Followers and following in early childhood education workplaces: A narrative review of the followership literature

Typically, leadership is identified as a key to constructing high-quality early childhood education services and creating provisions to promote children's successful outcomes. However, leadership does not occur in isolation. Organisational management scholars point out that success in organisations is mostly reliant on effective followers. Despite a long tradition of attention to the value of followership in organisational management literature, little attention is given to followership in early childhood education literature. This article reviews conceptualisations of followership from a broad body of literature from organisational management and higher education studies, and a small number of studies in early childhood education literature that mentioned followership. This small body of early childhood education literature is critiqued in connection with the broader body of literature. The analysis reveals three key themes concerning followership in early childhood education literature: the dominance of leader-centric ideas; a lack of conceptual clarity about the role and practices of followership; and early childhood educators’ qualifications typically determine who follows and who leads. This review contributes to increased understandings of the potential value of followership theories and practices in early childhood education.

Entrepreneurship Education and Founding Passion: The Moderating Role of Entrepreneurial Family Background

In this paper, we examine the relationship between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial passion. Despite the advancement of entrepreneurship education literature and the increasing focus on entrepreneurship education in business schools, we lack empirical exploration on how entrepreneurship education can impact students’ passion for founding new organizations. We hypothesize that students who take entrepreneurship classes would develop high levels of founding passion due to a great perception of skills and abilities that increase positive emotions and decrease negative emotions about the entrepreneurship process. Moreover, we draw on the literature on role models to suggest that students’ entrepreneurial family background (students whose immediate family members are entrepreneurs) strengthens the influence of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial passion. Utilizing survey data collected from 160 university students, we found that entrepreneurship education positively influences students’ founding passion and that this relationship is strengthened when students have entrepreneurs in their immediate family.

Driver re-education after stroke - case study

The article presents the characteristics of a case study - stroke survivors with unilateral neglect syndrome, mechanisms used in re-education training and elements of functional rehabilitation. The focus was on an important diagnostic problem in the field of occupational medicine and the return to driving for people after stroke. The aim of the research work undertaken was to justify the experimental description of the driver after a stroke and to confirm the possibility of returning to driving, including compulsory re-education. Literature analysis, review of legal acts, characteristics of adaptation devices and conclusions from the case study were also carried out.

Defining Microgames in Education Context

The concept of microgaming in education is relatively new and it has evident potential for supporting learning in various learning environments. However, there is little consensus in the education literature on how micro-games are defined. The present article proposes a conceptual definition of mi-crogames by considering related terms and learning approaches in education. Microgames in education context are defined as very small and short games that provide brief engagement and meaningful experience for players, support learning and instruction toward specific objectives, and integrate with existing resources. This article further elaborates the key definition elements to indicate microgame characteristics and provides some examples to demonstrate the kinds of games that fit this definition. The proposed definition acts as a fundamental starting point to study microgames for educational purposes in the future.

Computational Thinking for Youth and Adults Education: model, principles, activities and lessons learned

Computational Thinking (CT) is considered one of the most needed abilities of the 21st Century as the usage of digital resources has become more and more frequent. Research on CT teaching has been growing over the last decade and Brazilian initiatives have focused on Elementary and High School students while less privileged audiences, such as non-literate citizens, are rarely addressed. The lack of literacy affects more than communication, but autonomy for economic, cultural and educational development, social interaction, and also the experience with information and communication technology. Non-literate citizens represent more than 11 million people in Brazil, and Youth and Adults Education (YAE) is an educational modality offered to these citizens. In this article, we present the main results from a Master's research that investigated CT as a means to reduce YAE's students' rejection and fear of technology, aware of their characteristics, contexts, and particularities. In our research, we consider that through the practice of CT people can comprehend how technology works and how it can be used, favoring familiarity, and reducing rejection and fear of technology. Grounded on Computing and Education literature, we conceived a model to plan and conduct initiatives for YAE, applying and studying our model in a case study conducted inside a Brazilian public school during 8 workshops with 17 participants. For the case study, 9 principles to support the practice with YAE students were identified and used to inform 12 activities created/adapted for practicing CT throughout the workshops. A research overview is presented, along with its theoretical grounds to the main results from the case study and lessons learned. Results show the model as promising to inform practices to exercise CT abilities, sensitive to the audience's context.

MegaSoTL: Supporting pedagogical research across multiple institutions

MegaSoTL projects are SoTL projects that generate evidence of learning from multiple institutions. While being increasingly practiced, MegaSoTL projects and their potential contribution to improve higher education pedagogy remain understudied in higher education literature. In this paper, we introduce Transparency in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (TILT) and ManyClasses, as two MegaSoTL case studies and we describe their research goals, processes and administration. We then discuss the potentials and challenges of MegaSoTL projects for educational developers to promote the scholarship of teaching and learning at micro and mega levels. The paper concludes with recommendations to develop a collaborative infrastructure for supporting MegaSoTL projects.

Bridging the Gap between Theory and Empirical Research in Evaluative Judgment

The value of students developing the capacity to accurately judge the quality of their work and that of others has been widely studied and recognized in higher education literature. To date, much of the research and commentary on evaluative judgment has been theoretical and speculative in nature, focusing on perceived benefits and proposing strategies seen to hold the potential to foster evaluative judgment. The efficacy of the strategies remains largely untested. The rise of educational tools and technologies that generate data on learning activities at an unprecedented scale, alongside insights from the learning sciences and learning analytics communities, provides new opportunities for fostering and supporting empirical research on evaluative judgment. Accordingly, this paper offers a conceptual framework and an instantiation of that framework in the form of an educational tool called RiPPLE for data-driven approaches to investigating the enhancement of evaluative judgment. Two case studies, demonstrating how RiPPLE can foster and support empirical research on evaluative judgment, are presented.

On Idealizations and Models in Science Education

Idealizations are omnipresent in science. However, to date, science education research has paid surprisingly little attention to the use of idealizations in fostering students’ model competence and understanding of the nature of science (NOS). The starting point for the theoretical reflection in this paper is that insufficient consideration of idealizations in the science classroom can lead to learning difficulties. The following discussions should help to clarify the terms idealization and model and their relationship to each other. An example is drawn from physics. At least two cases can apply when considering model usage in the classroom. In the first case, to understand an observed phenomenon, a model (as a representation) of the situation to be explained is constructed. At this point, it is necessary to perform idealization. Seemingly, this step is still neglected in much of the science education literature but is well addressed in the philosophy of science. In the second case, existing models to work with are introduced, perhaps alongside a real experimental situation. This approach is called working with models in science education. This paper focuses primarily on the first case. Against the background of model building, a positioning and conceptual approximation of idealizations take place. To organize the idealization process, a framework of several categories of idealization adopted from science philosophy is offered. The framework is intended to stimulate explicit reflection about how models are constructed. The construction of a model by idealization is illustrated through an example from geometrical optics. Finally, the considerations presented are discussed in the context of the literature, and suggested research topics are provided.