RELATION BETWEEN BACKGROUND VARIABLES, VALUES AND CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

ABSTRACT Consumer perception of corporate social responsibility (CSR) can be directly influenced by individual value structures. This research aims to provide new knowledge regarding the relationship between basic human values and the public's perception of CSR. It focuses on the values of higher education students and their views regarding a particular corporate social initiative. The study reveals that social, educational, and economic circumstances influence human values. Those values in turn influence why different students perceive CSR differently. These findings are relevant to companies as they provide a more detailed understanding of why certain consumer groups perceive certain CSR initiatives the way that they do. They also suggest that universities should increase their awareness of the importance of integrating human values and CSR in the curricula of future business managers and social leaders.

VISUAL ART AND REGULATORY FIT MESSAGES ON CONSUMER EVALUATIONS

ABSTRACT In this study, we demonstrate that the art infusion effect, in which the presence of visual art causes a positive impact on consumers' perceptions of products and advertising messages, might have a moderation effect on regulatory fit and non-fit messages. We investigate the impact of visual art on advertisement evaluations in regulatory (non-) fit conditions. Regulatory focus theory suggests that consumers rely on their motivational focus (prevention vs. promotion) for their evaluations and decisions. Usually, consumers prefer products that fit with their personal motivational focus. In the present study, the results of three experiments indicate that using visual art with a promotion or prevention fit message is recommended, while non-art images increase message persuasiveness when non-fit messages are presented. Therefore, not all information compatible with the consumer's motivational focus are best evaluated. When non-art images are presented, non-fit messages might be more persuasive.

A perceção dos chefs sobre o conceito de alimentação saudável e sua influência no bem-estar das pessoas : um estudo exploratório

As artes culinárias, os seus intervenientes e a envolvente associada às mesmas, assumem hoje um interesse crescente por parte dos consumidores, podendo funcionar como uma ferramenta de educação, tornando os consumidores mais recetivos à influência da alimentação na saúde. Por outro lado, o entretenimento direcionado para alimentação poderá conduzir o consumidor a um desvio das suas práticas alimentares saudáveis, envolvendo os espetadores numa fantasia e glamour, de cenários encenados que parecem reais em particular para pessoas sem qualificações em artes culinárias. Esta investigação pretende aferir a perceção dos Chefs sobre o conceito de alimentação saudável e a sua influência no bem-estar das pessoas na região da grande Lisboa. Metodologicamente, realizaram-se entrevistas a Chefs, privilegiando o método qualitativo. A informação recolhida foi tratada recorrendo-se à análise de conteúdo, utilizando-se o software QSR Nvivo 10®. As entrevistas seguiram um guião pré-estabelecido, incidindo sobre os seguintes temas: i) hábitos alimentares dos Chefs em casa; ii) perceção sobre alimentação saudável; iii) práticas em contexto de trabalho. Os Chefs percecionaram corretamente o conceito de alimentação saudável e associaram o bem-estar como o principal benefício associado à sua prática. Porém, nos seus locais de trabalho, os Chefs referem que se sentem pressionados pelas questões economicistas aquando da elaboração das suas receitas. Importa pois promover uma oferta alimentar atrativa e simultaneamente saudável, contribuindo para o bem-estar das pessoas.

Educational characteristics of adult students in portuguese technological schools

Despite a massive expansion of education in Portugal, since the 1970’s, educational attainment of the adult population in the country remains low. The numbers of working-age people in some form of continuing education are among the lowest, according to the OECD and EU-27 statistics. Technological Schools(TS), initially created in the 1990’s, under the umbrella of the Ministry of Economy in partnership with industry and industrial associations, aimed to prepare qualified staff for industries and services in the country, particularly in the engineering sector, through the provision of post secondary non-university programmes of studies, the CET (Technological Specialization Courses). Successful CET students are awarded a DET(Diploma of Technological Specialization), which corresponds to Vocational Qualification level IV of the EU, according to the latest alteration (2005) of the Education Systems Act (introduced in 1986). In this, CET’s are also clearly defined as one of the routes for access to Higher Education (HE), in Portugal. The PRILHE (Promoting Reflective and Independent Learning in Higher Education) multinational project, funded by the European Socrates Grundtvig Programme, aimed to identify the learning processes which enable adult students in higher education to become autonomous reflective learners and search best practices to support these learning processes. During this research, both quantitative and qualitative methods were used to determine how students organise their studies and develop their learning skills. The Portuguese partner in the project’ consortium used a two case studies approach, one with students of Higher Education Institutions and other with students of TS. This paper only applies to students of TS, as these have a predominant bias towards engineering. Results show that student motivation and professional teaching support contribute equally to the development of an autonomous and reflective approach to learning in adult students; this is essential for success in a knowledge economy, where lifelong learning is the key to continuous employment.

