Does entrepreneurship education matter? Business students’ perspectives

The paper presents the findings of a mixed-methods study investigating the perceptions of business students in the Czech Republic towards entrepreneurship education, and examining the factors influencing their level of intention to be entrepreneurs. The results indicate that family background significantly influences the student’s entrepreneurial intention, and that participation in entrepreneurship-oriented courses positively influences the student’s level of self-efficacy. The study revealed further that business education had some effect on the student’s ability to gain the necessary knowledge for entrepreneurship. Another key finding was that entrepreneurship education specifically for business students has to equip students with entrepreneurial skills, attributes and behaviours. The results also suggest that entrepreneurship education is a contextually determined concept which requires modification of content and methods to meet the specific needs of particular target groups. The study has important implications for higher education institutions in terms of designing and managing effective entrepreneurship education.     

Building interfaces for on-line collaborative learning

For several years we have been engaged in the development and research of software environments for collaborative learning, for example in the recently completed CoLabs project (which we presented at the IFIP TC3 WG3.5 working conference in Budapest in 2004, see also http://matchsz.inf.elte.hu/Colabs/), also within lately defended long-range doctoral research, in which the co-author of this paper together with his undergraduate students had developed and evaluated cooperative computer activities for children aged 10 to 18. They observed children when using those environments and studied the influence of different approaches and solutions on the degree of their involvement and will to cooperate. We have also been involved in the London Knowledge Lab pilot project for developing a collaborative layered learning space travel games construction kit. Our department’s prior engagement in the development of collaborative activities also includes publishing a popular on-line journal (developed by A. Hrusecka and D. Lehotska, this on-line journal (in Slovak) can proudly boast up to 250,000 visits per month) for children, which intensively exploits on-line collaboration. This topic attracts us not only as a support for the learning process, but is a challenge for us as developers of educational programming tools as well. In our SuperLogo and Imagine environments we have always tried to provide users (ranging from children to developers) with new and powerful options to foster learning by exploring and developing. Thus we have equipped Imagine with the means for building objects and their behaviours in incremental loops, with parallel independent processes, event-driven programming and complex yet intuitive support for developing on-line environments for collaborative learning. In this paper we place our collaborative applications in the context of other related interfaces reported in literature. We use eight criteria to classify them and conclude that collaborative applications being developed by us and our students—future teachers—are distinguishable from others along two or three of those criteria: they combine in themselves typical features of Logo microworlds and inspiring support for on-line cooperation. We then analyze in detail our collaborative Imagine microworlds along four dimensions of their development. We specify means for establishing and maintaining on-line connection among any number of participants. We study tools for sending and receiving items (data, active characters with their behaviours, instructions etc.). We reflect on what can be shared by two or more participants in a collaborative activity. We examine all possible operations with common and private characters of a participant from the collaboration point of view. Our goals in this research and development are to:

1. Better understand potential the interfaces for on-line collaboration offer to support the learning process,
2. Place our Imagine Logo microworlds into context of other related applications,
3. Build a detailed map of all aspects important for their development (i.e., build a framework for the development),
4. Present the observations from our long-range experimental development and evaluation of the collaborative environments,
5. Point out how simple and natural it is (in the academic surroundings) to develop small and yet powerful collaborative microworlds—built for instance for immediate need in a classroom—with exceptional potential for interaction and openness.

Most of all, however, we want to motivate the endeavour to overcome all obstacles connected with the integration of on-line cooperation into children’s learning.     

VERBAL JUSTIFICATION—IS IT A PROOF? SECONDARY SCHOOL TEACHERS’ PERCEPTIONS

According to reform documents, teachers are expected to teach proofs and proving in school mathematics. Research results indicate that high school students prefer verbal proofs to other formats. We found it interesting and important to examine the position of secondary school teachers with regard to verbal proofs. Fifty high school teachers were asked to prove various elementary number theory statements, to write correct and incorrect proofs that students may use, and to evaluate given justifications to statements from elementary number theory. While all the participants provided correct proofs to the statements, our findings indicate that teachers are not aware of students’ preference for verbal justifications. Also, about half of the teachers rejected correct verbal justifications. They claimed that these justifications lacked generality and are mere examples.     

