In many countries, quality assurance systems rely on study programme accreditation. As with all quality assurance mechanisms, accreditation should also be continuously improved in order to maintain its relevance as a promoter of study programme quality. A way to move accreditation forward is by taking into account academics’ views, interests and needs about the process, since their support for it is paramount for its success and effectiveness. This paper analyses Portuguese academics’ knowledge and views on accreditation with the aim of understanding if the process is being supported and is on the right route for being effective. It is based on the analysis of 1484 academics’ answers to a questionnaire distributed in 16 higher education institutions. This analysis reveals a moderately positive attitude of academics towards accreditation, reflected in an only moderate knowledge of the process as well as in a mild agreement with its characteristics and implementation features. This suggests that there is room for improvement to bring this quality assurance mechanism closer to academics’ expectations and needs and therefore to improve accreditation’s effectiveness.
Rosenthal's critique of Grieger's paper embodies many of the problems that much of the literature on the teacher expectancy effect does. Positive data are selectively emphasized, negative data are explained as simply an unusual coincidence, and statistical significance is confused with practical significance. This paper clarifies several of Rosenthal's statistical and design misunderstandings. 相似文献
This paper analyses the importance of cooperation partners for the development of innovation activities. We contribute to the literature on cooperation in innovation activities that seeks to identify the characteristics differentiating cooperative from non-cooperative firms by proposing a different approach to this problem. We distinguish firms according to their evaluation of cooperation partners in the development of innovation activities. We apply a probit selection model to account for the firm's decision to cooperate (or not). The data we use come from the Portuguese Third Community Innovation Survey. Our estimation results show that firms from high-technological industries, with higher levels of absorptive capacity and of innovation investment, who give importance to incoming spillovers management, and who cooperate with firms from the same group or with suppliers, place greater value on cooperation partners in the innovation process. Additionally, we also find that the factors influencing the importance attributed to cooperation activities are different from the ones behind the decision to cooperate. 相似文献
International knowledge spillovers, especially through multinational companies (MNCs), have recently been a major topic of discussion among academics and practitioners. Most research in this field focuses on knowledge sharing activities of MNC subsidiaries. Relatively little is known about their capabilities for protecting valuable knowledge from spilling over to host country competitors. We extend this stream of research by investigating both formal protection strategies (e.g. patenting) as well as strategic ones (secrecy, lead time, complex design). We conceptualize the breadth of firm's knowledge protection strategies and relate it to the particular situation of MNC subsidiaries. Moreover, we argue that their approaches differ with regard to host country challenges and opportunities. We address these issues empirically, based on a harmonized survey of innovation activities of more than 1800 firms located in Portugal and Germany. We find evidence that MNCs prefer broader sets of knowledge protection strategies in a host country with fewer opportunities for knowledge sourcing (Portugal). In Germany, though, they opt for narrower sets of knowledge protection strategies if they invest in innovation activities themselves. We deduce that these results are due to a need for reciprocity in knowledge exchanges to benefit fully from promising host country knowledge flows. 相似文献
In this article, we analyze the variation in math achievement trajectories of Black male students to understand the different ways these students successfully or unsuccessfully navigate schools and the school characteristics that are associated with their trajectories. Using longitudinal student-level data from a large urban US city (n = 7,039), we analyze Black male students from one cohort to identify trajectories. We find a lack of growth in standardized math scores, suggesting that, on average, math proficiency among Black male students in our sample is declining over time. We found that the 4th-grade standardized math scores of subsidized-lunch students were somewhat lower than those of nonsubsidized students and those of retained students were substantially lower than their counterparts. The average math score of a Black male student's cohort appears to be the only variable amenable to policy manipulation that has a sizeable association with the growth of their standardized math scores, suggesting that putting Black male students in more challenging learning environments may be the best way to increase math proficiency over time. By themselves, other policy decisions (reducing student mobility, teacher turnover, or special education classification; increasing attendance or spending on after-school programming; or hiring more qualified or experienced teachers) all appear to have no or negligible associations with growth in math scores. 相似文献
In this paper we develop a new framework for time series segmentation based on a Hierarchical Linear Dynamical System (HLDS), and test its performance on monophonic and polyphonic musical note recognition. The center piece of our approach is the inclusion of constraints in the filter topology, instead of on the cost function as normally done in machine learning. Just by slowing down the dynamics of the top layer of an augmented (multilayer) state model, which is still compatible with the recursive update equation proposed originally by Kalman, the system learns directly from data all the musical notes, without labels, effectively creating a time series clustering algorithm that does not require segmentation. We analyze the HLDS properties and show that it provides better classification accuracy compared to current state-of-the-art approaches. 相似文献
The production of knowledge was subjected to quantitative analysis in the second half of the twentieth century, following Arrow (1962). The determinants of knowledge and the externalities present in the innovation process were discussed with immediate policy influence. In particular, the presence and strength of the spillover of the pool of past knowledge has encouraged high subsidization of R&D in the most developed countries. We survey the empirical literature on the spillover effect in the production of knowledge and implement a meta-analytic regression. We discover that the average spillover effect is less than but close to one and is highly significant. We also find that the spillover effect tends to be greater when the estimation of knowledge production accounts for foreign inputs, and it tends to be lower when the estimation includes only rich economies, regional data are used, and the pool of knowledge is not the patent stock. 相似文献
Most firms use secrecy to protect their knowledge from potential imitators. However, the theoretical foundations for secrecy have not been well explored. We extend knowledge protection literature and propose theoretical mechanisms explaining how information visibility influences the importance of secrecy as a knowledge protection instrument. Building on mechanisms from information economics and signaling theory, we postulate that secrecy is more important for protecting knowledge for firms that have legal requirements to reveal information to shareholders. Furthermore, we argue that this effect is contingent on the location in a technological cluster, on a firm’s investment in fixed assets and on a firm’s past innovation performance. We test our hypotheses using a representative sample of 683 firms in Germany between 2005 and 2013. Our results support the moderation effect of a technological cluster and a firm’s investment in fixed assets. Our findings inform both academics and managers on how firms balance information disclosure requirements with the use of secrecy as a knowledge protection instrument. 相似文献