Pastoral Care to Regulate School Bullying: Shame Management among Bystanders

Bystanders can reveal valuable information about bullying to school personnel to take action on it. If they remain reluctant, of course, they frustrate our efforts to stop bullying. But then, why would they get involved if doing so might make them victims of aggression too?
This paper investigates the importance of adaptive shame management in encouraging bystanders to prevent bullying. Data were collected through the Cross-national School Behaviour Research Project from 1452 secondary school students (49% girls) in grades 7–10 (mean=8.42) in Bangladesh. As predicted, students who scored higher on shame acknowledgement (admitting shame, accepting responsibility, making amends) were more likely to intervene to prevent bullying. Those with low shame displacement (blaming or hitting out at others) were also likely to intervene to stop bullying. Implications of these findings pertaining to pastoral staff, counsellors and school teachers working with students to encourage coming forward against bullying are discussed.     

Integrating External Knowledge to Supplement Training Data in Semi-Supervised Learning for Text Categorization

Text Categorization (TC) is the automated assignment of text documents to predefined categories based on document contents. TC has been an application for many learning approaches, which prove effective. Nevertheless, TC provides many challenges to machine learning. In this paper, we suggest, for text categorization, the integration of external WordNet lexical information to supplement training data for a semi-supervised clustering algorithm which can learn from both training and test documents to classify new unseen documents. This algorithm is the Semi-Supervised Fuzzy c-Means (ssFCM). Our experiments use Reuters 21578 database and consist of binary classifications for categories selected from the 115 TOPICS classes of the Reuters collection. Using the Vector Space Model, each document is represented by its original feature vector augmented with external feature vector generated using WordNet. We verify experimentally that the integration of WordNet helps ssFCM improve its performance, effectively addresses the classification of documents into categories with few training documents and does not interfere with the use of training data.     

A study of cross-national collaborative research: reflecting on experience in Pakistan

This paper seeks to offer insights into the complexities involved in cross-national collaborative research. It identifies and provides an account of the various issues running through the research process, whilst at the same time derives principles upon which such work should be based. Key narratives were identified by highlighting a number of critical incidents. These narratives were related to issues of ownership, trust, and power, whilst in the course of theorising the research process itself, the metaphors of voice and crossing borders were found to be profoundly empowering and transformative. The complexities of working cross-nationally in the research group, understanding roles, clarifying professional frames and ethical values, at the same time as creating and maintaining a context for effective partnership and participation, made managing and sustaining the research process challenging.     

基于需求和自我效能理论构建研究生英语分级教学新模式

分级教学改革旨在解决公共研究生英语教学中存在的问题,改革无论学生英语水平如何、需求如何,都使用同一本教材、采用同一种教学模式、教授同一种课型的方式。本文采取针对硕士研究生的不同英语水平和不同主体关于英语学习的不同需求进行"有的放矢"、"因材施教"的教学新模式,目标是缩小研究生的英语语言知识与实际应用能力之间的差距,促进学生英语能力与其本领域的研究相结合。     

Religion as a barrier to the use of student loans for higher education: A community-based participatory study with Somalis living in England

The unwillingness of the Somali community to finance higher education has largely gone unnoticed within the academic literature and government policy documents. This study explores the role of religion and the influence of Shari'ah scholars on the use of interest-bearing student loans within the Somali community. In the absence of any theoretical framework on this topic, we explore the multiple socioeconomic factors that may influence the attitude, perception of need, motivation and action of using student loans for higher education, by proposing the UK Somali Muslims Acceptance of Interest-bearing Student Loan Model. This is also a community-based participatory study that actively involved Somali community members in exploring and interpreting the results. This was achieved through regular consultations with the sampled Somali Muslim communities within the UK. Our results contribute to the broader debate on the effect of cultural, religious and social values of marginalised communities on inclusion and widening access policies for higher education. The findings reemphasise that people sharing the same location do not necessarily share the same level of opportunities for higher education because of the intersectionality of race, religion, gender and class. The results also show the complexity of the issue of exclusion and the atheoretical nature of student loans as a financial instrument for improving financial inclusion and widening access to higher education among Somali residents in England.     

Knowledge asset similarity and business relational capital gains: evidence from European manufacturing firms

This paper leverages the concept of absorptive capacity to explore whether similar configurations of intellectual capital (IC) are associated with the performance of relational capital in firms. It proposes a novel implementation of graph theory to analyse similarities in knowledge assets. We use Community Innovation Survey data to examine 5813 manufacturing firms in 13 business sectors and 13 European countries. While firms rely on external relations to compensate for a lack of internal assets, we find that a company’s propensity to cooperate in innovation is associated with its own IC profile. In particular, firms with common knowledge assets are more likely to benefit from business relational capital. The main contribution of this study lies in a holistic approach to understanding how similarities in knowledge assets are linked to gains in business relational capital.     

Monitoring intellectual capital: a case study of a large company during the recent economic crisis

Nowadays, companies and organizations are facing a deep economic crisis as a follow-up of the financial crisis that started in 2007. This crisis has affected a great amount of markets and industries around the world. In this context, companies are challenging the way they allocate resources to investments, especially to intangibles. The present research considers this issue based on an empirical work carried out with a large company (called here Global A) and with reference to the cycle approach proposed by Åkerman. General conclusions are derived for how to approach intangibles (intellectual capital) in a downturn context.