'Well,I've Not Done Any Work Today. I Don't Know Why I Came to School'. Perceptions of Play in the Reception Class

The place of play in the education of young children has been the focus of much interest in the past. But the findings from this research project demonstrate that there remains a significant amount of confusion about the role that play has in young children's education. In particular we found that there is a clear distinction between the rhetoric and reality of play in the reception class. Further, there was evidence of real anguish for some early years workers who were failing to offer the play activities that they knew should be provided. These findings are particularly interesting at present, since the debate on the role of play has once again emerged as fundamental in the attempt to define a curriculum appropriate to the needs of the 3-6 year olds who, from the year 2000, will be required to work within the highly contentious Foundation Stage of the National Curriculum.     

Towards a micro foundation of leadership,governance, and management in universities

Leadership, governance, and management are frequently conceptualized as conflictory institutional logics. The recent shift to a ‘new managerialism’ in universities, for example, clearly favors business-like leadership and management styles over collegial governance practices. This article provides a micro foundation of leadership, governance, and management in universities based on the underlying communication of strategic issues among governing bodies. Reporting on a longitudinal case study of a comprehensive reorganization of a German university, it illustrates how institutional logics translate into micro patterns of communication. The findings suggest that leadership, governance, and management are not necessarily conflictory but reflect in four complementary micro patterns. Rather than ‘managerialism’ replacing ‘collegialism,’ organizational change unfolds in oscillating sequences of these four micro patterns. The findings furthermore indicate that the strategic issues of research and teaching at the university’s core remain largely autonomous, despite their increasing managerial regulation.     

The effects of gender on group work process and achievement: an analysis through self‐ and peer‐assessment

The importance of teamwork skills as part of employability has been widely acknowledged and accompanied by active research on successful cooperative learning. However, relatively few studies have focused on the effects of gender on students' group work, and only a limited number of empirical studies exist that examine students' group work process and performance through the results of self‐ and peer‐assessment. This study examines the effects of gender on group work process and performance using the self‐ and peer‐assessment results of 1001 students in British higher education formed into 192 groups. The analysis aggregates all measures on the group level in order to examine the overall group performance. Further, a simple regression model is used to capture the effects of group gender compositions. Results suggest that students in gender balanced groups display enhanced collaboration in group work processes. The enhanced collaboration could be associated with less social loafing behaviours and more equitable contributions to the group work. However, the results imply that this cooperative learning environment does not lead to higher student performance. Students' comments allow us to explore possible reasons for this finding. The results also indicate underperformance by all‐male groups and reduced collaborative behaviours by solo males in male gender exception groups (i.e., groups consisting of one male student and other members being female). The results thus have implications for the composition of groups. The pedagogical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Effectiveness of visual and verbal prompts in training visuospatial processing skills in school age children

Recent decades have witnessed a growing interest in intervention-based assessment to promote and enhance children’s learning. In this study, we explored the potential effect of an experimental visual–spatial intervention procedure and possible training benefits of two prompting modalities: one group received training with verbal and visual prompts, a second group training with visual prompts only, while a third, control group did not receive any training. The two training methods led to significant improvements of performance in visuospatial tasks as compared to control group, and they did so about equally well. Our findings provide evidence for the efficiency and benefits of interventions targeting visuospatial processing skills. The success of such interventions does not seem to be bounded by age or gender, and it seems that visual cues are particularly effective.     

The structuration of socio-technical regimes—Conceptual foundations from institutional theory

In recent years, socio-technical transitions literature has gained importance in addressing long-term, transformative change in various industries. In order to account for the inertia and path-dependency experienced in these sectors, the concept of the socio-technical regime has been formulated. Socio-technical regimes denote the paradigmatic core of a sector, which results from the co-evolution of institutions and technologies over time. Despite its widespread acceptance, the regime concept has repeatedly been criticized for lacking a clear operationalization. As a consequence, empirical applications tend to depict regimes as too ‘monolithic’ and ‘homogenous’, not adequately considering persistent institutional tensions and contradictions. These are however crucial for assessing transition dynamics. In this paper, we revisit two concepts from institutional theory that enable an explicit identification of socio-technical regimes and more generally a specification of the ‘semi-coherence’ of socio-technical systems. First, we will show that ‘levels of structuration’ can be conceptualized as degrees of institutionalization, thereby treating institutionalization as a variable with different effects on actors, the stability of the system and thus the potential for change. Secondly, we draw on the institutional logics approach to characterize the content of various structural elements present in a system and to trace conflicts and contradictions between them. We illustrate this approach with an empirical in-depth analysis of the transformation of the Australian urban water sector since the 1970ies.     

Fostering online learning at the workplace: A scheme to identify and analyse collaboration processes in asynchronous discussions

Research has shown that providing participants with high-quality learning material is not sufficient to help them profit most from online education. The level of interaction among participants is another key determinant for learning outcomes. However, merely proposing interaction does not automatically lead to fruitful discussion and collaboration. Specifically, social presence and facilitation activities add value to online discussions. In Murphy's collaboration framework, social presence represents the basis of successful online collaboration from which more reflective discussions and co-construction can evolve. In this paper, an adjusted version of this framework was applied in a workplace learning context. The content analysis of 1170 comments in an online course for careers practitioners of a public employment service showed that the extended framework generated deeper insights into the dynamics of online discussions. The results show that involvement in collaborative learning at the workplace was supported by a high social presence and influenced by course topic and tasks. Facilitation played an important role in creating a sympathetic sense of community and stimulating co-creation processes.