Aims.

The aims of the study were to investigate whether the style of pupils with behaviour problems was different from that of children with no reported problems, and also to consider how pupils of different style manifested their problem behaviours.

Sample.

The sample comprised 83 male pupils aged 10‐18 years from two residential special schools.

Method.

The sample were given the Cognitive Styles Analysis to assess their positions on the Wholist‐Analytic and Verbal‐Imagery style dimensions. The pupil records of the special school pupils who were at the extreme of the style dimensions were also examined.

Results.

When their style characteristics were contrasted with a Comparison Sample of 413 12‐16‐year‐old males attending 10 secondary schools, the special school pupils had a significantly higher proportion of both Wholists and Verbalisers, than the Comparison Group. Further, the inspection of the records indicated that the types of social behaviour and behaviour problems exhibited varied with style, and particularly on the Wholist‐Analytic dimension.

Conclusion.

The results were considered to have implications for the origins and treatment of problem behaviour.  相似文献   

Design/Methodology/Approach: Key barriers for engaging in participatory extension were identified using content analysis of semi-structured interviews, surveys and focus group discussion of 37 government agricultural workers along with participant observation and review of existing literature.

Findings: The majority of workers surveyed understood basic participatory extension principles and desired to use these approaches. Changing from traditional ‘top down’ extension to systems that engage with farmers' needs at the community level is made difficult due to the aging and poorly functioning Village Extension Worker (VEW) network. Thus, it is far easier for the research driven extension programmes to use technology transfer models.

Practical Implications: Participatory extension relies on strong relationship building and open communication between farmers, extension workers, researchers, interest groups and policy-makers. The Egyptian government must properly establish and resource the pivotal role of VEWs within the extension system to meet its strategic aims of modernising agriculture, developing food security and improving the livelihoods of rural inhabitants.

Originality/Value: This paper captures the unique perspectives of government research, extension and education workers involved in agricultural development at a time directly after the 2010 revolution, when they were able to more openly reflect on the past and present situations.  相似文献   

Design: We use the network map analysis in a case study approach as a tool to demonstrate the linkages between the key actors and stakeholders in the information network of farmers.

Findings: The government institutions are well networked among themselves but have limited interactions with non-government sources. Farmers in Bihar have strong linkages with few network actors, who are important nodes in the social knowledge network. The study showed heterogeneity and complexity in the network shape and structure across different districts.

Practical Implications: Knowledge networks and social networks are the drivers of information sharing and play a significant role in the diffusion of agricultural technology and related knowledge. Understanding these networks provides a platform for introducing the agricultural technologies and getting connected to a wider group of farming communities.

Theoretical Implications: The study shows that the network is formed by different actors and their role determine the nature and shape of the network. Knowledge of this heterogeneity is important in designing or revamping agricultural information systems.

Originality: Information and knowledge networks are least explored in the agricultural information dissemination process. Some studies have shown the role of actors and social networks, but this study uniquely explores and presents the heterogeneity of these networks.  相似文献   

_____ comprehensive and unified;

_____ able to take into account the particular possibilities of individual adult educators; and

_____ easily adjustable to the particular needs within the community.

Such a scheme can only be realized through the application of a modular structure. A scheme like this is being developed at Gwent College of Higher Education for a professional training programme which will give a Certificate in Continuing Education, conferring full teacher status in adult and further education. This development is used to illustrate the points the author wants to make. The development of a programme on such a scheme raises considerable structural and methodological problems, which are discussed and compared with what is done elsewhere.  相似文献   

Design/methodology/approach: Using Conservation Agriculture (CA) as a case study, we qualitatively explore with 26 locally based agricultural researchers the context of CA research and promotion, including their perceptions on persistent research gaps and issues in closing them.

Findings: Respondents identified that CA was not yet a finished product, with concerns regarding the benefit, feasibility and relevance of CA implementation. They asserted that while further adaptation was required, they were unable to do this due to institutional constraints within their research, extension and policy contexts.

Practical implications: We find that CA continues to be considered a donor-driven intervention in its current form and requires substantial further adaptation to local contexts before researchers will deem it ready for farmer uptake. The five research gaps identified by respondents highlight practical areas where further adaptations must occur.

Theoretical implications: Our findings suggest a lack of participatory research and extension most likely reflects limited financial, human and social capital to implement more participatory approaches. Without addressing these capacities, widespread adoption of complex farming systems change appears unlikely.