Czech students and mitigation of global warming: beliefs and willingness to take action

Abstract

The future life-styles and pro-environmental behaviour of today’s younger students will be a cardinal factor in mitigating the severity of projected climate change. In this study, Czech students at upper-primary and secondary-school levels responded to a set of covertly paired statements designed to assess their beliefs concerning the usefulness of actions that might ameliorate global warming and the degree to which they are willing to act. Relations between their beliefs and willingness to act were assessed by means of an index of Potential Effectiveness of Education (PEE). The results show that Czech students are generally sceptical about the usefulness of the actions suggested and are among the less willing, in a wider international context, to participate in actual processes that might ameliorate global warming. However, Czech secondary-school students, particularly females, are significantly more willing to act than upper-primary students. Although relatively high PEE values were observed, Czech students tend to underestimate the role of personal consumption and male students in particular are not willing to take actions that involve no immediate personal benefit. Our results thus emphasize the importance of adjusting school curricula by promoting insight into the topic of global warming, and extending that understanding into practical measures.     

A University Administrative Information System: Getting People Involved and Combating Doubt

An on-line information system at Masaryk University, in the Czech Republic, has been functioning for a little more than two years. Its aim is to facilitate the management of the university and gradually to introduce state-of-the-art new information technologies into the full fabric of university life. Although the project has encountered some resistance, it has, little by little, gained acceptance as staff and students from all disciplinary areas have discovered ways in which it can make their work efficient.     

Patterns of Close Relationships and Socioemotional and Academic Adjustment Among School‐Age Children with Learning Disabilities

This study examined patterns of close relationships among school‐age children with learning disabilities (LD) as manifested in their attachment style, their self‐perceived loneliness, their sense of coherence, and teacher ratings of their academic functioning. In line with resilience theory, this study also aimed to further explore predictors of positive adjustment for children with LD. The sample comprised 98 children with LD from regular classes in four Israeli public elementary schools, and 98 non‐LD children from the same classes. Significant group differences emerged in attachment styles and adjustment. Attachment style significantly correlated with socioemotional adjustment but not with academic functioning. In addition, a subgroup of resilient children emerged among the LD children. Discussion focused on the value of attachment patterns for understanding social and emotional adjustment among school‐age children with LD.     

Lexical inference in L2: predictive roles of vocabulary knowledge and reading skill beyond reading comprehension

The current study examined the predictive roles of L2 vocabulary knowledge and L2 word reading skills in explaining individual differences in lexical inferencing in the L2. Participants were 53 Israeli high school students who emigrated from the former Soviet Union, and spoke Russian as an L1 and Hebrew as an L2. L2 vocabulary knowledge and decoding accuracy predicted L2 reading comprehension, which in turn was strongly related to lexical inferencing abilities in the L2. In addition, decoding accuracy predicted additional variance in lexical inferencing, beyond the role of reading comprehension. These findings support the idea that beginning L2 readers with more precise and efficient lexical representations demonstrate better lexical inferencing abilities, most likely due to the increased automatization of word reading, which frees up resources for higher level processing. These results suggest that lexical inferencing from text in the L2 might be limited not only by vocabulary knowledge and higher order comprehension processes, but also by basic decoding skills.     

Visual and Auditory Morphological Priming in Adults With Developmental Dyslexia

The quality of implicit morphological knowledge in adult Hebrew readers with developmental dyslexia was investigated. The priming paradigm was used to examine whether these adults extract and represent morphemic units similarly to normal readers during online word recognition. The group with dyslexia as a whole did not exhibit priming with visual presentation as opposed to both age- and reading-level controls. Priming was absent when the prime and target words shared a morpheme and even when the prime and the target were identical. Only the students with phonological dyslexia, who exhibited relatively good performance in the orthographic judgment task, exhibited repetition priming but not morphological priming. Strong repetition and morphological priming effects were found for participants with dyslexia when the stimuli were auditory. The implications of the dissociation between visual and auditory priming for the locus of the deficit in morphological processing during word recognition are discussed.     

Book review

Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education -