Learning objects recommendation in an adaptive educational hypermedia system

The aim of this paper is presenting the modules of the Adaptive Educational Hypermedia System PCMAT, responsible for the recommendation of learning objects. PCMAT is an online collaborative learning platform with a constructivist approach, which assesses the user’s knowledge and presents contents and activities adapted to the characteristics and learning style of students of mathematics in basic schools. The recommendation module and search and retrieval module choose the most adequate learning object, based on the user's characteristics and performance, and in this way contribute to the system’s adaptability.

A Intenção de uso da M-Wallet pelo consumidor português

Dissertação de Mestrado apresentada ao Instituto de Contabilidade e Administração do Porto para a obtenção do grau de Mestre em Marketing Digital, sob orientação de Mestre António da Silva Vieira.

Educational policies, territories and actors strategies

The purpose of this paper is to analyse how educational policies about school violence are reinterpreted and implemented at school level and if this process contributes to a more pluralistic and democratic school. A research carried out in 3 clusters of schools showed that the diversity of understandings and strategies to face school violence, higher within the territories than between them, was associated to the school board's agendas and the legitimacy of the different actors to interpret and act within the national policies framework. There was a high consistency between violence management strategies and the ways schools faced social and cultural diversity. Those who favour more inclusive strategies to deal with violence tend to provide higher educational opportunities in schools, inversely, those who favour repressive strategies are more likely to support educational and social selective strategies, with less educational offer; less participation of teachers, students and parents in violence regulation.

An adaptive educational system for higher education

The main objective of an Adaptive System is to adequate its relation with the user (content presentation, navigation, interface, etc.) according to a predefined but updatable model of the user that reflects his objectives, preferences, knowledge and competences [Brusilovsky, 2001], [De Bra, 2004]. For Educational Adaptive Systems, the emphasis is placed on the student knowledge in the domain application and learning style, to allow him to reach the learning objectives proposed for his training [Chepegin, 2004]. In Educational AHS, the User Model (UM), or Student Model, has increased relevance: when the student reaches the objectives of the course, the system must be able to readapt, for example, to his knowledge [Brusilovsky, 2001]. Learning Styles are understood as something that intent to define models of how given person learns. Generally it is understood that each person has a Learning Style different and preferred with the objective of achieving better results. Some case studies have proposed that teachers should assess the learning styles of their students and adapt their classroom and methods to best fit each student's learning style [Kolb, 2005], [Martins, 2008]. The learning process must take into consideration the individual cognitive and emotional parts of the student. In summary each Student is unique so the Student personal progress must be monitored and teaching shoul not be not generalized and repetitive [Jonassen, 1991], [Martins, 2008]. The aim of this paper is to present an Educational Adaptive Hypermedia Tool based on Progressive Assessment.

User modeling In adaptive hypermedia educational systems

This document is a survey in the research area of User Modeling (UM) for the specific field of Adaptive Learning. The aims of this document are: To define what it is a User Model; To present existing and well known User Models; To analyze the existent standards related with UM; To compare existing systems. In the scientific area of User Modeling (UM), numerous research and developed systems already seem to promise good results, but some experimentation and implementation are still necessary to conclude about the utility of the UM. That is, the experimentation and implementation of these systems are still very scarce to determine the utility of some of the referred applications. At present, the Student Modeling research goes in the direction to make possible reuse a student model in different systems. The standards are more and more relevant for this effect, allowing systems communicate and to share data, components and structures, at syntax and semantic level, even if most of them still only allow syntax integration.

