Institutionalized incentives for ingenuity—Patent value and the German Employees’ Inventions Act

Germany is one of few countries in which the monetary compensation for inventors is not only determined by negotiations between employer and employee-inventor, but also by relatively precise legal provisions. In this paper, we describe the characteristics of the German Employees’ Inventions Act (GEIA) and discuss which incentives it creates. We rely on responses from a recent survey of 3350 German inventors to test hypotheses regarding this institution. We conclude from our data that the law creates substantial monetary rewards for productive inventors. The qualitative responses from our survey confirm this view, but also point to a number of dysfunctional effects.     

In search of quality criteria in peer assessment practices

With the increasing popularity of peer assessment as an assessment tool, questions may arise about its measurement quality. Among such questions, the extent peer assessment practices adhere to standards of measurement. It has been claimed that new forms of assessment, require new criteria to judge their validity and reliability, since they aim for specific goals and address different aspects of learning. But although new criteria have been formulated, little is known about how they are deployed and operate in actual peer assessment practices. This study intends to explicate the quality criteria relevant to the context of peer assessment. We conducted a survey in vocational education on peer assessment quality criteria applied in classrooms. Fifty-six teachers using peer assessment rated several quality criteria as relevant to their teaching practice. The findings suggest that peer assessment practices entail many of the quality criteria recognized in measurement and evaluation, although in an embedded way: the generic quality criteria are tuned or adapted to the peer assessment setting. The findings also show that peer assessment is very much in the hands of the teacher, who organizes and orchestrates the appraisal process in which students receive clear guidelines to appraise one another's work. Our results indicate that quality criteria hardly differ from the function peer assessment serves in classrooms, either within a summative or formative evaluation context. By gaining insight on the specific criteria of peer assessment and their precise purposes, we believe it becomes possible to help teachers improve its measurement quality.     

Qualitätssicherung: Unde venis et quo vadis?

Externe Qualit?tssicherung hat sich in den letzten zehn Jahren von einem kaum beachteten Aspekt zu einem Leitmotiv der europ?ischen Hochschulreformen entwickelt. Nicht zuletzt durch die geplante Neuordnung der externen Qualit?tssicherung hat dieses Thema auch in ?sterreich an Bedeutung gewonnen. So wichtig verschiedene europ?ische Initiativen für diese Entwicklungen waren und sind, so existieren doch keine rechtsverbindlichen Normen auf supranationaler Ebene. Die EU kann aufgrund der Subsidiarit?t im Hochschulbereich ihre Positionen nur in Empfehlungen an die Mitgliedstaaten und in Berichten ausdrücken; innerhalb des zwischenstaatlichen Bologna-Prozesses einigten sich die Signatarstaaten freiwillig auf eine Reihe von Prinzipien zur Qualit?tssicherung sowie auf einen Katalog von Standards und Leitlinien (ESG), die die interne Qualit?tssicherung an den Hochschulen, die externe Qualit?tssicherung durch Agenturen sowie die Meta-Qualit?tssicherung der Agenturen betreffen. Der Beitrag schildert die verschiedenen EU- und Bologna-Initiativen und skizziert Fragestellungen, die sich aus den bisherigen Entwicklungen für Qualit?tssicherung auf der europ?ischen und nationalen Ebene ergeben.     

Included or excluded? The dual influences of the organisational field and organisational practices on new female academics

A number of measures have been taken by the society to ensure gender equality in higher education. Nevertheless, women still face great difficulties when pursuing an academic career. Our aim is to increase the understanding of how the society, conceptualised as the organisational field, interacts with organisational factors and personal actions as women try to establish themselves within academia. We followed a group of female PhD students and their struggle to graduate at a Swedish, traditionally male‐dominated, university department. The paper analyses how actors and regulations in the society interact with the department’s gendered structures and practices. Three processes that influenced the women’s career opportunities have been identified – a process of integration, liberation and legitimatisation. We also show that women can get accepted and realise their short‐term objective, based on support from the society, while not necessarily being included by the department in a longer‐term perspective.     

Swedish PE teachers struggle with assessment in a criterion-referenced grading system

In the field of education, the international trend is to turn to criterion-referenced grading in the hope of achieving accountable and consistent grades. Despite a national criterion-referenced grading system emphasising knowledge as the only base for grading, Swedish physical education (PE) grades have been shown to value non-knowledge factors, such as students’ characteristics and behaviour. In 2011, a new national curriculum was implemented which attempts to deal with the problem by prescribing specific knowledge requirements with a clear progression as the only basis for different grades. The aim of the present study is to explore the impact of the new knowledge requirements on what teachers consider important when assigning grades. It is also to discuss what non-knowledge-related aspects (if any) teachers continue to look for and why these seem to remain resilient to the reform. The Repertory Grid technique was employed to interview the teachers before (2009) and after the implementation (2013). During the interviews, the grading of 45 students was discussed, which generated 125 constructs. After the implementation, there was a near doubling of knowledge constructs, half as many motivation constructs and an almost total elimination of constructs based on confidence and social skills. While motivational factors were still considered valuable for the award of a higher grade, clear criteria seemed to be important, but too limited for the teachers’ needs. In order to understand the persistence of motivational factors, we discuss the results in relation to Bernstein’s interrelated message systems of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. We emphasise the need to discuss how valid grades can be achieved and, at the same time, give value to the regulative discourse in order to realise the overarching national goals of values and norms in education and PE.     

Proxy-produced ethnographic work: what are the problems,issues, and dilemmas arising from proxy-ethnography?

This article addresses the implications of researcher-student cooperation in the production of empirical material. For the student to replace the experienced researcher and work under the researcher’s supervision, we call such work proxy-produced ethnographic work. Although there are clear advantages, the specific relations and positions arising from such a set-up between the teacher/researcher and the proxy ethnographer/student are found to have implications for the ethnographies produced. This article’s main focus is to show how these relations and positions have shifted the focus of the ethnographic work and in some way have distorted the ethnographies in certain ways. It is shown how the participating researchers have distinctive, incorporated dispositions with which they pre-consciously participate in an implicit and subtle relation that can make it easy to overlook the distortions during the research process. These ethnographic distortions are generated within a framework drawn primarily on the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.