Taking leaps of faith: Evaluation criteria and resource commitments for early-stage inventions

Successfully developed academic inventions have the potential to spawn new technological domains, form the basis of thriving business ventures, and improve the well-being of society. However, evaluating whether an early-stage scientific invention truly has such potential is extremely difficult, and financially backing such inventions is highly risky. And yet, organizations and their evaluators still back some of these inventions with resources for further development. We investigate this puzzle to pinpoint how and why evaluators decide to offer resource commitments at early stages, despite the red flags raised using standard evaluation criteria. Many academic inventions need these initial resources to dispel concerns regarding their commercial feasibility, so evaluators need to take a leap of faith with their support to prematurely avoid eliminating high-potential opportunities. We tested our theory using text analysis on nearly 700 invention evaluation reports written by a university’s technology transfer experts. Our results revealed that evaluators backed inventions based on their feasibility (overcoming doubt and assessing maturity) and desirability (background familiarity and scientific complexity). Using the context of the research laboratory, our study insights can be applied to many management situations in which early-stage opportunities are assessed for resource commitments under high uncertainty.     

The power of integrality: Linkages between product architecture, innovation, and industry structure

A substantial literature stream suggests that many products are becoming more modular over time, and that this development is often associated with a change in industry structure towards higher degrees of specialization. These developments can have strong implications for an industry's competition as the history of the PC industry illustrates. To add to our understanding of the linkages between product architecture, innovation, and industry structure we develop detailed product architecture measurements based on a previously proposed method [Fixson, S.K., 2005. Product architecture assessment: a tool to link product, process, and supply chain design decisions. Journal of Operations Management 23 (3/4), 345-369] and study an unusual case in which a firm - through decreasing its product modularity - turned its formerly competitive industry into a near-monopoly. Using this case study we explore how existing theories on modularity explain the observed phenomenon, and show that most consider technological change in rather long-term dimensions, and tend to focus on efficiency-related arguments to explain the resulting forces on competition. We add three critical aspects to the theory that connects technological change and industry dynamics. First, we suggest integrating as a new design operator to explain product architecture genesis. Second, we argue that a finer-grained analysis of the product architecture shows the existence of multiple linkages between product architecture and industry structure, and that these different linkages help explain the observed intra-industry heterogeneity across firms. Third, we propose that the firm boundary choice can also be a pre-condition of the origin of architectural innovation, not only an outcome of efficiency considerations.     

Learning to detect error in movement timing using physical and observational practice

Three experiments assessed the possibility that a physical practice participant's ability to render appropriate movement timing estimates may be hindered compared to those who merely observed. Results from these experiments revealed that observers and physical practice participants executed and estimated the overall durations of movement sequences similarly and more accurately than those who were not privy to any previous practice. This was true for a case in which (a) the execution demands for the physical practice participant were relatively high when multiple movement sequences were practiced with a consistent relative time structure but different overall durations (Experiment 1) and (b) the execution demands were relatively modest when only a single sequential motor task was learned (Experiment 2). Moreover, this general set of findings remained true for individuals who had previous experience with physical or observational practice, even when timing estimations were made during tests with no execution demands (Experiment 3). Thus, executing a movement sequence does not appear to interfere with the development of a learner's subjective evaluation of overall timing performance. Specifically, these data provided evidence that recognizing error in movement timing can be accomplished via observation, and, more generally, they add to the growing evidence supporting the claim that observational practice is a legitimate method facilitating the acquisition of sequential movement behaviors.     

EUROPEAN COLLABORATION IN THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

The article briefly describes the way in which an academic department in a major urban polytechnic in the United Kingdom established a study and research link with a similar departmental a major French university. This first link was a fruitful one which gave rise to other links with other French institutions. The article concludes with a short list of do's and don't's with regard to the establishment of international student exchange and research links among institutions of higher education.     

