STEM education in the twenty-first century: learning at work—an exploration of design and technology teacher perceptions and practices

Teachers’ knowledge of STEM education, their understanding, and pedagogical application of that knowledge is intrinsically linked to the subsequent effectiveness of STEM delivery within their own practice; where a teacher’s knowledge and understanding is deficient, the potential for pupil learning is ineffective and limited. Set within the context of secondary age phase education in England and Wales (11–16 years old), this paper explores how teachers working within the field of design and technology education acquire new knowledge in STEM; how understanding is developed and subsequently embedded within their practice to support the creation of a diverse STEM-literate society. The purpose being to determine mechanisms by which knowledge acquisition occurs, to reconnoitre potential implications for education and learning at work, including consideration of the role which new technologies play in the development of STEM knowledge within and across contributory STEM subject disciplines. Underpinned by an interpretivist ontology, work presented here builds upon the premise that design and technology is an interdisciplinary educational construct and not viewed as being of equal status to other STEM disciplines including maths and science. Drawing upon the philosophical field of symbolic interactionism and constructivist grounded theory, work embraces an abductive methodology where participants are encouraged to relate design and technology within the context of STEM education. Emergent findings are discussed in relation to their potential to support teachers’ educational development for the advancement of STEM literacy, and help secure design and technology’s place as a subject of value within a twenty-first Century curriculum.     

Teachers’ views about technical education: implications for reforms towards a broad based technology curriculum in Malawi

Internationally there has been concern about the direction of technical education and how it is positioned in schools. This has also been the case in Malawi where the curriculum has had a strong focus on skills development. However, lately there has been a call for enhancing technological literacy of students, yet little support has been provided for teachers to achieve this goal. This paper reports from a wider study that looked at teachers’ existing views and practices in technical education in Malawi. The article focuses on the findings from interviews that were conducted with six secondary school teachers to find out about their understanding of the meaning and rationale for technical education. It is also discussed how the teachers view technical education as involving skills development for making things and their thoughts on the benefits of such knowledge. It is argued that teachers’ views about technical education were strongly linked to the goals of the curriculum vacationalization policies adopted at the dawn of political independence. Besides skills training they saw the potential to impart thinking skills related to design and problem solving, and the need for essential pedagogical techniques to support learning in technical education. Examination requirements, inadequate opportunities to conduct practical activities and a lack of supportive policy were seen as limiting factors. This article claims that teachers’ views were shaped by their expectations and beliefs about the nature of technical education and what they perceived students may gain from such learning. Their views were also influenced by contextual factors which may have implications on reforms towards broader notions of technology education.     

Is there a need for platform neutrality regulation in the EU?

Motivated by the policy discussion in the EU whether to impose non-discrimination obligations for dominant online platforms, we analyse whether such regulation is warranted from an economic point of view. Our contribution is threefold. First, across several platform contexts, we identify (i) (paid) prominence of some third parties over others and (ii) the favouring of a platform's integrated services over independent entities as common discriminatory conducts of online platforms. Second, within this scope, we review the economic literature and find that discrimination in the form of paid prominence may often be in the interest of consumers. However, smaller or low-quality content providers are likely to be worse off, which gives rise to concerns regarding dynamic efficiency and long-term variety in those markets. Additional problems may arise if platform operators are vertically integrated with content providers. Third, based on these theoretical insights, we recommend that EU policy makers should not adopt a neutrality regulation for platforms prematurely. Instead, we recommend to impose new proportionate transparency rules for dominant platforms in order to facilitate the identification of actual misconduct and legal enforcement.     

Food,energy and environment: Is bioenergy the missing link?

We study price linkages between the food, energy and bioenergy markets. A vertically integrated multi-input, multi-output market model allows us to derive testable hypothesis, which we test by applying time-series analytical mechanisms to nine major traded food commodity prices along with one weighted average world crude oil price. The data consists of 939 weekly observations from January 1993 to December 2010. The empirical findings confirm the theoretical hypothesis that the prices for crude oil and food commodities are interdependent: a USD 1/barrel increase in oil prices and food commodity prices increase by between USD 0.09/tonne and USD 1.65/tonne.     

Food consumption patterns and malnourished Indian children: Is there a link?

