The Adoption of the Compact Disk Player: An Event History Analysis for the Netherlands

The compact disk (CD) player was one of the major audio innovations of the 1980s in the Netherlands. For studies of the temporal and social diffusion pattern of the CD player and the compact disks, both cultural and economic theories about innovations and music consumption are available. In this paper, these theories are combined in six working hypotheses concerning earlier adoption. The empirical analysis includes both time-invariant and time-varying variables and consumer characteristics. Event history analysis, the technique used in this article, enables one to incorporate these kinds of variables simultaneously in a dynamic model. Compared with the diffusion models usually employed by means of longitudinal analysis, event history analysis is a significant improvement in studying the development of the CD market in the Netherlands.     

The use of protocol materials as an evaluation instrument

In this article a recent development in the field of teacher education in the U.S.A. is discussed and a proposal is made for the development of an evaluation‐instrument which is based on the insights gained from this development. It concerns the “Protocol Materials Program,” a comprehensive project in which materials are developed to facilitate the integration of theory and practice in teacher education. Student teachers are confronted with a series of video‐episodes. These episodes are arranged in such a way as to form an illustration of relevant theoretical concepts the student teacher has mastered. An example of protocol materials is given, the relevance of this project for teacher education is discussed and a review is given of the research on the effects of these materials up to now. The authors make a plea for the development of student evaluation instruments, based on the principles of the protocol movement: if the student teacher, after having studied a piece of educational theory, is confronted with a number of specially arranged classroom situations on video, he can be asked to relate these situations to the theory he has studied. This procedure can also help the teacher educator to diagnose what his theoretical instruction really “means” to the student teachers, i.e. whether their interpretative abilities are really increased by it.     

Does homework behavior mediate the relation between personality and academic performance?

Past research has consistently shown that there is a relation between personality and academic performance, but much less work has focused on explaining this relation. The present study examined whether three aspects of homework behavior, namely homework time, procrastination, and learning strategies, mediate the relation between personality and academic performance, controlling for cognitive ability, track level, gender, and ethnicity. We investigated this in a nationally representative sample of about 9000 secondary school students in The Netherlands (average age 13 years). Results indicated that all personality traits were related to homework behavior, and that both personality and homework behavior were related to end-of-year grades in math and Dutch language. Nevertheless, homework behavior only partially mediated the relation between personality and grades.     

Arousing News Characteristics in Dutch Television News 1990–2004: An Exploration of Competitive Strategies

This study investigates the processes by which competition in the television news market might promote the presence of arousing characteristics in television news. A total of 3,024 news stories from six Dutch television news programs over the period 1990 to 2004 were investigated through content analysis. The findings of the study show overall increases in all 6 arousing characteristics. The findings also show that commercial newcomers included more arousing characteristics in their news stories than the public service broadcasters, that commercial newcomers developed a news format that featured more arousing characteristics, and that existing programs reacted to newcomers by increasing the amount of arousing characteristics in their news stories.     

The changing relation between science and technology in Dutch secondary education

In 1993 a new subject, Technology, was introduced in all Dutch junior secondary schools. The results of an implementation study (part of the OECD/SMTE case studies project) are described inthe first part of the paper. Technologyclasses in three case-study schools are characterized and pupils' attitudes towards technology described. Pre-vocational schools emphasized practical activities more than other types of secondary schools. Introducing technology imposed a heavy teaching load and there were, as yet, no satisfactory textbooks. Little co-operation with other subjects had been achieved. The second part of the paper elaborates on the problems in the co-operation between science and technology teachers. Some recommendations for improved co-operation are offered.     

The relation between specialty choice of psychology students and their interests,personality, and cognitive abilities

The aim of this longitudinal study was to investigate differences in interests, personality, and cognitive abilities between students majoring in the six specialties of psychology at the University of Amsterdam. Results show that students at Social Psychology and Work and Organizational Psychology were on average more extraverted than students of other specializations, that students of Psychological Methods and Psychonomics were relatively more open to experience, and that students at Clinical Psychology were on average more neurotic. Differences in cognitive ability were small, but significant, with the highest scores among students of the more research-oriented specialties. With discriminant analyses on the basis of nine interest scales, 53% of the students were correctly categorized in the specialization chosen two or years after interests were measured. Interest profiles of the specialties follow differences in interest in helping people, abstract vs. concrete topics, and technical issues. Person-specialization congruence failed to predict academic performance.     

What keeps science spiralling? Unravelling the critical success factors of knowledge creation in university research

Based on Nonaka’s knowledge spiral, this paper examines how processes of knowledge creation contribute to success in academia. It presents the outcomes of an in-depth exploration of the workings of the knowledge spiral in a university research institute. The research shows the outstanding but undervalued importance of socialization processes. It also shows that, while research success is typically defined at the interplay of the individual, group and institutional levels, in the institute that was examined none of the four knowledge creation processes (socialization, externalization, combination and internalization) appears to run smoothly at the institutional level.     

What are Clinician Scientists Expected to do? The Undefined Space for Professionalizable Work in Translational Biomedicine

Minerva - Clinician scientists have gained institutional support in the era of translational research, as the key solution to closing the ‘translational gap’ between biomedical research...     

Alternative Missing Data Techniques to Grade Point Average: Imputing Unavailable Grades

In this article, grade point average (GPA) is considered a missing data technique for unavailable grades in school grade records. In Study 1, theoretical and empirical differences between GPA and seven alternative missing grade techniques were considered. These seven techniques are subject mean substitution, corrected subject mean, subject correlation substitution, regression imputation, expectation maximization algorithm imputation and two multiple imputation methods-stochastic regression imputation and data augmentation., The missing grade techniques differ greatly. Data augmentation and stochastic regression imputation appear to be superior as missing grade techniques. In Study 2, the completed grade records (observed and imputed values) were used in two prediction analyses of academic achievement. One analysis was based on unweighed grades, the other on weighed grades. In both analyses, alternative missing grade methods produced better and more consistent predictions. It is concluded that some alternative missing grade methods are superior to GPA.