Knowledge flows through informal contacts in industrial clusters: myth or reality?

The role of informal networks in the development of regional clusters has recently received a lot of attention in the literature. Informal contact between employees in different firms is claimed to be one of the main carriers of knowledge between firms in a cluster. This paper examines empirically the role of informal contacts in a specific cluster. In a questionnaire survey, we asked a sample of engineers in a regional cluster of wireless communication firms in Northern Denmark a series of questions on informal networks. We analyze whether the engineers actually acquire valuable knowledge through these networks. We find that the engineers do share even quite valuable knowledge with informal contacts. This shows that informal contacts represent an important channel of knowledge diffusion.     

Preservice Elementary School Teachers' Understandings of Theory Based Science Education

Journal of Science Teacher Education -     

Learning chemistry from text: The effect of decision making

Two experiments examined the relative effects of questions requiring decisions, statements providing the decision information to students, questions not requiring decisions, and control procedures on students' memory for chemistry text reading materials. Experiment 1 employed immediate recall. The results of Experiment 1 indicated that students who made and justified decisions about the contents recalled significantly more information than students in any other condition. In addition, students who answered questions that did not require decisions recalled significantly more of the content than students in the control or the statements conditions. No other contrasts reached significance. Experiment 2 employed delayed recall assessed one week after reading. The results confirmed those of Experiment 1. The overall results of the study are discussed in terms of an elaboration perspective on memory.     

The cultural grid: A framework for multicultural counseling

The Cultural Grid suggests a structure for interpreting a person's behavior in the context of culturally learned expectations. When two persons' expectations are similar, but their behaviors are dissimilar, cross cultural misunderstanding is likely to result. When their expectations are dissimilar, the result is likely to be a personal misunderstanding even though their behaviors are similar. This article introduces a framework for differentiating personal and cultural differences in the interview which is essential for appropriate multicultural counseling. The alternatives are to allow apparent and obvious cultural differences to mask underlying personal differences or to incorrectly assume that two persons who appear culturally similar are having a personal disagreement.     

Understanding a Phenomenon in Two Domains as a Result of Contextualization

This study illustrates how contextualization influences students' reasoning. An experiment on the properties of air was demonstrated with alternative designs to two groups of primary students (n = 45). Students' written explanations to the observations show that an experiment in which science equipment and chemicals are used poses a significant problem to these students, who have not yet been introduced to the different disciplines of school science. We argue that the scientific arrangement of experiments might in fact obstruct students' sound reasoning in explaining phenomena. In relation to its role as a trigger for reasoning, scientific equipment calls for a more conscious utilization than is often the case in school science.     

They censor,I select

What happens when a bookseller does not want to stock or sell a specific title? Does this act represent a decision to censor a title? Or, perhaps, does it reflect a bookseller's belief that a book would offend customers (the moral or political argument)? In this article the author explores covert (which he terms an “unspoken ambivalence”) and overt (“we do not carry books of that type”) forms of “title selection” that help perpetuate some forms ofde facto censorship within the bookselling community.