First-Year Non-STEM Majors’ Use of Definitions to Solve Calculus Tasks: Benefits of Using Concept Image over Concept Definition?

Six US first-year university students in humanities or social science degree programmes were interviewed while solving 4 tasks on continuity and asymptotes in a required mathematics course. The focus was on how the students referred to the definitions or to the concept images when solving the tasks and if partial understandings appeared. Partial understanding denotes when the definition or the concept image has correct parts but essential parts are missing or incoherencies occur. Some students confused continuity with differentiability or perceived it as a graph not having holes, which is also reported by other studies. Another misconception that emerged is to perceive points on the x-axis as non-continuous. The partial understandings of asymptotes were related to the vertical asymptote as it was confused with a function property. Some students referred to the definitions when correctly solving some of the tasks and some students with coherent concept images were successful solving some of the tasks even when they did not refer to the definitions.     

Measuring Mathematical Competences of Engineering Students at the Beginning of Their Studies

This article reports about our efforts to determine engineering students' competence in mathematics. Our research is embedded in a larger project, KoM@ING–Modeling and developing competence: Integrated IRT based and qualitative studies with a focus on mathematics and its usage in engineering studies, within the program Modeling and Measuring Competencies in Higher Education (KoKoHS). KoKoHS provides the umbrella organization of several research projects addressing the modeling and measuring of competences at the college level. KoM@ING aims to model the role of engineering students' mathematical competences for their studies from both a quantitative and a qualitative perspective.

Here, we report the development of a large-scale instrument assessing engineering freshmen's competence in mathematics by applying Rasch analysis to determine measures for item difficulties and student abilities. Several analyses were performed to provide insights into the measures' reliability and validity. In particular, to examine cognitive validity, we scrutinized students' think-aloud protocols when solving the items to investigate their problem solving abilities as a proxy for item difficulty. Overall, we found first evidence that our instrument is suitable to assess engineering freshmen's competence in mathematics. This instrument may be helpful to conduct further research and to inform those concerned with college organization and policy.     

Bachelor Graduates on the Labour Market. A Cross‐national Comparison of the Employers' Viewpoint

One of the most vehemently discussed questions in the process of restructuring traditional long study programmes according to the Bachelor/Master model is how to develop first cycle curricula and degrees which are a meaningful preparation for a following Master programme as well as for the labour market—as stressed in the Bologna Declaration. It remains to be seen for which occupational levels undergraduate programmes will prepare and how these new degrees will be assessed on the labour markets in different countries in Europe. The article focuses on the employers' viewpoint, giving an overview of the assessment of Bachelor degrees in four countries: Austria, Hungary, the Netherlands and Norway. As it is a very early stage to provide in‐depth analyses because so far there are hardly any Bachelor graduates on the labour markets, the article illustrates from a more analytical perspective what factors might influence their transition to the world of work and the development of their further careers.     

Connecting best practices in public relations to social media strategies for academic libraries

Academic libraries worldwide use social media to inform and connect with users. Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Libraries is no different and must keep up with rapidly evolving platforms and user expectations. When our presence stretched across twenty-two channels, we needed to ensure that social media efforts were managed in the most effective and efficient manner possible. To develop a research-based, unified vision for communication for new media, we scanned the literature in the library and public relations fields and then surveyed librarians to address identified gaps. Based on results, we offer recommendations focused on best management practices and strong content strategies.     

The performance impact of intra-firm organizational design on an alliance's NPD projects

This research contributes to the intra-organization, inter-organization, and new product development (NPD) management literature by studying the impact of a firm's internal organizational design on the communication within and performance of NPD projects conducted with strategic alliance partners. The empirical data were collected from three in-depth case studies of network lead companies (NLCs) operating in different industries. The three NLCs have different internal organizational designs, ranging from very flexible “organic” to very rigid “mechanistic.” In each NLC, a successful new-to-firm product development project was chosen for further detailed investigation. First, we identify the role the alliance's NPD project characteristics and industry characteristics play in determining the “intensity level” and “media richness” of communication required between the alliance's NPD project partners. Then, we examine how the internal organizational design influences the actual intensity and media richness of communication of the alliance's NPD project that matches our assumptions of what is required.     

Policy learning and governance of education policy in the EU

Open methods for coordinating (OMC) education policies in the EU rely on a number of techniques, one of which is policy learning. This article examines how policy learning and governance transform each other. More specifically, policy‐learning in the education OMC becomes differentiated into four distinct learning styles: mutual, competitive, surface and imperialistic learning. While they overlap with some forms of policy learning discussed in the literature, they are also different by focusing upon interactions and political dynamics between the European Commission and the member states. In seeking to understand how governing through learning occurs, we argue that any ‘impact’ of EU‐level policy‐learning is co‐constructed by both the European Commission and the member states. The analysis of this article is grounded in a discourse analytical and institutionalist perspective. It draws on qualitative data derived from semi‐structured interviews with officials from the Directorate General for Education and Culture in the European Commission and on EU documents generated during policy‐learning activities.     

Education after and about Auschwitz in Germany: Towards a theory of remembrance in the European context

This article provides an overview of education after and about Auschwitz (Holocaust education)* in Germany in both theory and practice, with particular attention to three critical areas. The first is the status of research in, as Adorno famously phrased it, “education after Auschwitz” within the context of contemporary Germany. German society is pluralistic, and is built on the third and fourth generations of young Germans since the National Socialist Era. These Germans cannot and do not want to be identified as perpetrators, but they must deal with a strong and growing right-wing extremist movement. The second area, given these challenges, is the fact that Holocaust education can fail. And finally, the European dimension of Holocaust remembrance means teaching about Auschwitz in the context of a general effort to resist inhumanity, as well as attempts to identify the connections between learning after and about Auschwitz, on the one hand, and learning and understanding human rights as a European and global vision on the other.