O ensino do empreendedorismo: o papel do docente, os métodos pedagógicos e a sua relação com a intenção empreendedora

Can entrepreneurship be taught, or be learned? This is a question that brings a broad debate to the table. Indubitably, education has an essential role in attitude development and competences promotion. This assumption has fostered entrepreneurship initiatives and course proliferation, seeking to teach entrepreneurship to individuals. The increasing importance of the entrepreneurial spirit leads to the creation and promotion of entrepreneurship initiatives and encouragement of youngsters to have entrepreneurial profiles. Today, entrepreneurship education has a crucial role promoting entrepreneurial mindset s in younger people. It stimulates competence and skill development, which extends beyond the business world. The effects of such education depend on strategy and teaching pedagogies, but mostly on its effective implementation. This gives teachers and higher education institutions the challenge of finding nontraditional methodologies and alternative ways to teach the subject. Therefore, this study aims to explore, through the theory of planned behavior, the effects of entrepreneurship education and its relationship with entrepreneurial intention. Additionally, the essential and challenging role of the teacher is explored, contributing to a better understanding of its significance in entrepreneurship education that is remarkably poorly explored in the literature. Findings reinforce the strength of the theory of planned behavior as an intention measure; in addition, students were found to increase their entrepreneurial intentions, entrepreneurial knowledge and institutional context perceptions after taking a higher education course. Concerning teachers, a consensus was found between their education aims and similarities among their pedagogic methods, topics and forms of evaluation, along with time and resource management struggles.

New tools for cognitive and motor rehabilitation: development and clinical validation

Nervous system disorders are associated with cognitive and motor deficits, and are responsible for the highest disability rates and global burden of disease. Their recovery paths are vulnerable and dependent on the effective combination of plastic brain tissue properties, with complex, lengthy and expensive neurorehabilitation programs. This work explores two lines of research, envisioning sustainable solutions to improve treatment of cognitive and motor deficits. Both projects were developed in parallel and shared a new sensible approach, where low-cost technologies were integrated with common clinical operative procedures. The aim was to achieve more intensive treatments under specialized monitoring, improve clinical decision-making and increase access to healthcare. The first project (articles I – III) concerned the development and evaluation of a web-based cognitive training platform (COGWEB), suitable for intensive use, either at home or at institutions, and across a wide spectrum of ages and diseases that impair cognitive functioning. It was tested for usability in a memory clinic setting and implemented in a collaborative network, comprising 41 centers and 60 professionals. An adherence and intensity study revealed a compliance of 82.8% at six months and an average of six hours/week of continued online cognitive training activities. The second project (articles IV – VI) was designed to create and validate an intelligent rehabilitation device to administer proprioceptive stimuli on the hemiparetic side of stroke patients while performing ambulatory movement characterization (SWORD). Targeted vibratory stimulation was found to be well tolerated and an automatic motor characterization system retrieved results comparable to the first items of the Wolf Motor Function Test. The global system was tested in a randomized placebo controlled trial to assess its impact on a common motor rehabilitation task in a relevant clinical environment (early post-stroke). The number of correct movements on a hand-to-mouth task was increased by an average of 7.2/minute while the probability to perform an error decreased from 1:3 to 1:9. Neurorehabilitation and neuroplasticity are shifting to more neuroscience driven approaches. Simultaneously, their final utility for patients and society is largely dependent on the development of more effective technologies that facilitate the dissemination of knowledge produced during the process. The results attained through this work represent a step forward in that direction. Their impact on the quality of rehabilitation services and public health is discussed according to clinical, technological and organizational perspectives. Such a process of thinking and oriented speculation has led to the debate of subsequent hypotheses, already being explored in novel research paths.