The role of the entrepreneur in identifying international expansion as a strategic opportunity

This research explores business internationalisation as a process of recognising and exploiting business opportunities in an international context and uses Spain's natural stone industry as a case study. We differentiate internationalisation into two stages: opportunity identification and subsequent opportunity exploitation. We focus on the initial identification stage to determine the impact of entrepreneurs’ cognitive variables when gathering relevant information for internationalisation of the firm, highlighting the role of entrepreneurs’ alertness, the centre of interest, causal logic, and prior experience. We also examine the importance of the entrepreneur's environment, social networks, and institutional setting. In our empirical analysis, we find that although interested in internationalisation, entrepreneurs in the natural stone industry devote very little time and effort to gathering information. As a result, decisions related to internationalisation are restricted by uncertainty and a poor understanding of the appeal, barriers, and available support services.     

A Transactional Approach to Transfer Episodes

In this article we present an analytical framework for approaching transfer episodes—episodes in which participants declare or can be declared to bring prior experience to bear on the current task organization. We build on Dewey’s writings about the continuity of experience, Vygotsky’s ideas of unit analysis, as well as more recent developments in continental philosophy to develop a transactional approach that involves reconceptualizing the notion of experience. In this view, experience is not something that individuals have but an analytical category that denotes the unity of whole persons, their material and social environment, and their changing transactional relations (mutual effects on each other) across time. In the 1st part of the article, we present the theory and contrast it with past and present literature on transfer. In the 2nd part, we develop the methodological implications and analyze an episode of transfer from a technology-enhanced science education curriculum in which students were presented with analogous models of scientific phenomena across different tasks. We describe instances of recognition, of analogical reasoning, and of how students applied theoretical knowledge in terms of transactional units of change. We conclude by discussing implications with regard to further theoretical development and educational practice.     

The influence of imaging capacity on visual art skills

Imaging is a component of fundamental cognitive processes employed in a variety of cognitive activities. In particular, imaging is of special relevance to artistic skills. As part of our research on the relationships between mental images and the plastic arts, the influence of the imaging capacity in the visual art skills was investigated. Seventy-two fine arts students were administered the Vividness Of Visual Imagery Test and performed tasks testing spatial skill, spatial manipulation skill, and visual memory. Imaging capacity was associated with all three-task scores. We also found that women were more proficient in spatial tasks and spatial manipulation tasks than men. These results lead us to consider future studies with other tests of imaging capacity, with the aim of confirming and generalizing the relation between mental imagery and artistic skills. If the ability to create mental images is connected to artistic skill one would have to take this into account in the teaching of art and in designing programmes for mental image training.     

Sanitizing “Indians” in America’s Thanksgiving story

Children’s books about the Thanksgiving holiday offer a superlative example of America’s supposedly innocent interactions with “Indians.” In this essay, we describe how representations of “Indians” in children’s Thanksgiving books are often used to promote a Manifest Destiny ideology, we correct basic “facts” about the “first” Thanksgiving, and we urge educators to employ decolonizing and indigenizing pedagogical strategies when teaching about Thanksgiving in order to better explain America’s historical relation to “Indians” in their classrooms.     

Effects of elements or compound preexposure on conditioned taste aversion as a function of retention interval

The effects of element or compound preexposure and retention interval were examined in three experiments with the taste-aversion paradigm. In Experiment 1, preexposure to the elements of a compound flavor produced less latent inhibition to the compound than did preexposure to the compound itself when a 1-day preexposure-conditioning interval was used. However, preexposing the elements or the compound resulted in equivalent latent inhibition effects when a 21-day retention interval was used. In Experiment 2, a similar pattern of results was observed when the conditioning-test interval was manipulated. Experiment 3 explored the effect of element or compound preexposure when preexposure and test were carried out in different contexts. Attenuated latent inhibition following preexposure to the elements was found when preexposure and test were carried out in the same context. In contrast, preexposure to the elements resulted in as much latent inhibition as did preexposure to the compound when the context was switched from preexposure to testing. The implications of these findings for a retrieval-oriented view of latent inhibition are discussed.     

Combination of logical conditions and arithmetic operations to assign a mark to a course based on multidimensional learning outcomes

Assessment is a notorious source of preoccupation for faculty and university governing bodies, especially when an institution initiates curricular reforms which shift the programme learning outcomes for knowledge to competencies. One obstacle to acceptance arises from a culture of quantitative assessment (often represented by a single mark), which is at odds with the concept of outcome assessment which is by essence subjective, qualitative and multidimensional. The method presented here is specifically concerned with learning activities where students need to demonstrate competency in learning outcomes of different natures. It describes a methodological framework that can be used in any programme that aims at developing multidimensional learners, but operates in a context where the final assessment product is a single quantitative grade. This method follows a classical approach to the evaluation of each learning outcome. It then proposes an innovative way of ranking students by categorising their overall performance based on conditions that reflect the integral nature of the learning process, to allow teaching staff to assign a range of marks for each student. Finally, a last step allows a quantitative ranking of students within each category, yielding a single quantitative mark for the course while remaining coherent with the learning goals.