Setting New Standards for Homo Academicus: Entrepreneurial University Graduates on the EU Agenda

In this article, we examine how the ideal university graduate is constructed in the European Commission’s documents on entrepreneurship education (EE). Our analysis illustrates how persuasive policy language determines the standards for educating entrepreneurial graduates to optimally meet the needs of the liberal market economy. We argue that the policy discourse on EE reformulates the idea of being academically educated. In the context of building the European knowledge economy, EE has become a significant theme that establishes neoliberal ideals, redefines the values of European university education, and generates instrumental and one-dimensional understanding of the purpose of university education.     

Investigating Students’ Learning Through Co-designing with Technology

Involving students in the co-design of educational curricula and practices can benefit both students and teachers. Students who participate in co-design may show better learning or increased agency or engagement. In the present study, we investigated what kind of science knowledge or practices can be learned by student co-designers while engaging in co-design practices and how that learning happens with six high school students. We created a model to guide the analysis of students’ learning with technology in co-designing processes. The results revealed that students learned engineering design process even if no explicit instruction on engineering learning was given. Also, our analysis suggested that co-designing with technology enabled learning of the engineering design process and potentially furthered learning of science because it promoted knowledge integration. The results have implications for understanding and enhancing engineering design and science learning through co-designing with technology.

     

Family and social risk,and parental investments during the early childhood years as predictors of low-income children's school readiness outcomes

Using data from the National Early Head Start (EHS) Research and Evaluation Project (N = 1851), the current study examined relations among cumulative family and social risk, assessed during infancy and the preschool years, and children's prekindergarten achievement, self-regulatory skills, and problematic social behavior, testing if these associations were mediated through two sets of family processes–responsive parenting practices and the provision of language stimulation and literacy practices. Structural equation modeling results highlight the significance of the timing of children's experience of risk in predicting school readiness competencies. Risk exposure during infancy was observed to be most detrimental for children's school readiness skills and was partially mediated by risk exposure during the preschool years and family processes, assessed during toddlerhood and the preschool years. Moderation analyses revealed no difference in the strength of relationships among the study variables by EHS assignment or by race/ethnicity.