Older adult entrepreneurs as mentors of young people neither in employment nor education and training (NEETs). Evidences from multi-country intergenerational learning program

ABSTRACT

Population aging is exacerbating the loss of competences in the workforce and simultaneously young people neither in employment nor in education and training (NEETs) are struggling to be reengaged in employment. These issues, which are deemed priorities for the European policy agenda, could be addressed by triggering active aging dimensions, valuing and exploiting older adult entrepreneurs’ knowledge for enhancing youngsters’ entrepreneurial attitudes, through mentoring. This paper reports the results of a study based on an intergenerational learning program, carried out in 2018 in Germany, Italy and Slovenia. The study was aimed at developing and testing one training on mentoring addressing 41 older adult entrepreneurs (55 and over), and two intergenerational learning trainings aiming at boosting entrepreneurial competences of 33 NEETs (aged 18–29). The impact of the program on older adult entrepreneurs and NEETs was assessed through a pre and post-evaluation using qualitative and quantitative tools. Findings at country level were treated as national case-studies and then the latter were compared by considering them as a multiple embedded case-study. Results indicated that, to different extent in the study countries, mentors learned and enhanced mentoring competences, e.g. active listening and the capability of orienting, improved well-being and self-esteem, social inclusion and active aging attitude. Moreover, NEETs acquired entrepreneurial and socio-relational competences by benefiting from the full exploitation of mentors’ know-how and the trust relationship with them. Companies, trade unions, educational and voluntary organizations should cooperate to adopt intergenerational learning programs as good practices for older adults and NEETs’ lifelong learning promotion.     

Zero,single, or multi? Genre of web pages through the users’ perspective

The goal of the study presented in this article is to investigate to what extent the classification of a web page by a single genre matches the users’ perspective. The extent of agreement on a single genre label for a web page can help understand whether there is a need for a different classification scheme that overrides the single-genre labelling. My hypothesis is that a single genre label does not account for the users’ perspective. In order to test this hypothesis, I submitted a restricted number of web pages (25 web pages) to a large number of web users (135 subjects) asking them to assign only a single genre label to each of the web pages. Users could choose from a list of 21 genre labels, or select one of the two ‘escape’ options, i.e. ‘Add a label’ and ‘I don’t know’. The rationale was to observe the level of agreement on a single genre label per web page, and draw some conclusions about the appropriateness of limiting the assignment to only a single label when doing genre classification of web pages. Results show that users largely disagree on the label to be assigned to a web page.     

Student satisfaction in higher education: a meta-analytic study

This paper discusses the results of a meta-analysis performed to identify key antecedent and consequent constructs of satisfaction in higher education. We offer an integrated model to achieve a better understanding of satisfaction in the context of higher education. To accomplish this objective, we identified 83 studies that were valid and relevant to the research objective of the current study, generating a total of 469 observations. We identified studies published from 1986 to 2016 and analyzed six antecedent dimensions (perceived value of educational services, resources provided to the student, service quality perception, marketing orientation, identity of the higher education institution, university environment) and one consequent dimension related to satisfaction. The 7 dimensions exhibited a total of 51 relationships. We believe that the originality of the findings clearly contributes to future academic research in higher education.     

Modeling Conceptualization and Investigating Teaching Effectiveness

Science & Education - Our research addresses the issue of teaching and learning concepts in science education as an empirical question. We study the process of conceptualization by closely...     

Distributed model reference adaptive containment control of heterogeneous multi-agent systems with unknown uncertainties and directed topologies

In this paper, the containment control problem of heterogeneous uncertain high-order linear Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) is addressed and solved via a novel fully-Distributed Model Reference Adaptive Control (DMRAC) approach, where each follower computes its adaptive control action on the basis of local measurements, information shared with neighbors (within the communication range) and the matching errors w.r.t. its own reference model, without requiring any previous knowledge of the global directed communication topology structure. The approach inherits the robustness of the direct model reference adaptive control (MRAC) scheme and allows all agents converging towards the convex hull spanned by leaders while fulfilling at the same time local additional performance requirements at single-agent level, such as prescribed settling time, overshoot, etc. The asymptotic stability of the whole closed-loop network is analytically derived by exploiting the Lyapunov theory and the Barbalat lemma, hence proving that each follower converges to the convex hull spanned by the leaders, as well as the boundedness of the adaptive gains. Extensive numerical analysis for heterogeneous MAS composed of stable, unstable and oscillating agent dynamics are presented to validate the theoretical framework and to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach.