Transferring Collective Knowledge: Collective and Fragmented Teaching and Learning in the Chinese Auto Industry

Collective knowledge, consisting of tacit group-embedded knowledge, is a key element of organizational capabilities. This study undertakes a multiple-case study of the transfer of collective knowledge, guided by a set of tentative constructs and propositions derived from organizational learning theory. By focusing on the group-embeddedness dimension of collective knowledge, we direct our attention to the source and recipient communities. We identify two sets of strategic choices concerning the transfer of collective knowledge: collective vs. fragmented teaching, and collective vs. fragmented learning. The empirical context of this study is international R&D capability transfer in the Chinese auto industry. From the case evidence, we find the expected benefits of collective teaching and collective learning, and also discover additional benefits of these two strategies, including the creation of a bridge network communication infrastructure. The study disclosed other conditions underlying the choice of strategies of transferring collective knowledge, including transfer effort and the level of group-embeddedness of the knowledge to be taught or re-embedded. The paper provides a group-level perspective in understanding organizational capabilities, as well as a set of refined constructs and propositions concerning strategic choices of transferring collective knowledge. The study also provides a rich description of the best practices and lessons learned in transferring organizational capabilities.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39804/3/wp420.pd

An activity theory investigation of tool-use in undergraduate mathematics

This mixed methods study investigates a number of aspects related to tool-use in undergraduate mathematics as seen from an Activity Theory perspective. The aims of this study include: identifying the tools that undergraduates use; seeking for an empirically-based typology of these tools; examining how undergraduates themselves can be profiled according to their tool-use; and finally identifying the factors influencing students tool preferences. By combining results from survey, interview and diary data analyses, it was found that undergraduates in the sample preferred using mostly tools related to their institution s practice (notes, textbooks, VLE), other students and online videos. All the tools students reported using were classified into five categories: peers; teachers; external online tools; the official textbook; and notes. Students in the sample were also classified into five distinct groups: those preferring interacting with peers when studying mathematics (peer-learning group); those favouring using online tools (online-learning group); those using all the tools available to them (blended-learning group); those using only textbooks (predominantly textbooks-learning group); and students using some of the tools available to them (selective-learning group). The main factor shaping students tool choices was found to be their exam-driven goals when examined from an individual s perspective or their institution s assessment related rules when adopting a wider perspective. Results of this study suggest that students blend their learning of mathematics by using a variety of tools and underlines that although undergraduates were found to be driven by exam-related goals, this is a result of the rules regulating how Higher Education Institutions (HEI) function and should not be attributed entirely as stemming from individuals practices. Assigning undergraduates exam- driven goals to their university s sociocultural environment, was made possible by combining two versions of Activity Theory (Leontiev and Engestrøm s) and analysing data at two different levels (individual and collective respectively)

Transferring Collective Knowledge: Collective and Fragmented Teaching and Learning in the Chinese Auto Industry

Collective knowledge, consisting of tacit group-embedded knowledge, is a key element of organizational capabilities. This study undertakes a multiple-case study of the transfer of collective knowledge, guided by a set of tentative constructs and propositions derived from organizational learning theory. By focusing on the group-embeddedness dimension of collective knowledge, we direct our attention to the source and recipient communities. We identify two sets of strategic choices concerning the transfer of collective knowledge: collective vs. fragmented teaching, and collective vs. fragmented learning. The empirical context of this study is international R&D capability transfer in the Chinese auto industry. From the case evidence, we find the expected benefits of collective teaching and collective learning, and also discover additional benefits of these two strategies, including the creation of a bridge network communication infrastructure. The study disclosed other conditions underlying the choice of strategies of transferring collective knowledge, including transfer effort and the level of group-embeddedness of the knowledge to be taught or re-embedded. The paper provides a group-level perspective in understanding organizational capabilities, as well as a set of refined constructs and propositions concerning strategic choices of transferring collective knowledge. The study also provides a rich description of the best practices and lessons learned in transferring organizational capabilities.knowledge transfer, collective knowledge, organizational capabilities, R&D capabilities, organizational learning, network, China

Reflective Teaching Practices Between Theory and Reality in a Demanding Society

Being a teacher implies enjoying the stages that students have to go through in order to learn; provide an environment conducive to learning; have an academic preparation to be successful. At various points in this process, unlearning is needed to relearn and make sense of a new experience. Being a teacher means recognizing that teaching is a transformative process for both students and teachers. The teaching activity can be defined as the set of actions, carried out inside and outside the classroom, aimed to promoting student learning in relation to the objectives and competencies designed in a planning and a specific institutional context. This leads us to reflect on the importance of developing a framework, as realistic as possible, of the methodology, objectives, content, assessment criteria and activities that are intended to be carried out with the students throughout the school year. But how far can we delimit the dimensions of this reflection? Why is reflection needed? what does the reflection represent for a teacher? Are we talking about an action, stage or a whole process? Why is it important to reflect on the act of teaching? What happens when a teacher begins to think and act not like a technical expert, but like a thoughtful professional? What does reflection in the teaching-learning process represent? Why does the professor need to reflect, invent, and differentiate? The main purpose of this work is to present a pedagogical tool that could help to see and understand the teaching-learning process beyond a simple interaction between the professor and his students, and thus to contribute to the improvement of the study planning. In this article, readers and teachers interested and passionate in this field of education will focus their attention to the importance and the need of being a professional reflexive not only in a narrow perspective but at a global scope, including the way how students learn from the cognitive dimension, especially those who need more assistance. Is it a complex process? Yes, but to reach that deep understanding of what is happening will have the benefit to take the teaching-learning vision from practice dimension to a significative purpose, and would complement any didactic training that teachers perform to make practical decisions, allowing them to reach the established objectives