Originality/Value: Whilst many studies have identified a need for local innovation to enable CA utilisation, few have qualitatively explored directly with local researchers the capacity of such systems to do so. We address this gap in the literature.  相似文献   

Design/methodology/approach: Individual interviews and focus group discussions were held with 24 farmers over 20 months. Observations were made of these farmers as they participated with eight agricultural and social scientists in a range of innovative experiences to learn about chicory and plantain establishment and management. These learning experiences were designed around evidence-informed educational pedagogies. Data sets were analyzed using NVivo to determine common themes of affordances and barriers to learning and actual practice changes.

Findings: The affordances for learning and practice change include belonging to a learning community, enhancing self-efficacy, engaging with scientists, seeing relative advantage, reinforcing and validating learning, supporting system’s integration and developing an identity as learners. Barriers to learning and practice change include issues of: trialability, complexity, compatibility and risk.

Practical implications: The importance of basing new models of extension around evidence-informed pedagogies known through educational research to promote learning and practice change.

Theoretical implications: Sociocultural theory and self-efficacy theories of learning are critical to the success of effective agricultural extension programs.

Originality: To date, little empirical research about the affordances and barriers for pastoral farmers’ learning has been based on contemporary educational research.  相似文献   

Design/Methodology/Approach: The research addressed a purposive sample of 30 agronomists divided into two groups (older - younger). Questionnaire-based survey was followed by a semi-structured interview.

Findings: The views of both groups of agronomists follow the same orientation and revolve around the progressive and behaviourist philosophies. In terms of practice, the intervention of older agronomists mainly relates to the progressive, the liberal and the behaviourist philosophy while that of younger agronomists around the liberal framework; evidence shows a small turn of younger agronomists towards participatory extension.

Practical Implications: The current piece of work puts forward the gaps and weaknesses of Extension in Greece both in terms of rhetoric and practice; notably, Greek agronomists do not seem capable to support bottom-up processes.

Theoretical Implications: Research detected the espoused orientation of extensionists and the ways they assist their constituencies in practice.

Originality/Value: The work reported here is considered one means of raising the awareness of the field’s needs in documenting extensionists’ educational philosophies and how they guide practice.  相似文献   

Methodology: An online survey was conducted among students of agricultural universities from Austria, Slovenia and Albania.

Findings: The results show that professors of agriculture from Austria, Slovenia and Albania should generally not be satisfied with their own communication patterns and should thus try to improve their communication. The result also reveals cultural differences in the shares of agriculture professors employing different communication patterns in Austria, Slovenia and Albania. Compared to Austrian and Slovenian students, their Albanian peers perceive that most of their professors use nonverbal immediacy communication. According to Austrian students, the majority of their professors use verbal immediacy. On the contrary, Albanian students assessed that some of their professors employ verbal immediacy.

Practical Implications: The results show the professors of agriculture should improve the way they communicate to students. In particular, the Albanian professors should improve their verbal communication especially in terms of providing timely and quality feedback to students.

Theoretical implications: The study reveals differences in immediacy communication among countries (Austria, Slovenia and Albania) which the scientific literature considers to have a high-context culture.

Originality/Value: Given that no study has yet examined how students perceive professors’ communication in different European countries, this research helps understand the characteristics of agricultural professors’ communication.  相似文献   

Research design. Students taking four courses received an end-of-course questionnaire. The following year, students taking all six courses received a mid-course questionnaire.

Method. The Course Experience Questionnaire and the Revised Approaches to Studying Inventory were administered in a postal survey to 3539 students of the UK Open University.

Outcomes and results. Across successive levels of study, students were progressively less likely to adopt a deep approach, were more likely to adopt a surface approach and rated their courses less favourably, especially with regard to the workload and materials. Between the middle and end of a course, students were more likely to adopt a deep approach and gave more positive ratings with regard to the materials and amount of choice.

Conclusions. The survey instruments can be recommended as useful tools for monitoring the experiences of engineering and technology students.  相似文献   

—Robert Ardrey (1972), The Territorial Imperative, Fontana

London, p. 257  相似文献   

Design/methodology/approach: A stratified survey including 103 villages and 823 farmers was conducted in all districts of Haryana (India). Firstly, technical efficiency (TE) was modeled using biophysical data including grain yield, seeding rate, wheat varieties, tillage, sowing date, seed source, harvesting method and the application of fertilizer, herbicide and irrigation. The relationship between TE and social community factors such as farm size, farmer age, level of education and agricultural support programs was analyzed by regression tree.

