Search patterns and absorptive capacity: Low- and high-technology sectors in European countries

Searching for externally available knowledge has been characterised as a vital part of the innovation process. Previous research has, however, almost exclusively focused on high-technology environments, largely ignoring the substantial low- and medium-technology sectors of modern economies. We argue that firms from low- and high-technology sectors differ in their search patterns and that these mediate the relationship between innovation inputs and outputs. Based on a sample of 4500 firms from 13 European countries, we find that search patterns in low-technology industries focus on market knowledge and that they differ from technology sourcing activities in high-technology industries.     

Examining the link between organizational democracy and employees’ moral development

While much is understood about the role of the family context and educational experiences for moral development, less attention has been devoted to the occupational context. In this research, we used Kohlberg’s approach of moral education as a framework and investigated the relationship between structurally anchored organizational democracy and employees’ moral development. Employees (N = 285) of five conventional (i.e., traditionally owned and hierarchically managed) and five democratic (i.e., collectively owned and democratically managed) enterprises participated in our study. Consistently with our theoretically derived hypotheses, the results provide initial support for the theoretical model in that employees from democratic firms scored higher on moral development than employees from conventional firms. In turn, contrary to our expectations, the socio-moral climate within organizations failed to explain variance in moral development. Theoretical implications of our findings as well as suggestions for future research are discussed.     

Expertise, Aptitude, and Strategic Remembering

Second- and fourth-grade children were classified according to their knowledge of soccer (experts vs. novices) and IQ (high vs. low), and given 2 sort-recall tasks. One task included items related to the game of soccer and the other included items from familiar natural language categories. Previous research has shown that expertise in a subject can compensate for low levels of performance on text comprehension tasks. Our results, the first examining the effects of both expertise and intelligence on a strategic memory task, were that soccer expert children recalled more items on the soccer list but not on the nonsoccer list than soccer novice children. However, soccer expertise did not modify a significant effect of IQ level, with high-IQ children recalling more than low-IQ children for all contrasts. Interest in soccer was found to be related to expertise but did not contribute to differences in memory performance. The results demonstrate that the knowledge base plays an important role in children's memory, but that domain knowledge cannot fully eliminate the effects of IQ on sort-recall tasks using domain-related materials. That is, although rich domain knowledge seemed to compensate for low aptitude, in that low-aptitude experts performed at the level of high-aptitude novices, its effects were not strong enough to eliminate performance differences between high- and low-aptitude soccer experts.     

Students embracing change towards more powerful learning environments in vocational education

Students’ educational engagement is both an important predictor of study success and a key preventive factor for dropout. Vocational tracks in secondary education show high dropout rates. There is strong evidence that the solution to educational disengagement lies in student‐centred, powerful learning environments (PLEs). This study investigates characteristics of PLEs from the perspective of students in vocational secondary education. Students’ perspectives on a learning environment are crucial for their satisfaction and learning engagement. Therefore, we investigated whether the perceived learning environment meets the requirements of PLEs, and to what extent it meets students’ preferences. Additionally, it was investigated whether students who perceive their learning environment as more powerful, are also more engaged for school. Survey data of 532 students showed that student perceptions of their current learning environment were largely discrepant from the characteristics of PLEs. Students strongly asked for more challenging learning pathways, in combination with adaptive learning support. Students who perceived the characteristics of PLEs as being present, reported higher satisfaction and stronger engagement than students who perceived their education to be a less powerful environment. There is a need to redesign curricula in vocational education in such a way that these more intensely implement characteristics of PLEs.     

Children selectively endorse speculative conjectures

Young children are epistemically vigilant, attending to the reliability, expertise, and confidence of their informants and the prior probability and verifiability of their claims. But the pre-eminent requirement of any hypothesis is that it provides a potential solution to the question at hand. Given questions with no known answer, the ability to selectively adopt new, unverified, speculative proposals may be critical to learning. This study explores when people might reasonably reject known facts in favor of unverified conjectures. Across four experiments, when conjectures answer questions that available facts do not, both adults (n = 48) and children (4.0–7.9 years, n = 241, of diverse race and ethnicity) prefer the conjectures, even when the conjectures are preceded by uncertainty markers or explicitly violate prior expectations.     

Tiefe Venenthrombose – TVT

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Higher Education Supported by New Technologies at the Technical University of Dresden—Problems and Initiatives

This article summarizes the technical efforts and scientific experience that have been recognized as essential for the introduction of multimedia technologies for innovative teaching and learning at the Technical University of Dresden. Beginning with conventional standards, the most important media types are discussed. Important criteria for the development of multimedia tools are investigated. Finally, the first results of a pilot project of teleteaching are reported. This article emphasizes that new didactic and psychological studies are of the same level of importance for learning success as is technological development. Therefore, the strategy envisaged does not aim at developing the virtual university in its purest form but at the enrichment of the contemporary university by innovative elements that preserve the living contact between teachers and students.