Teaching internet inquiry in the early years: a microcase of teaching practice with iPads

This paper focuses on teaching practices intended to support primary school students’ internet inquiries and the development of requisite knowledge and skills. The paper builds on growing knowledge about multimodal pedagogy (e.g., Walsh, 2011) and how such pedagogies not only bring with them intrinsic benefits for student engagement and learning, but also offer opportunities to reinforce and refine traditional print literacies (e.g., McKee and Heydon, 2015). A microethnographic approach is taken, involving a close examination of short classroom episodes. The data include classroom video footage and teacher interviews concerning one lesson where students aged six, seven and eight undertook research using iPads. Within the lesson, the iPads were treated as a suite of resources, tools and channels to be put into operation in the service of student inquiries, where informational texts could be found on the internet and then used as sources for new knowledge and material for the students’ multimedia artefacts. Print literacy skills were similarly treated as resources to be drawn upon in the service of inquiry work. The data is assembled to provide a window into the complexities of teaching in this context, with a particular focus on how new and traditional literacy practices are interwoven. The analysis shows how digital and ‘non-digital’ resources, modes and channels are strategically assembled by the teacher and her students through the practice of fit-for-purpose inquiry, reading and composition strategies. An explicit discourse of purpose is put to work in this classroom to make sense of materials, resources and curricula within a context of contradictory policy discourses. Thus an approach to curriculum and pedagogy is illustrated that lays the foundations for crucial contemporary information literacies, serving our increasingly everyday need to make strategic use of digital and online tools to navigate the internet and shape it for our own purposes. The interdependence of traditional and new literacies in such contexts reveals the nonsense of dominant discourses found in the media that emphasise the importance of one mode or one method, as well as divisive public politics that seeks to perpetuate understandings of traditional and new literacies as dichotomous domains that compete for airtime in classrooms, resulting in teachers’ neglect of literacy ‘basics’. In contrast to popular fears, in this classroom, both digital and traditional literacy skills and knowledge were developed, employed and reinforced as part of the students’ digital work.

Influence of work pressure on proactive skill development in China: the role of career networking behavior and guanxi HRM

This research examines how work pressure influences proactive skill development in the contextof the Chinese workplace. Drawing from the conservation of resources theory, we developa model which argues that career networking behavior serves as the mechanism that allowsemployees to transform work pressure into proactive skill development. We further arguethat in the context of the Chinese workplace, guanxi HRM, which is a culturally-specific workplacepractice deeply-rooted in Chinese tradition, plays a contingency role in influencing theextent to which work pressure influences career networking behavior. We test our modelusing Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling for a sample of employees (N =392) in China. The results show that career networking behavior positively mediates the influenceof work pressure on proactive skill development and that guanxi HRM positively and significantlymoderates the influence of work pressure on career networking behavior. The overallfindings provide empirical support for the relevance of contextual and motivational factors inexplaining employee proactive skill development. The theoretical and practical implicationsof the findings are fully discussed.

"When I saw walking I just kind of took it as wheeling": interpretations of mobility-related items in generic, preference-based health state instruments in the context of spinal cord injury

Background : In health economic analyses, health states are typically valued using instruments with few items per dimension. Due to the generic (and often reductionist) nature of such instruments, certain groups of respondents may experience challenges in describing their health state. This study is concerned with generic, preference-based health state instruments that provide information for decisions about the allocation of resources in health care. Unlike physical measurement instruments, preference-based health state instruments provide health state values that are dependent on how respondents interpret the items. This study investigates how individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI) interpret mobility-related items contained within six preference-based health state instruments.

Methods : Secondary analysis of focus group transcripts originally collected in Vancouver, Canada, explored individuals’ perceptions and interpretations of mobility-related items contained within the 15D, Assessment of Quality of Life 8-dimension (AQoL-8D), EQ-5D-5L, Health Utilities Index (HUI), Quality of Well-Being Scale Self-Administered (QWB-SA), and the 36-item Short Form health survey version 2 (SF-36v2). Ritchie and Spencer’s ‘Framework Approach’ was used to perform thematic analysis that focused on participants’ comments concerning the mobility-related items only.

Results : Fifteen individuals participated in three focus groups (five per focus group). Four themes emerged: wording of mobility (e.g., ‘getting around’ vs ‘walking’), reference to aids and appliances, lack of suitable response options, and reframing of items (e.g., replacing ‘walking’ with ‘wheeling’). These themes reflected item features that respondents perceived as relevant in enabling them to describe their mobility, and response strategies that respondents could use when faced with inaccessible items.

Conclusion : Investigating perceptions to mobility-related items within the context of SCI highlights substantial variation in item interpretation across six preference-based health state instruments. Studying respondents’ interpretations of items can help to understand discrepancies in the health state descriptions and values obtained from different instruments. This line of research warrants closer attention in the health economics and quality of life literature.