Findings: TE was lower with the farmers who only have education to a primary standard. Farmers with high TE scores were mostly between 35 and 40 years of age, and a higher TE association was common for farmers who use technical publications. Social individual factors such as farmers’ views on the future of farming were also analyzed across different TE levels.

Practical implications: Farmers with lower TE are an obvious target for production improvement, particularly given the understanding that the overall production yield gap is small in Haryana.

Theoretical implications: Our conceptual framework shows a quantitative way to establish the socio-ecological linkage, and to identify the opportunities for changes in management with extension services leading to productivity improvement.

Originality/value: This paper provides a novel framework with detailed methodology to effectively identify the socio-economic factors that limit the biophysical production in an agricultural system.  相似文献   

Design/Methodology/Approach: We calculated information scores to measure channel preference from a randomly selected sample of farmers: 285 in Tamale, Ghana and 300 in Kakamega, Kenya. Using t-tests we compared the information score differences of different channels between farmers who adopted Integrated Soil Fertility Management and those who did not.

Findings: The highest information scores were observed for radio along the entire value chain for both locations. However, farmers in Tamale prefered interpersonal channels for processing information. Radio and farmer field days had the highest rankings for production information at both locations. Radio, workshops and interpersonal channels (traders and neighbours/friends/relatives) were best-bet channels for marketing and procesing information.

Practical implication: Extension agents should place more emphasis on channels such as radio, farmer field days, and workshops as they may offer more efficient delivery of information packages at all levels, whilst recognizing the central role of interpersonal channels.

Theoretical implication: The nexus between the uses and gratification, adoption, diffusion of innovations theories and the collaborative communication theory on one hand, and the agricultural product value chain framework on the other, is highlighted. Farmers’ preference for information channels is not predicated on the stage of the value chain.

Originality/Value: In the current context of weak agricultural knowledge and innovation systems in African agriculture, agricultural producers are poorly informed about the current innovations. This study furnishes empirical evidence on the best-bet information channels to be used by extension workers and change agents to disseminate and communicate system innovations.  相似文献   

Purpose: Aiming to understand the enrolment dynamics, this study analyses sample-based data from Finland’s National Assessment in Science to determine whether pedagogical approaches influence student intention to enrol in upper secondary school physics courses.

Sample: This study examined a clustered sample of 2949 Finnish students in the final year of comprehensive school (15–16 years old).

Methods: Through explorative factor analysis, we extracted several variables that were expected to influence student intention to enrol in physics courses. We applied partial correlation to determine the underlying interdependencies of the variables.

Results: The analysis revealed that the main predictor of enrolment in upper secondary school physics courses is whether students feel that physics is important. Although statistically significant, partial correlations between variables were rather small. However, the analysis of partial correlations revealed that pedagogical practices influence inquiry and attitudinal factors. Pedagogical practices that emphasise science experimentation and the social construction of knowledge had the strongest influence.

Conclusions: The research implies that to increase student enrolment in physics courses, the way students interpret the subject’s importance needs to be addressed, which can be done by the pedagogical practices of discussion, teacher demonstrations, and practical work.  相似文献   

Methodology: A multiple regression analysis was employed to assess the combined effect of the knowledge bases, factors such as age of the household head, land size, marketing channels and geophysical factors (such as land slope) on linseed productivity.

Findings: The findings reveal no differences in productivity between trained and untrained farmers. They further show that training and the interaction between training and experience positively influence productivity. Our findings, however, reveal farmer education to have an inverse yet insignificant effect on productivity. Furthermore, we found that factors such as the slope of the land and the choice of marketing channel also play an important role in influencing productivity.

Practical implications: Moving away from the traditional top-down approach could be the answer to avoid a mismatch between the information given by trainers and what the farmers actually need.

Theoretical implications: The study used interaction variables of knowledge bases, and attempted to demonstrate the importance of a tacit knowledge base, which is often not well documented and therefore neglected in research.

Originality/value: The research demonstrates the combined effects that interactions between several knowledge bases have on the productivity of linseed farmers.  相似文献   

Purpose: LBD uses the context of design challenges to learn, among other things, science. Previous research shows that this approach to subject integration is quite successful but provides little profit on (scientific) concept learning. For this, a lack of (knowledge of) proper teaching strategies is suggested as an important reason. This study explores these strategies and more specific the interaction with concept learning.

