What do we know about innovation?

In this editorial article, we introduce this Special Issue of Research Policy in honour of the late Keith Pavitt, a pioneer in science and technology policy studies and a scholar of innovation. The papers in this Issue were drawn from a widely attended international conference held in Keith's honour in November 2003 and selected according to their contribution to themes central to the Pavitt tradition: the nature of technological knowledge, the management of research and development in the firm, systems of innovation and measurement of scientific and technological activities. There are a further two papers which describe not only Keith Pavitt's scholarly legacy to the fields of innovation studies and science and technology policy but also the important role he played in forging the growing community of scholarship in technology and innovation.     

Enfranchising the profession through evaluation: a story from Australia

Educational reform in Australia recognizes the need for an effective teacher evaluation system but has fallen short of actually prescribing one. Current practice does not align to policy intent, with teacher evaluation largely an exercise in compliance around performance management as opposed to a process that promotes evaluative thinking, continuous improvement and connection to student outcomes. The recent introduction of the Australian Professional Standards for Teaching has gone some way to providing a common language and the idea of a nationally acceptable pathway for teacher development and performance. Nonetheless, two things are missing in the Australian context: the privileging of developing evaluative mindsets in teachers and school leaders and the tools and methods that provide the ‘how’ of evaluation and support this thinking. Situated against a period of reform in Australia’s diverse federal and multi-sectoral education system, this article first provides an analytical review of the Australian approach to teacher evaluation. It then presents two innovative approaches that support the process of evaluation and the broader information needs of an evaluation system while developing teachers’ and school leaders’ evaluative thinking which engages evidence-informed change and ultimately more sustainable outcomes for the education system.     

Understanding Inquiry Science Teaching in Context: A Case Study of an Elementary Teacher

Journal of Science Teacher Education -     

Reading ability and sensitivity to morphological relations

The morpho-phonological nature of English orthography is examined in this study of the relation between morphological sensitivity and decoding ability in the latter elementary grades. Children in grades three to six were required to distinguish derivationally-related word pairs (e.g., nature-natural) from foil pairs that are related in spelling but not in morphology (e.g., ear-earth). The materials included both transparently-related (i.e., the second word incorporated the pronunciation of the first, as in person-personal) and complexly-related word pairs (i.e., the second word involved some change in pronunciation, as in atom-atomic). Across two experiments, these items were presented in either oral or written form along with various tests of reading ability, intelligence and phonological awareness. The results indicate that children's recognition of derivational relationships improved with grade-level. As anticipated, there was also a significant association between sensitivity to derivational relatedness and decoding ability which remains significant even when the word pairs were orally presented and even when phonological awareness in taken into account. Both phonological awareness and sensitivity to morphological structure emerge as important factors in decoding skill in the later elementary grades.     

Parent role questionnaire: Psychometric qualities

The Parent Role Questionnaire (PRQ) is a recently developed instrument to study individual perceptions of the parent role. The PRQ was piloted, revised, and studied psychometrically. This study examines PRQ internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and validity. Results reveal that the instrument has relatively high internal consistency, moderate test-retest reliability, and high validity. The discussion includes implications for further research and study on parents, parenting, and the parent role.     

Real-time processing of social media with SENTINEL: A syndromic surveillance system incorporating deep learning for health classification

Interest in real-time syndromic surveillance based on social media data has greatly increased in recent years. The ability to detect disease outbreaks earlier than traditional methods would be highly useful for public health officials. This paper describes a software system which is built upon recent developments in machine learning and data processing to achieve this goal. The system is built from reusable modules integrated into data processing pipelines that are easily deployable and configurable. It applies deep learning to the problem of classifying health-related tweets and is able to do so with high accuracy. It has the capability to detect illness outbreaks from Twitter data and then to build up and display information about these outbreaks, including relevant news articles, to provide situational awareness. It also provides nowcasting functionality of current disease levels from previous clinical data combined with Twitter data.The preliminary results are promising, with the system being able to detect outbreaks of influenza-like illness symptoms which could then be confirmed by existing official sources. The Nowcasting module shows that using social media data can improve prediction for multiple diseases over simply using traditional data sources.