Decomposition as a Complex-Skill Acquisition Strategy in Management Education: A Case Study in Business Forecasting

Graduate business education has been criticized for utilizing simplistic teaching strategies that compromise the presentation of real-world complex skills in the classroom. In this article, we propose that complex management functions can be effectively taught using decomposition strategies. We demonstrate the usefulness of this strategy in the domain of business forecasting by comparing the forecast accuracy of students instructed in decomposition ( RBF - Instructed ) with that of students not exposed to such instruction ( Uninstructed ), as well as with an expert system called Rule-Based Forecasting (RBF). RBF-Instructed students demonstrated significant improvements over Uninstructed students and were at least as accurate as the RBF system. Our findings suggest that academics engaged in teaching complex domains can benefit from building their teaching environment on a decomposition framework. We further suggest strategies for measuring the effectiveness and endurance of classroom knowledge thus imparted. Implications for academia and practice are discussed and a research framework is proposed.     

The effect of social network diagrams on a virtual network of practice: a Korean case

This study investigates the effect of the presentation of social network diagrams on virtual team members’ interaction behavior via e-mail. E-mail transaction data from 22 software developers in a Korean IT company was analyzed and depicted as diagrams by social network analysis (SNA), and presented to the members as an intervention. Results showed that the SNA diagrams presented were effective in increasing the quantity of e-mail transactions among the members and in forming a community of practice. The findings suggest that SNA diagrams can be used as a cost-effective intervention strategy for virtual team members to actively share knowledge and collaborate as members of a network of practice.     

Pre-game hydration status, sweat loss, and fluid intake in elite Brazilian young male soccer players during competition

In this study, we assessed the pre-game hydration status and fluid balance of elite young soccer players competing in a match played in the heat (temperature 31.0 ± 2.0 ° C, relative humidity 48.0 ± 5.0%) for an official Brazilian soccer competition. Fluid intake was measured during the match, as were urine specific gravity and body mass before and after the game to estimate hydration status. Data were obtained from 15 male players (age 17.0 ± 0.6 years, height 1.78 ± 0.06 m, mass 65.3 ± 3.8 kg); however, data are only analysed for 10 players who completed the full game. The mean (± s) sweat loss of players amounted to 2.24 ± 0.63 L, and mean fluid intake was 1.12 ± 0.39 L. Pre-game urine specific gravity was 1.021 ± 0.004, ranging from 1.010 to 1.025. There was no significant correlation between sweat loss and fluid intake (r = 0.504, P = 0.137) or between urine specific gravity and fluid intake (r = -0.276, P = 0.440). We conclude that young, native tropical soccer players started the match hypohydrated and replaced about 50% of the sweat lost. Thus, effective strategies to improve fluid replacement are needed for players competing in the heat.     

Australian Secondary Students’ Views About Global Warming: Beliefs About Actions, and Willingness to Act

A 44-item questionnaire was constructed to determine secondary students’ views about how useful various specific actions might be at reducing global warming, their willingness to undertake the various actions, and the extent to which these two might be linked. Responses (n = 500) were obtained from students in years 7 to 10 in three schools in NSW, Australia. For some pro-environmental actions, the degree to which students professed a willingness to act was greater than might be expected from the extent to which they believed the action to be useful. Such actions are those that involve minimal inconvenience such as switching off un-used electrical appliances, or those that are becoming well embedded in social practice, such as recycling. For other pro-environmental actions, the degree to which students were willing to act seemed less than might be expected, given the extent to which they believed the action to be useful. Actions concerning personal transport, such as buying smaller cars or using public rather than private transport, and obtaining more electricity from nuclear power stations, fell into this category. Here, there are disincentives to acting in a pro-environmental manner relating to personal inconvenience, or concern about nuclear power. The data were also explored to determine the strength of the relationships, for each action, between students’ professed willingness to act and their belief that an action would be effective. This suggested a measure of the potential effectiveness of education about that action. For some actions, this relationship was weak; in such cases, altering belief about the usefulness of the action might not be expected to produce major changes in behaviour. Issues concerning public transport were of this type; clearly, for issues such as these, other approaches and/or inducements may be needed to persuade people to adopt pro-environmental behaviour patterns. For other actions the relationship was stronger, so that in these areas environmental education could well be effective, especially if a large proportion of the population are not already willing to undertake that action.     

Becoming a teacher: Transitions from training to the classroom in the NWFP,Pakistan

This paper addresses issues related to the effectiveness of teacher education in Pakistan in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), through a small scale collaborative research study in two state secondary schools, one girls’ and one boys’. The aim was to explore how newly qualified teachers manage their transition from student teachers to classroom teachers. In teasing out the relationship between teacher training experiences and classroom practice, we highlight the importance of greater consideration of the social and professional contexts of the school within training programmes as a means to make sustained improvements in the quality of classroom teaching and learning.     

A robust unscented transformation for uncertain moments

This paper proposes a robust version of the unscented transform (UT) for one-dimensional random variables. It is assumed that the moments are not exactly known, but are known to lie in intervals. In this scenario, the moment matching equations are reformulated as a system of polynomial equations and inequalities, and it is proposed to use the Chebychev center of the solution set as a robust UT. This method yields a parametrized polynomial optimization problem, which in spite of being NP-Hard, can be relaxed by some algorithms that are proposed in this paper.     

Adaptive Comparative Judgment as a Tool for Assessing Open-ended Design Problems and Model Eliciting Activities

We investigated the use of adaptive comparative judgment to evaluate the middle school student learning, engagement, and experience with the design process in an open-ended problem assigned in a technology and engineering education course. Our results indicate that the adaptive comparative judgment tool effectively facilitated the grading of the students’ products and improved the judges’ understanding of the processes the students used to arrive at their solutions. We found the reliability and validity of the tool to be acceptable and the outcomes of our study suggest that there is justification for the use of the adaptive comparative judgment method to assess student learning outcomes at multiple levels of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education.     

(Re)shaping educational research through ‘programmification’: Institutional expansion,change, and translation in Norway

Educational research in Norway has experienced unprecedented structural expansion and cognitive shifts over the last two decades because of greater state investments and the strategic use of extensive and multi-year thematic programmes to fund research projects. Using a neo-institutionalist framework, we examine institutionalisation dynamics in cultural-cognitive, normative and regulative dimensions by means of interviews, research programme calls, policy documents and funding data. In the cultural-cognitive dimension, we find references to the knowledge society, the perceived importance of evidence in policymaking and ideas of quality, excellence and relevance. In the normative dimension, we find the introduction of new professional and methodological standards, reflecting broader global patterns of academic and epistemic drift. In the regulative dimension, the strengthened role of both government and the Research Council of Norway is manifest in substantial growth in both funding and large-scale, long-term planning, including thematic choices—evidence of ‘programmification’. The importance of external models has grown in an era of internationalisation, yet translation occurs at every level of the governance of educational research. This results in a specific Norwegian research model, guided by a mode of governance of programmes that maintains social values that are traditionally strong in Nordic societies.