Sample: Six Dutch first-year bachelor’s degree science student teachers, between the ages of 16 and 18, and two science teacher trainers (principal investigators included) were involved.

Design and methods: A mixed methods study was used to study LBD’s teaching practice in depth. Based on a theoretical framework of (concept) learning-related teaching strategies video recordings of a guided LBD challenge were analysed to unravel teacher handling in detail. Complemented by questionnaire and interview data and students’ learning outcomes (pre- and post-exam) the effectiveness of teaching strategies was established and shortcomings were distracted.

Results: Students reached medium overall learning gains where the highest gains were strongly task-related. Teacher handling was dominated by providing feedback and stimulating collaboration and only 13% of all teacher interventions concerned direct explication of underlying science. And especially these explicit teaching strategies were highly appreciated by students to learn about science.

Conclusions: In accordance with insights about knowledge transfer, LBD needs to be enriched with explicit teaching strategies, interludes according to poor-related science content important for cohesive understanding and de- and recontextualisation of concepts for deeper understanding.  相似文献   

Aim: The aim of this article is to compare loneliness, fear of falling, and quality of life in older women who live alone and live with others.

Methods: This cross-sectional study was done on 218 accessible elderly women (116 live alone, 102 live with others) to compare loneliness, fear of falling, and quality of life by using the Farsi versions of UCLA-LS, falls efficacy scale-international (FES-I), and SF12 questionnaires, respectively.

Results: Linear regression was used to compare the means of continuous outcomes between the two groups by adjustment on probable confounder’s age and falling history.

Conclusion: Fears of falling and physical aspect of life quality in the lonely older adults were considerably higher than other group.  相似文献   

Purpose: This study evaluated and compared the Singaporean and Taiwanese middle school students’ conceptions of science assessment. Within-country gender comparisons were also explored.

Sample: 424 Taiwanese and 333 Singaporean eighth graders were invited for a cross-country comparison.

Design and methods: The participants completed a questionnaire named Conceptions of Science Assessment.

Results: The findings showed that the summative assessment dominates in the Taiwanese classrooms, while formative and summative assessment are usually perceived in Singaporean classrooms. The Singaporean students had a greater tendency than their Taiwanese counterparts to perceive the purpose of assessment as a way of reproducing knowledge, and the formative assessment as improving learning, problem-solving, and critical judgment. No gender differences were found among either the Singaporean or the Taiwanese students.

Conclusions: Educators in both countries should provide learners with more opportunities to experience process-oriented science assessment activities and de-emphasize the usage of examination-oriented practices to achieve the sophistication of conceptions.  相似文献   

The second big breakthrough came with the Integrated Child Development Services in 1974, the world's largest to attempt to provide a package of services to the most vulnerable children. The attached four-month job training, intended to develop paraprofessionals with multiple roles, supported by untrained ‘helpers’ is hence somewhat diluted in content.

In addition several other limited kinds of training in Early Childhood Education are available.

Training programmes have had to face several recurrent constraints related to issues of both quantity and quality—availability at different levels; relevance of content and appropriateness of methodology; motivation; certification; and the development of a trainer cadre.

Recently, innovative training programmes, three of which are mentioned, are attempting to meet these challenges in new ways.  相似文献   

Methodology: We used the ‘Antecedent-Process-Outcome Framework’ developed by Wood and Gray [1991. “Toward a Comprehensive Theory of Collaboration.” The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 27 (2): 139-162] and adapted by Thomson and Perry [2006. “Collaboration Processes: Inside the Black Box.” Public Administration Review 66 (s1): 20-32], to analyse the collaborative process within the Board of Social Farming (BSF) in Valdera, Italy. The BSF in Valdera is particularly important as it was the first transition arena developed in Italy for SF development.

Findings: The article highlights the difficulties and opportunities encountered by the BSF in the knowledge co-creation and collaboration, and identifies key elements to facilitate innovation in SF and more generally in transition processes.

Practical implications: The article aims to generalize crucial practical elements in the relationship between collaborative approaches and innovation in the field of innovative welfare society, which is increasingly key to rural transition.

Theoretical implications: Innovation in SF is complex due to the need to identify new knowledge, diverse kinds of organizations and innovative interactions among many private and public stakeholders. The article explores the concept of collaboration in SF in order to re-define the production of public and private goods within local and rural communities.

Originality: The article aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion on the advantages and disadvantages of collaboration in order to reinforce rural transition pathways.  相似文献