Multiple regression data using the WISC-R and the Woodcock-Johnson tests of cognitive ability

Using a sample of 100 behavior disordered male adolescents, correlations between the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R) and the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Cognitive Abilities (WJTCA) were computed. All WISC-R subtests correlated with the W-J Broad Cognitive Ability score at the .0001 level. Analysis of the forward selection multiple regression procedure resulted in the inclusion of only WISC-R Verbal subtests for the first six steps. Implications of such results were discussed and a predictive equation reported.     

Idea generation in biomedical engineering courses using Design Heuristics

ABSTRACT

With increasing demand for improved medical equipment and healthcare, next-generation biomedical engineers need strong design skills. Equipping biomedical engineering students with tools for idea generation and development can increase student design success. Design Heuristics are an ideation tool developed through empirical studies of product designs. While identified in the mechanical engineering space, Design Heuristics may be applicable in biomedical engineering design. In our study, we implemented a Design Heuristics session during upper-level undergraduate and first-year graduate biomedical engineering design courses. We examined the applicability of Design Heuristics within individual and team concept generation contexts. The findings demonstrated that biomedical engineering students were able to use Design Heuristics to generate multiple concepts, and that initial concepts produced using Design Heuristics were carried over into final team design. The results support the applicability of Design Heuristics to student idea generation in biomedical engineering design.     

Leisure time physical activity in Australian women: relationship with well being and symptoms

This paper explores the association between moderate levels of physical activity (PA) and health benefits in well being and symptoms such as tiredness, back pain, and constipation. Participants in the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health, 14,502 young women (ages 18-23 years), 13,609 middle-age women (45-50 years), and 11,421 older women (ages 70-75 years), answered questions about vigorous and less vigorous exercise (used to determine a physical activity score), well being (SF-36), symptoms, and medical conditions. There were significant associations between the PA score and SF-36 in each cohort. Odds ratios (OR) for a range of symptoms and conditions were lower for women who reported low to moderate activity than for sedentary women, for example, for young women or for constipation = 0.76 (CI, 0.65-0.89), for middle-age women or for tiredness = 0.70 (0.63-0.78). There was no threshold of PA at which health benefits increased significantly. Although cross-sectional, the findings suggest that low-to-moderate levels of exercise are associated with a range of health benefits for women of all ages. These preliminary findings will be followed up during the longitudinal study.     

Parent Resource Centers: An Innovative Mechanism for Parental Involvement in School Choice Decisions

This qualitative investigation reports on the use of Parent Resource Centers (PRCs) as a mechanism for parental involvement in public school choice decisions. Interviews with parents and staff at seven PRCs in Florida revealed that PRCs employ multiple strategies to communicate choice information to parents: community-, school- and media-based outreach; outreach to hard-to-reach parents; and collaboration with other agencies. Personalized assistance and provision of choice materials are also highlighted as useful strategies. Results indicate that there is low level of awareness about school choice options among parents and thus clear and consistent communication of choice information is needed. While PRCs hold promise for increasing parental engagement in school choice, structural and systemic barriers to exercising choice decisions such as transportation and collaboration between schools and PRCs should be addressed. Methodologically, this study illustrates the power of triangulating data from parents and PRCs to illuminate our understanding of how parents make choice decisions.     

Perceptions of tutoring roles and psychological distance among instructors,tutors and students at a Korean university

This study explores issues related to the tutor’s role when initiating tutoring as an institutional strategy at a conventional university. Based on a pilot tutoring program implemented in four college courses, we investigated the perceptions of instructors, tutors and students regarding the role of tutoring and whether it affected the psychological distance between the different types of participants. The results indicated that instructors’ perceptions of the tutor’s primary role and the psychological distance from the students and the tutors differed from the perceptions of the tutors and the students, perhaps because the instructors perceived tutors as a source of instructor support rather than student support. Implications and suggestions are discussed.     