Funding sources and fostering of educational projects

This paper is part of the results from the project "Implementation Strategies and Development of an Open and Distance Education System for the University of the Azores" funded by the European Social Fund. http://hdl.handle.net/10400.3/2327

Determinantes do comportamento de compra verde em Portugal

Apesar do avanço tecnológico, uma grande maioria dos consumidores contínua a utilizar excessivamente os recursos naturais não renováveis do planeta, resultado de um consumo exagerado e inconsciente. Atualmente, os consumidores possuem mais informação sobre as questões ambientais e, alguns, refletem esse conhecimento nas suas decisões de compra. Com a crescente preocupação e atenção, quer por parte da população, quer por parte das organizações governamentais e empresas, para com o meio ambiente e a sua preservação, as questões ecológicas têm cada vez mais importância nas estratégias das empresas. Na presente investigação é analisado o comportamento de compra verde com a utilização das variáveis sociodemográficas (género, idade, número de filhos, rendimento e habilitações literárias) e psicográficas (conhecimento ecológico, coletivismo e individualismo), indo ao encontro do objetivo geral de investigação que visa compreender qual a relevância destas variáveis face ao comportamento de compra verde. O estudo desenvolvido é operacionalizado por via de um método quantitativo, através da utilização de um inquérito por questionário com base nas escalas do conhecimento ecológico (Laroche et al., 2001), coletivismo e individualismo (Singelis et al., 1995 e Triandis & Gelfand (1998)) e do comportamento de compra verde (Jain & Kaur, 2004). O questionário foi aplicado a uma amostra de conveniência (N=350), dando origem a uma análise quantitativa face aos dados obtidos. Os resultados indicam que as variáveis psicográficas exercem maior influência no comportamento de compra verde do que as variáveis sociodemográficas. As variáveis psicográficas, conhecimento ecológico e coletivismo, têm uma grande influência no comportamento de compra verde, ao contrário do individualismo. Por seu lado, do conjunto das variáveis sociodemográficas, apenas a idade e o número de filhos influenciam significativamente o comportamento de compra verde.

Educational in a global environment: non-formal examples of learning practices at the international office

23rd SPACE AGM and Conference from 9 to 12 May 2012 Conference theme: The Role of Professional Higher Education: Responsibility and Reflection Venue: Mikkeli University of Applied Sciences, Mikkeli, Finland

TimeMesh: an educational historical game

The TIMEMESH game, developed in the scope of the European Project SELEAG, is an educational game for learning history, culture and social relations. It is supported by an extensible, online, multi-language, multi-player, collaborative and social platform for sharing and acquiring knowledge of the history of European regions. The game has been already used, with remarkable success, in different European countries like Portugal, Spain, England, Slovenia, Estonia and Belgium.

Regional governance: strategies and disputes in health region management

OBJECTIVE To analyze the regional governance of the health systemin relation to management strategies and disputes.METHODOLOGICAL PROCEDURES A qualitative study with health managers from 19 municipalities in the health region of Bahia, Northeastern Brazil. Data were drawn from 17 semi-structured interviews of state, regional, and municipal health policymakers and managers; a focus group; observations of the regional interagency committee; and documents in 2012. The political-institutional and the organizational components were analyzed in the light of dialectical hermeneutics.RESULTS The regional interagency committee is the chief regional governance strategy/component and functions as a strategic tool for strengthening governance. It brings together a diversity of members responsible for decision making in the healthcare territories, who need to negotiate the allocation of funding and the distribution of facilities for common use in the region. The high turnover of health secretaries, their lack of autonomy from the local executive decisions, inadequate technical training to exercise their function, and the influence of party politics on decision making stand as obstacles to the regional interagency committee’s permeability to social demands. Funding is insufficient to enable the fulfillment of the officially integrated agreed-upon program or to boost public supply by the system, requiring that public managers procure services from the private market at values higher than the national health service price schedule (Brazilian Unified Health System Table). The study determined that “facilitators” under contract to health departments accelerated access to specialized (diagnostic, therapeutic and/or surgical) services in other municipalities by direct payment to physicians for procedure costs already covered by the Brazilian Unified Health System.CONCLUSIONS The characteristics identified a regionalized system with a conflictive pattern of governance and intermediate institutionalism. The regional interagency committee’s managerial routine needs to incorporate more democratic devices for connecting with educational institutions, devices that are more permeable to social demands relating to regional policy making.

Virtual laboratory for educational environments

In this paper a new simulation environment for a virtual laboratory to educational proposes is presented. The Logisim platform was adopted as the base digital simulation tool, since it has a modular implementation in Java. All the hardware devices used in the laboratory course was designed as components accessible by the simulation tool, and integrated as a library. Moreover, this new library allows the user to access an external interface. This work was motivated by the needed to achieve better learning times on co-design projects, based on hardware and software implementations, and to reduce the laboratory time, decreasing the operational costs of engineer teaching. Furthermore, the use of virtual laboratories in educational environments allows the students to perform functional tests, before they went to a real laboratory. Moreover, these functional tests allow to speed-up the learning when a problem based approach methodology is considered. © 2014 IEEE.