Accountability Reform and Responsive Assessment for Immigrant Youth

Immigrant students, one of the fastest-growing populations in US public schools, have been linguistically and culturally disadvantaged by accountability policies that rely only on standardized tests. Recent changes to these policies allow for the use of performance-based assessment tasks (PBATs) as an assessment indicator to supplement standardized tests. In this article, we explore how 1 highly successful high school that works exclusively with recently arrived immigrant teenagers has incorporated PBATs into its curriculum. We find that school leaders, teachers, and students agree that the use of rigorous performance assessments accomplishes language learning, content mastery, and test preparation simultaneously.     

Can Dynamic Visualizations with Variable Control Enhance the Acquisition of Intuitive Knowledge?

Journal of Science Education and Technology - An important feature of inquiry learning is to take part in science practices including exploring variables and testing hypotheses. Computer-based...     

Students’ Energy Concepts at the Transition Between Primary and Secondary School

Energy is considered both a core idea and a crosscutting concept in science education. A thorough understanding of the energy concept is thought to help students learn about other (related) concepts within and across science subjects, thereby fostering scientific literacy. This study investigates students’ progression in understanding the energy concept in biological contexts at the transition from primary to lower secondary school by employing a quantitative, cross-sectional study in grades 3–6 (N?=?540) using complex multiple-choice items. Based on a model developed in a previous study, energy concepts were assessed along four aspects of energy: (1) forms and sources of energy, (2) transfer and transformation, (3) degradation and dissipation, and (4) energy conservation. Two parallel test forms (A and B) indicated energy concept scores to increase significantly by a factor of 2.3 (A)/1.7 (B) from grade 3 to grade 6. Students were observed to progress in their understanding of all four aspects of the concept and scored highest on items for energy forms. The lowest scores and the smallest gain across grades were found for energy conservation. Based on our results, we argue that despite numerous learning opportunities, students lack a more integrated understanding of energy at this stage, underlining the requirement of a more explicit approach to teaching energy to young learners. Likewise, more interdisciplinary links for energy learning between relevant contexts in each science discipline may enable older students to more efficiently use energy as a tool and crosscutting concept with which to analyze complex content.     

The perception problem: a comparison of teachers’ self-perceptions and students’ perceptions of instructional quality

Teachers’ self-perceptions and their students’ perceptions of the three basic dimensions of instructional quality were compared based on a sample of 171 classes and their teachers in German secondary education. Low to moderate correlations (r = .35 to .50) were found between the two perspectives. Differences in perceptions vary across teachers based on favorable and less favorable students’ assessments. Results from latent profile analyses based on perception combinations of teachers and their classes hint at four differential profiles, reflecting to a large extent patterns of under- and overestimation of people’s own competence identified in previous research. Significant differences in gender among individuals assigned to the four profiles could be found. Implications of identifying the divergence between teachers’ and students’ perceptions of instructional quality for reflective practice are discussed.

     

Students’ readiness to move from consumers to producers of digital video content: A cross-cultural analysis of Irish and Indian Students

Evidence has shown that students have greatly increased their consumption of digital video, principally through video sharing sites. In parallel, students’ participation in video sharing and creation has also risen. As educators, we need to question how this can be effectively translated into a positive learning experience for students, whilst examining how willing students actually are to critically engage with digital video and analysing how best to hone their digital literacy skills. Firstly, this article presents a cross-cultural analysis of Irish and Indian students’ perception of themselves as creators of digital video and examines their readiness to produce such videos as part of third level curricula. Secondly, it attempts to quantify the expose of both student cohorts to video sharing and creation. Thirdly, it analyses student perceptions of what challenges they face as they move from consumers to creators of digital video. Results indicate that whilst students are willing to adopt digital video for academic tasks, this article will analyse what supports and considerations need to be put in place in order for its successful integration in curricula.     

A survey of good practice in control education

This paper gives a focussed summary of good practice taken primarily from engineers who are responsible for teaching topics related to systems and control. This engineering specialisation allows the paper to give some degree of focus in the discussions around laboratories, software and assessment, although naturally many of the conclusions are generic. A key intention is to provide a summary document or survey paper which can be used by academics as a start point in studies of what is effective in the discipline. It is also hoped that such a summary will be useful to engineering institutions in drawing together and disseminating open access resources that are freely available to the community at large.