Globalization or Glocalization? Higher Education Reforms in Singapore

Globalization and the evolution of the knowledge‐based economy have caused dramatic changes to the character and functions of higher education in most countries around the world. However, the impacts of globalization on universities are not uniform though business‐like practices have been adopted to cope with competition in the global marketplace. The pressure for restructuring and reforming higher education is mainly derived from growing expectations and demands of different stakeholders in society. In recent years, widespread concerns over widened access, funding, accountability, quality, and managerial efficiency are perceived as the prominent global trends related to university education. Because of the divergent political, social, economic, cultural and historical backgrounds, national/local governments may adopt similar strategies in response to pressures generated from globalization. Nonetheless, through a close scrutiny of the ways that national policies are made, we may find that governments around the globe, particularly in East Asia, have tried to make use of the globalization discourse to address/justify the local policy/political agendas. This paper aims to examine the latest higher education reform initiatives proposed by the Singapore Government, with particular reference to reflect upon how the Singapore Government reforms its university systems in the context of globalization. It is argued that the latest comprehensive review of public university governance and funding brings about a changing role of the government in the regulation, finance and provision of higher education in Singapore and eventually alters the state‐university relationship.     

Open innovation in SMEs—An intermediated network model

In spite of increasing interest in open innovation, discussion about the concept and its potential application to the SME sector has been excluded from mainstream literature. However, given that the argument about the effect of firm size on the effectiveness of innovation is still ongoing, it is worth addressing the issue from an SME perspective. That is the focus of this article, which seeks, firstly, to place the concept of open innovation in the context of SMEs; secondly to suggest the input of an intermediary in facilitating innovation; and finally to report accounts of Korean SMEs’ success in working with an intermediary. The research results support the potential of open innovation for SMEs, and indicate networking as one effective way to facilitate open innovation among SMEs.     

Career patterns and competences of PhDs in science and engineering in the knowledge economy: The case of graduates from a UK research-based university

Based on data collected through a complex survey of science and engineering PhD graduates from a UK research-based university, this paper examines the different types of careers and to what extent different types of competences acquired from doctoral education are regarded as valuable in the different career types. The results show that employment outside the conventional technical occupations is the main destination for the survey respondents. This career type is not only successful at retaining its members, but is also the destination of the other career types. Moreover, different types of competences from doctoral education are regarded as relatively more valuable in different career types: knowledge directly tied to subject areas is regarded as more valuable in academia/public research; both knowledge directly tied to subject areas (but more general type of knowledge rather than specialist knowledge in PhD topics) and the more general and transferable skills are regarded as valuable in technical positions in manufacturing; and the general and transferable skills are regarded as more valuable in employment outside the conventional technical occupations. In absolute terms, general analytical skills and problem solving capability acquired from doctoral education are perceived as valuable in all three career types.     

Variability in children’s early reading strategies

The present study examines the development of sight word reading in young children by examining changes in their self‐reported reading strategies over time. A sample of 65 five to seven year olds were asked to read 40 real word items, all carefully matched for letter length and word frequency, on three separate occasions. Changes in the children’s word identifications were measured using immediately retrospective verbal self‐reports. Overall, the results showed some variability in the children’s self‐reported reading strategies. Over time the children relied less on phonological strategies and moved towards reliance on directly retrieving words from memory. This change was most evident in the older children; while both year groups showed similar patterns of shifting reliance from explicit phonological strategies to retrieval, this shift was simply less frequent among the younger children. An analysis of word‐specific changes in reading strategies showed that the older children had a better sight vocabulary for more complex word items. These findings provide further support for Ehri’s mediated phase theory in explaining children’s development in learning to read.     

Dimensions of cultural differences: Pancultural, ETIC/EMIC, and ecological approaches

We investigated the factorial structure of four major domains in social psychology (personality traits, social attitudes, values, and social norms) with an emphasis on cross-cultural differences. Three distinctive approaches—pancultural, multigroup, and multilevel—were applied to the data based on 22 measures that were collected from 2029 participants from 73 countries. First, in a pancultural approach, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted on the entire sample of participants, disregarding country of origin. Second, in the multigroup (etic/emic) approach, nine societal clusters were fitted using a four-factor model. Several tests of invariance were applied to assess equivalence across the cultures. Finally, a multilevel approach was used to assess the structure at the individual-level and at the between-country (ecological) level. Our results show that the four-factor solution emerges from the cultural domains, and this is supported by all three approaches. The factors are Personality/Social Attitudes, Values, Social Norms, and Conservatism. In the multilevel analysis, only two factors emerge at the ecological (between) level as opposed to four factors at the individual (within) level, but due to methodological difficulties, their status needs to be studied further. We discuss our findings in terms of the inside–out view of social interactions.