hospital-in-the-home unit's ‘performance’ is unlikely to be successful without embracing eListening.     

Modeling the Mediating Role of Volition in the Learning Process

According to action-control theory, volition plays a mediating role between the intention to learn (motivation) and goal-directed behavior (the use of learning strategies). Although extensive theoretical work has been done to document this flow of events, more empirical studies have been needed to identify the specific means by which volitional control protects the intention to learn and maintains the attempts to learn; our intention here was to address this gap in the literature. Using data from a sample of 487 college students in two different domains, we found that the positive effects of intrinsic goal orientation and self-efficacy on cognitive engagement were augmented by volitional control. We also found that the effects of volition differed by domain as well as by the type of learning strategy being considered. These results suggest that volitional control merits greater attention from those doing research in self-regulated learning.