Intersubjectivity and groupwork in school mathematics: examining year 7 students’ interactions from a perspective of communicative action

This thesis explores how small group interactions around problem-solving in secondary school mathematics can be understood using a theoretical framework of Communicative Action inspired by Habermasian Critical Theory. How does cognition express itself socially? What are the technical features of communicative acts that afford access to the development of mutual understanding? A case study approach was used to investigate episodes of interactive speech acts. Participants included three Year 7 mathematics teachers and 87 students in 3 different English secondary schools, who were engaged in adopting aspects of a ‘Complex Instruction’ pedagogical approach to design and coordinate problem-solving groupwork. Tasks were collaboratively designed with the participating teachers, followed by participant observation of the lessons, and post-lesson interviews with the teachers. Small group interactions were recorded using Flip cameras at each table that captured audio and video of student interactions around the tasks, and whole class video was also recorded. Initial analysis of small group interactions led to the development of codes and models focused on understanding interactions from an intersubjective perspective informed by Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action. These models and codes were then iteratively used to generate and refine analytical statements and working hypotheses from further interrogation of the data. The pragmatic focus of this study is on the content of episodes of utterances. These episodes are part of the intersubjective level at which teaching and learning take place. The findings from this analysis add to the field by developing a technical and critical treatment of evidence of intersubjectivity in mathematics education. Understanding the intersection of meaningful communication, action, and practices at the small group level is argued to provide novel insights into practice and design for problemsolving groupwork in mathematics education. The contributions of this thesis include the development of an Intersubjective Framework for Analysis of small group interactions, evidence that this framework can be productively used to identify ways in which the development of collaborative understanding expresses itself at the small group level, how it breaks down and how it can be supported. Methodologically this work makes a claim to knowledge in the development of microanalyses of situated cognition informed by Habermasian social theory. This work explores the merits and limitations of the communicative perspective in understanding small group interactions in mathematics problem-solving situations. A central claim is that Habermas’ sociological approach can be used productively to investigate small group interactions in mathematics classrooms. Theoretically this work makes a claim to knowledge in the development of a novel set of codes and models that can be used to analyse evidence of intersubjectivity through analysis of episodes of utterances in situ. This analytical framework is used to argue that small group interactions can be understood productively from a theoretical perspective of Communicative Action. These contributions suggest that insights from a perspective of Communicative Action can give educators critical pragmatic insights into curriculum design, structuring groupwork and associated pedagogy, and communicative (as opposed to instrumental or strategic) intervention in the support of intersubjective understanding

Responsible Accounting for Stakeholders

Through a critique of existing financial theory underlying current accounting practices, and reapplication of this theory to a broad group of stakeholders, this paper lays a normative foundation for a revised perspective on the responsibility of the public accounting profession. Specifically, we argue that the profession should embrace the development of standards for reporting information important to a broader group of stakeholders than just investors and creditors. The FASB has recently moved in the opposite direction. Nonetheless, an institution around accounting for stakeholders continues to grow, backed by a groundswell of support from many sources. Based on institutional theory, we predict that this institution and the forces supporting it will cause changes in the public accounting, building from the premise that a primary responsibility of accounting is to provide information to address the risk management needs of stakeholders

Bridging RL Theory and Practice with the Effective Horizon

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) works impressively in some environments and fails catastrophically in others. Ideally, RL theory should be able to provide an understanding of why this is, i.e. bounds predictive of practical performance. Unfortunately, current theory does not quite have this ability. We compare standard deep RL algorithms to prior sample complexity prior bounds by introducing a new dataset, BRIDGE. It consists of 155 MDPs from common deep RL benchmarks, along with their corresponding tabular representations, which enables us to exactly compute instance-dependent bounds. We find that prior bounds do not correlate well with when deep RL succeeds vs. fails, but discover a surprising property that does. When actions with the highest Q-values under the random policy also have the highest Q-values under the optimal policy, deep RL tends to succeed; when they don't, deep RL tends to fail. We generalize this property into a new complexity measure of an MDP that we call the effective horizon, which roughly corresponds to how many steps of lookahead search are needed in order to identify the next optimal action when leaf nodes are evaluated with random rollouts. Using BRIDGE, we show that the effective horizon-based bounds are more closely reflective of the empirical performance of PPO and DQN than prior sample complexity bounds across four metrics. We also show that, unlike existing bounds, the effective horizon can predict the effects of using reward shaping or a pre-trained exploration policy

Comparison of Perceptions of Single Mothers and Christian Leaders through Transformational Change

The purpose of this phenomenological qualitative study was to examine the transformational change process of single mothers from their perspective, and to then assess the influence of Christian leaders in this transformational change process from the leaders’ perspective, with respect to the single mother’s family stability: spiritually, emotionally, financially and generationally. The two theories working simultaneously in this study was the transformational leadership theory and transformational learning theory. The implementation of these two theories could spark an authentic life-long change in the single mother. Understanding the role of transformational leadership in Christian leaders then becomes necessary to guide single mothers towards spiritual formation and family stability, breaking the generational pattern and ultimately becoming who God intends her to be “in His image”. Through interviews and surveys of Christian leaders, who then identified potential participants for the sample group of single mothers, the perceptions of both groups were compared to determine the effectiveness of transformational change. By reviewing the responses, perceived barriers surfaced as possible hindrances to a transformational change, as well as perceived indicators which could be used as a future predictor of transformational change that is generational