The role of peer review in Norwegian quality assurance: potential consequences for excellence and diversity

The article analyses the role of peer review within broader external quality assurance schemes. Based on an analytical framework emphasising that modern quality assurance schemes are designed as a balancing act between standardised guidelines and professional judgement, the article uses data from a recent evaluation of NOKUT, the Norwegian Quality Assurance Agency, to investigate whether and how the peer review process has maintained its central role in quality assurance, not least with respect to promoting excellence and diversity. The findings indicate that what is presented as judgements based on peer expertise, turn out to be a rather technical process in which pre-defined rigid criteria and standards are imperative. In the conclusion, the role of peer review is discussed in relation to developments in European higher education.     

Approaches to school leadership in Scandinavia

In this article I examine approaches to school leadership in Scandinavia by applying a historical lens. I start by drawing attention to some aspects of the ideology and the history of the Scandinavian education systems in order to discuss how these aspects intersect with the globalised policy trends, and where there is likely to be tensions between the global trends and the cultural and historical imperatives of schooling and school leadership in Scandinavia. The devolution of greater responsibilities to schools has contributed to a number of demands upon them, in particular on school principals, but so far, the emerging age of accountability has had only small consequences on classroom practice. My main argument is that even though there is a growing homogenisation of approaches to school leadership due to global forces, local traditions ensure that they are played out differently in national contexts.     

Childhood football play and practice in relation to self-regulation and national team selection; a study of Norwegian elite youth players

Childhood sport participation is argued to be important to understand differences in self-regulation and performance level in adolescence. This study sought to investigate if football-specific activities in childhood (6–12 years of age) is related to self-regulatory skills and national under 14- and 15-team selection in Norwegian elite youth football. Data of practice histories and self-regulatory skills of 515 youth football players selected at Norwegian regional level were collected and further analysed using multilevel analyses. The results revealed that high self-regulated players were more likely to be selected for national initiatives, and increased their involvement in peer-led football practice and adult-led football practice during childhood, compared to players with lower levels of self-regulation. While national level players reported higher levels of peer-led football play in childhood, the interaction effect suggest that the regional level players increased their involvement in peer-led play during childhood compared to national level players. In conclusion, the findings indicate that childhood sport participation may contribute to later differences in self-regulation, and highlights the importance of childhood engagement in football-specific play and practice in the development of Norwegian youth football players.     

Classifying Amharic webnews

We present work aimed at compiling an Amharic corpus from the Web and automatically categorizing the texts. Amharic is the second most spoken Semitic language in the World (after Arabic) and used for countrywide communication in Ethiopia. It is highly inflectional and quite dialectally diversified. We discuss the issues of compiling and annotating a corpus of Amharic news articles from the Web. This corpus was then used in three sets of text classification experiments. Working with a less-researched language highlights a number of practical issues that might otherwise receive less attention or go unnoticed. The purpose of the experiments has not primarily been to develop a cutting-edge text classification system for Amharic, but rather to put the spotlight on some of these issues. The first two sets of experiments investigated the use of Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs) for document classification. Testing on small datasets, we first looked at classifying unseen data into 10 predefined categories of news items, and then at clustering it around query content, when taking 16 queries as class labels. The second set of experiments investigated the effect of operations such as stemming and part-of-speech tagging on text classification performance. We compared three representations while constructing classification models based on bagging of decision trees for the 10 predefined news categories. The best accuracy was achieved using the full text as representation. A representation using only the nouns performed almost equally well, confirming the assumption that most of the information required for distinguishing between various categories actually is contained in the nouns, while stemming did not have much effect on the performance of the classifier.

Investing in knowledge? Information asymmetry and Indonesian schooling

This paper reports from a survey of media exposure and level of knowledge among senior high school students at various locations in Indonesia. Government budgets for education have recently been dramatically reduced in Indonesia and increasing financial burdens are put on the households, like in many other poor countries. There is a tendency to increasing differences in quality of schooling among social layers and geographical areas. Main conclusions in this research are that information asymmetry exists as a problem in society and that type of school and location matter more than media exposure for students’ knowledge level. Students in public schools generally score significantly higher than those in private institutions. Also, students’ level of knowledge tends to fall with decreasing level of geographical centrality. Our policy recommendations include increased public investment in quality schooling for all.     

Optimal timing of movie releases in ancillary markets: The case of video releases

The optimal time for the release of a film in the video market is derived theoretically and shown to depend on characteristics of its cinema performance and on several other parameters. It is empirically confirmed that the model can explain the changing film release patterns in the years of video market growth. The model can also be applied to other ancillary markets for motion pictures as well as to paperback releases of books.     

Identifying paths to audience success of media products: the media decision-makers’ perspective

Research on media success factors is a fragmented field. Definitions, measures, and methods vary, and findings are often inconsistent. In an attempt to fill this perceived research gap, we distilled generic success factors of media products from the literature. Guided by theory and empirical findings, these factors were aggregated to complex concepts, building blocks of success that we further investigated in an exploratory qualitative study. We found that the building blocks are applicable to all types of media, independent of seriality and content types of media products. Subsequently the research question of this article is: Which building blocks of success are most important for media products? To answer this question, we conducted an online survey of 255 media professionals in print, audio-visual, and online media in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. To analyze our data, we deployed qualitative comparative analysis, a method based on set theory that is suitable to investigate complex causality. We conclude that four building blocks are necessary for success: “good” distribution, environmental orientation, form/design, and human resources are preconditions for achieving success in terms of audience market share. In addition, three patterns emerge in the sufficient paths (combinations of building blocks) to success. Which route to success a media product shows can be related to the width of its topical scope and the corresponding projected audience size.     

School jailhouse: discipline,space and the materiality of school morale in early-modern Sweden

This paper uses a specific phenomenon of early-modern education in Sweden, the school jail, as a point of departure for a broader analysis of educational policy in the areas of discipline and moral instruction. The paper demonstrates how the jail evolved as a part of a wider network of objects, pedagogical technologies and social routines in this area and how this gradually came to change. From being part of a disciplinary rationale leaning on public corporal punishment, the prison was successively set aside in favour of new symbolic and more productive forms of discipline. This process of modernisation also enforced spatial and material reconfigurations, as the classroom acquired a more prominent role as an arena for regulatory practice. The paper also suggests a shift of the general scope in formal policy from a religious frame of reference towards a more secular and independent positioning of schooling.     

Identity concept formation during visual multiplechoice matching in a harbor seal (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Phoca vitulina</Emphasis>)

Identity concept formation was tested in a harbor seal using a visual multiple-choice matching-tosample task. The seal was first trained on a two-alternative matching task. After criterion (≥80% correct choices in two successive sessions) was reached with two sets of two stimuli (Figure 3, Blocks A and B), stimulus sets were enlarged to six objects (Blocks C-G). After the seal reached criterion immediately with two successive sets (Blocks F and G), multiple-choice matching was introduced, first using stimulus sets of four familiar objects (Blocks H-M). After the seal reached the criterion immediately with two successive sets (Blocks L and M), completely new objects were used in two further stimulus sets (Blocks N and O). The seal immediately applied the matching rule in all four sessions (≥80% correct choices). In two further sessions with problems composed of all 38 familiar stimuli, the seal again reached the criterion (Block P). In the final, transfer session, 20 new problems were composed of 80 unknown stimuli (Block Q). The seal immediately applied the matching rule in these one-trial tests, showing that harbor seals can conceptualize complex visual information.