Enhancing Technological Practice: An Assessment Framework for Technology Education in New Zealand

The stated aim of technology education in New Zealand is to develop students' level of technological literacy. This paper introduces the Technology Assessment Framework (TAF) as an organisational tool for the development and delivery of technology programmes that focus on increasing students' technological literacy through the enhancement of their technological practice across technological areas and contexts. The TAF was developed and refined in 1999 and 2000 as part of a two year New Zealand Ministry of Education funded research project, and integrated within a national professional development programme in 2000 designed for preservice and inservice teacher educators in New Zealand.This paper backgrounds the sociocultural theoretical position of the TAF and explains how it reflects and furthers the aim of technology education in New Zealand. The TAF is then presented and explained with the aid of illustrative examples from classroom practice.     

Complex home care: Part I--Utilization and costs to families for health care services each year

As many as 120 persons per million people in the United States are dependent on the lifelong, complex, technology-based care of home parenteral nutrition (HPN) infusions. However, data for costs paid by families for HPN-related health care services and for non-reimbursed expenditures are rarely tabulated and most often underestimated. The goals of this study were to describe health care services used by families to manage HPN, report the frequency of each service used annually, and estimate the average annual non-reimbursed costs to families for these health services. The numerous and varied types of services reported and the time required to coordinate and access HPN services illustrates the challenges faced by patients and their family caregivers. The lack of a coordinated and efficient system for delivering complex chronic care results in poorer outcomes for HPN patients and their families on-reimbursed costs and the extensive amount of time required to coordinate multi-professional services negatively impacts the clinical outcomes and quality of life of complex chronic home care.     

Understanding why people do not give: strategic funding concerns for AIDS‐related nonprofits

• In this increasingly competitive environment for the individual donor's time and money, it is especially important for AIDS‐related nonprofits to understand why people choose not to give. Voluntary donations to organizations serving persons with HIV/AIDS could be negatively influenced by the social stigma that continues to be associated with the disease. Using the empathy‐altruism hypothesis from social psychology, the impact of gender, homosexuality, promiscuity, and drug use on donor cognitive situational empathy, emotional situational empathy, and altruism is examined. The findings have significant implications for nonprofits. Understanding the impact of these behaviors on giving is a first step in gauging the magnitude of challenges that AIDS‐related nonprofits may face in fund‐raising activities. Additionally, this information should be invaluable in the development of educational and/or promotional strategies to increase private sector support. Finally, initiatives in communication and marketing strategy are discussed to improve fund‐raising efforts.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Women, social skill and interactive service work in telephone call centres

This paper contributes to current debates about gender, work and skill in the service economy, focusing specifically on the case of women's employment in telephone call centres. The paper asks whether call centre employers are capitalising on women's 'feminine' social skills, and examines the degree to which these skills are being developed, acknowledged and recognised.     

On the profitability of collusion in location games

In this note we take a first step towards the analysis of collusion in markets with spatial competition, focusing on the case of pure location choices. We find that collusion can only be profitable if a coalition contains more than half of all players. This result holds for location games played in k-dimensional Euclidean space as long as consumers are distributed via atomless density functions. For competition on the unit interval, unit circle, and unit square we also derive sufficient conditions for collusion to be profitable. The results have immediate implications for mergers in spatial markets.     

The turn-of-the-month effect still lives: the international evidence

This paper examines 19 country stock market indices for recent evidence of the turn-of-the-month (TOM) pattern in daily stock returns using both parametric and nonparametric measures to address concerns regarding methodologies applied in prior anomalies studies. We find that the 4-day TOM period accounts for 87% of the monthly return, on average, across countries, in the stock markets of 15 countries where the TOM pattern exists. These countries account for 77% of the foreign market capitalization value. The parametric and nonparametric results provide information regarding the degree to which distributional assumption violations may lead to incorrect conclusions.     

Teaching the nature of technology: determining and supporting student learning of the philosophy of technology

This paper reports on findings related to the Nature of Technology from Stage Two of the Technological Knowledge and Nature of Technology: Implications for teaching and learning (TKNoT: Imps) research project undertaken in 2009. A key focus in Stage Two was the trialing of different teaching strategies to determine how learning related to the components Characteristics of Technology (CoT) and Characteristics of Technological Outcomes (COTO) could be supported. These components fall within the Nature of Technology (NoT) strand of technology in the New Zealand Curriculum (NZC) (Ministry of Education, 2007) and as such, reflect a philosophical understanding of technology as a discipline. During this stage of the research further exploration was undertaken to determine how student understanding of these two components of technology education progressed from level 1 to level 8 of the NZC (Ministry of Education, 2007). Common misconceptions and partial understandings related to these components are identified and explained and four case studies are presented to illustrate strategies employed by teachers and their impact on student learning related to these two components. The Stage Two outcomes resulted in the revision of the Indicators of Progression for CoT and CoTO in order to clarify the progression expected of students in each component and provide increased teacher guidance to support such progression.