The culture of learning from mistakes: How employees handle mistakes in everyday work

Workplace learning circumscribes processes leading to the development of competencies and skills through daily work. It is of increasing importance for many modern enterprises, which consider themselves as being learning organisations, to make use of the potential of their employees in order to be competitive within global markets. Dealing with mistakes is a particular strategic source of workplace learning for such organisations, because contemporary work often is so complex that mistakes cannot be avoided. A workplace culture of learning from mistakes stands to maximise them as effective learning experiences. Two empirical studies were conducted in order to investigate conditions of learning from mistakes in everyday work in modern enterprises. Study 1 assessed the role of individual mistake orientation using a questionnaire. Through the comparison of 52 managers and 108 working staff members the variability of learning from mistakes was investigated. Study 2 assessed how communities of practice deal with mistakes and what is done to prevent them occurring in future. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 28 subjects, 14 managers and 14 working staff members. Study 1 revealed a greater appraisal of mistakes as opportunities for learning by managers, but no differences in related strategies and emotions. Study 2 revealed that mistakes are constructively dealt with, and that they are appraised as learning opportunities. Both studies indicate the presence of a culture of learning from mistakes in everyday work. Conclusions are drawn about organisational and personal prerequisites for this kind of workplace learning.     

Learning opportunities in teacher education and proficiency levels in general pedagogical knowledge: new insights into the accountability of teacher education programs

Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability - This paper examines the effects of learning opportunities on the attainment of different proficiency levels in general pedagogical knowledge...     

Associations of Number Line Estimation With Mathematical Competence: A Meta‐analysis

The number line estimation task is widely used to investigate mathematical learning and development. The present meta‐analysis statistically synthesized the extensive evidence on the correlation between number line estimation and broader mathematical competence. Averaged over 263 effect sizes with 10,576 participants with sample mean ages from 4 to 14 years, this correlation was r = .443. The correlation increased with age, mainly because it was higher for fractions than for whole numbers. The correlation remained stable across a wide range of task variants and mathematical competence measures (i.e., counting, arithmetic, school achievement). These findings demonstrate that the task is a robust tool for diagnosing and predicting broader mathematical competence and should be further investigated in developmental and experimental training studies.     

The Narrative Approach in Art Education: A Case Study

This case study takes as its focus the work of the Fine Art graduate Dumile Johannes Ndita, who visually narrates his experience of life in contemporary South Africa. The artist graduated from Border Technikon, East London, an institution which teaches the narrative approach. It is the aim of the authors to illustrate how this method enables students to transfer lived experience into image. The three voices in this paper come from different backgrounds. The artist will explain the meaning of his drawings, the teacher will give background information on the community and culture in which he himself and the artist operate and outline teaching methods. Students taught by this method create work that has impact and meaning beyond the confines of the art school. To argue this point, the theoretician will add her voice and reflect on meta‐narratives presented in Dumile Johannes Ndita's drawings. Intricate inter‐textual patterns, shared and interconnecting institutional narratives tie our individual voices to those of the wider community and culture of present‐day South Africa and beyond.     

EXPERIENCES AND INSIGHTS IN A TEMPUS/TACIS PROJECT IN THE UKRAINE

The author is the Director of a TEMPUS/TACIS project on university administration linking the National Technical University of Ukraine, on one hand, and the Aachen University of Technology and the Delft University of Technology, on the other. He presents this project as the centre point of a discussion whereby he first traces the origins of the European Union TEMPUS programme and then develops a philosophy of East‐West Co‐operation. For him, it is not acceptable to expect eastern European higher education institutions to simply copy western higher education institutions but to adapt what is useful to them from the western experience to their local realities bearing in mind that higher education in the West too is undergoing transition in a number of ways. In light of this project, the author criticizes certain aspects of TEMPUS practices and suggests improvements so as to make TEMPUS projects more efficient. He also declares that in many circumstances the time limit of three years per project is insufficient.     

研究性学习促进教师教育的专业发展

本文主要论述了教师教育专业化的性质和特点,并指出研究性学习可以促进教师教育的专业发展。文章回顾了德国研究性学习的进程后,分别从学习过程和研究过程这两个视角分析了研究性学习的本质,以及研究性学习在教师教育专业化发展中的地位。文章最后结合作者本人的课题研究案例分析了研究性学习在教师专业发展中的实施。     

Transitioning Experiences of First Year Gender Non-conforming Students from School to University in South Africa

Interchange - Change is an inevitable part of life, more so for gender non-conforming students who have to confront prejudice and hostile environments as they transition from school to university....     

Mathematical learning difficulties and PASS cognitive processes

This study examined the relationships between mathematical learning difficulties (MLD) and the planning, attention, simultaneous, successive (PASS) theory of cognitive processing. The Cognitive Assessment System (CAS) was used to measure the PASS processes for a group of 267 Dutch students with MLD who attended either general or special education. The results showed that students with MLD performed lower than their peers on all CAS scales and that the MLD group contained many students with cognitive weaknesses in planning or successive processing. Moreover, students who had specific difficulties with the acquisition of basic math facts, the automatization of such facts, or word-problem solving were found to have distinct PASS cognitive profiles. In order to investigate the relationships between cognitive abilities and improvement in the mastery of basic math facts and problem solving, 165 of the students with MLD were given a special multiplication intervention. It appeared that the effectiveness of this particular intervention did not differ across the groups of students with specific cognitive weaknesses.