‘Is it because I’m a woman?’ Gender-based attributional ambiguity in higher education administration

This study examines gender-based attributional ambiguity among higher education administrators in the US, specifically academic deans. Attributional ambiguity involves situations in which members of underrepresented groups cannot determine whether interactions both negative and positive have occurred because of their minority status or for some unrelated yet plausible reason. A conceptual model of attributional ambiguity in higher education administration is presented highlighting the types of situations that produce this ambiguity, two variants of attributional ambiguity (i.e. cognitive and social), and the psychological and organizational consequences of such ambiguity. Reasons that attributional ambiguity is inherent to higher education administration are examined including the fluidity of gender roles, the culture of academia, and leaders’ minimization of discriminatory experiences. Implications for professional practice are also presented such as the need for curricula, trainings, mentoring, and coaching that addresses attributional ambiguity and greater publicity related to women’s underrepresentation in leadership roles in higher education.     

Sustainable development as a driver for educational innovation in engineering school: the case of UniLaSalle

ABSTRACT

The potential relationships between innovation and sustainability processes, in engineering education, is neither obvious nor simple, especially when innovation, generally speaking, is promoted regardless of sustainability. We used UniLaSalle (In January 2016, the ‘Institut Polytechnique LaSalle Beauvais’, a French engineering school, merged with another higher education engineering school (ESITPA, Rouen). Both campuses (Beauvais and Rouen) have a common name: UniLaSalle (www.unilasalle.fr). As the interview began during 2015, this article only describes the situation of the Beauvais campus.) as a ‘living Lab’ to identify and analyse the reasons for the integration of innovation and Sustainable Development (SD) in training programmes. The aim is to explore, in a perception and reflective approach, how SD can be understood as a driver for specific innovation attitudes in higher education engineering school. This paper adopts an empirical approach based on a qualitative study, using NVivo 9 software to analyse non-numerical data. Our research suggests that SD can be a structural driver for innovation if it is integrated in a transdisciplinarity approach and not just as a discipline per se.     

Analysis and evaluation of lecturers’ activity in Learning Management Systems: Subjective and objective perceptions

Learning Management Systems (LMS) have become the principal resource for the distribution of educational material and collaboration among lecturers and students in Higher Education. The potential of these platforms does not limit to a simple manager of contents, but they also offer a wide range of tools that support the development of different methodologies according to the learning modality, namely on-campus, blended or online. This work analyzes the use of LMS and the interactions with their different tools from the lecturers’ point of view, in order to detect possible incidents, check the tools’ utility and evaluate their complexity. All these metrics represent valuable information to the Degree Coordinators, if they are presented in a suitable manner, to detect and resolve deficiencies in the methodology. For the analysis of the teaching activity two methods are employed: (1) surveys, to measure the subjective perception of lecturers when using LMS tools; and (2) visual analysis of the real lecturer’s activity through OnlineData, a graphical analytic tool developed as part of our work to monitor LMS tools metrics. The results of both methods show differences among the perceived self-usage and actual usage, especially for the e-learning methodologies     

The Role of Orthographic and Semantic Learning in Word Reading and Reading Comprehension

We tested the theoretically driven hypotheses that children’s orthographic and semantic learning are associated with their word reading and reading comprehension skills, even when orthographic and semantic knowledge are taken into account. A sample of 139 English-speaking Grade 3 children completed a learning task in which they read stories about new inventions. Then they were tested on their learning of the spelling and meaning of the inventions (i.e., orthographic and semantic learning, respectively). Word reading and reading comprehension were assessed with standardised tasks, and orthographic and semantic knowledge were assessed with choice tasks targeting the spelling and meaning of existing words. The results of our structural equation modeling indicated that orthographic learning predicted word reading directly and reading comprehension indirectly via word reading. We also found that semantic learning predicted reading comprehension directly. These findings support integration of the self-teaching hypothesis and the lexical quality hypothesis.     

The Role of Desegregation and Teachers of Color in Discipline Disproportionality

The Urban Review - Scholars note the multitude of ways that the continual shifts in the racial composition of schools affect students, but fewer studies consider the implications of such shifts for...     

Group Membership Influences More Social Identification Than Social Learning or Overimitation in Children

Group membership is a strong driver of everyday life in humans, influencing similarity judgments, trust choices, and learning processes. However, its ontogenetic development remains to be understood. This study investigated how group membership, age, sex, and identification with a team influenced 39- to 60-month-old children (N = 94) in a series of similarity, trust, and learning tasks. Group membership had the most influence on similarity and trust tasks, strongly biasing choices toward in-groups. In contrast, prior experience and identification with the team were the most important factors in the learning tasks. Finally, overimitation occurred most when the children's team, but not the opposite, displayed meaningless actions. Future work must investigate how these cognitive abilities combine during development to facilitate cultural processes.     

Identifying Changes in a Student’s Mental Models and Stimulating Intrinsic Motivation for Learning During a Dialogue Regulated by the Teachback Technique: a Case Study

Research in Science Education - The aim of this paper is to show how an innovative technique can be used to introduce a method for uncovering intrinsic mechanisms that motivate changes in...     

Contractual governance and the choice of dispute-resolution mechanisms: Evidence on technology licensing

In fast-paced and knowledge-intensive environments, licensing partnerships can be powerful levers for market expansion. Research on the management of technology-oriented licenses has nonetheless pointed out the risks of corrosive disputes caused by conflicting interests or misunderstandings among licensing partners. The choice made ex ante on mechanisms for resolving potential disputes is of prime importance in the execution of licensing exchanges. Although the legal literature has widely emphasized the advantages of arbitration towards litigation, public ordering remains the “default” option in managers’ eyes. By adopting a transaction cost economics logic, our study explores the conditions under which licensing partners may prefer arbitration over public ordering during the contractual-design phase. In accordance with our theoretical arguments, findings show that the occurrence of arbitration provisions increases when the coordination orientation adopted by licensing partners is extensive. In situations where both monitoring and coordination orientations are simultaneously extensive, results reveal a greater propensity to prefer arbitration over public ordering. Our research therefore supports the view that corporate decision-makers tend to favor the conciliatory stance and compromising awards typically associated with arbitration, only when exchanges are expected to be highly coordinative. Their preference for arbitration over litigation is magnified when the coordination orientation develops alongside the monitoring orientation.