Despite its economic success, India has made little progress towards meeting its Millennium Development Goal targets of reducing undernourishment, particularly among children. In this paper, we use nationally representative datasets, the National Family Health Surveys (NFHS II and NFHS III) and the National Sample Survey (55th and the 61st rounds) to analyse the link, if any, between child nutritional outcomes and calorie intakes. Our analysis finds evidence of an improvement in the height-for-age z-scores, but a worsening in weight-for-height z-scores for children aged 0–3 over the period 1998/1999–2005/2006. There is also evidence of a sharp decline in per adult equivalent calorie intake from the principal food items over roughly this same period. Moreover, this decline was observed across all the expenditure quintiles. Our analysis is therefore able to identify a co-movement of declining nutritional intake for both adults and children and a lack of progress in improving nutritional outcomes of children.     

Representations of technology in the “Technical Stories” for children of Otto Witt, early 20th century Swedish technology educator

Children’s fiction in school libraries have played and still play a role in mediating representations of technology and attitudes towards technology to schoolchildren. In early 20th century Sweden, elementary education, including textbooks and literature that were used in teaching, accounted for the main mediation of technological knowledge to schoolchildren. An investigation of children’s literature for schools is therefore important in order to understand what was considered worth knowing about technology at the time. The aim of this article is therefore to analyse the representations of technology and attitudes towards technology that were mediated through two children’s fiction books in Swedish elementary school libraries in the 1910s. We have limited the analysis of empirical material to the books Technical Stories for Young and Old (Tekniska sagor för stora och små, 1914) and Technical Stories of the War for Young and Old (Krigets tekniska sagor för stora och små, 1915) by the Swedish inventor, author and technology educator Otto Witt. Gauging Witt’s influence on the schoolchildren and educators of his time is very difficult, but in this first English-language article on his “technical stories” one can conclude that he was in many ways unique and probably fairly well-read in the schools of early 20th century Sweden and onward. He was also a particularly perceptive forerunner of today’s technology and science educators in his use of anthropomorphism as an educational tool.     

Vietnam in Mutation: Will it be the Next Tiger or a Future Jaguar?

The article describes Vietnam's economic prospects. Using the World Bank model (1993), the study is based on a documentary research and interviews carried out in Vietnam. The inadequate business environment in Vietnam which is highlighted, implies that Vietnam far from being a tiger should be described as a young jaguar, following in the footsteps of Thailand or Indonesia, all of which are trying to catch up with the four tigers.     

Perceptions of the students’ learning and evaluation process in an e-learning course in Food Preservation Technology: a study case in a Food Consumption MSc

International Journal of Technology and Design Education - Food Preservation Technology is a main module within a course integrated in a Master of Science program in Food Consumption at...     

The Financial Costs of Caring in the British Labour Market: Is There a Wage Penalty for Workers in Caring Occupations?

Recent evidence from the USA suggests that people engaged in occupations involving providing care for others, such as childcare and teaching, suffer a wage penalty. After taking into account job and individual characteristics such as level of education and work experience, people in these occupations in the American study earned about 6 per cent less than their peers in other types of occupation. However, we do not yet know if people working in similar occupations in other countries also suffer the same degree of disadvantage. The issue is important because, despite the perception that people in caring jobs place a relatively low weight on the level of remuneration when making career decisions, a number of studies have shown clear evidence of an association between pay and the propensity to give up working in a caring occupation. There are implications too for social inequality as many caring jobs are done by women and associated wage penalties could contribute to the persistent gender gap in pay. This study compares and contrasts the predictions of neoclassical economics, cultural feminist theory and social closure theory. Data are taken from 17 waves of the British Household Panel Survey and include a total of 23,773 individuals, giving 110,677 person‐year observations. These data are analysed using multi‐level linear regression. The results show clear evidence of a statistically significant wage penalty associated with working in some caring occupations. Those occupations requiring lower levels of educational qualification, such as nursing assistants and auxiliaries, are particularly hard‐hit by the wage penalty. On the other hand, some occupations, such as medicine and teaching, have fared better than comparable non‐caring occupations over the same period. We discuss the implications of these results for the gender gap in pay, poverty, social inequality and the future supply of caring workers.     

Is your netflix a substitute for your telefunken? Evidence on the dynamics of traditional pay TV and OTT in Latin America

Are audiovisual over the top (OTT) services in Latin America substitutes for the traditional Pay TV services (cable or satellite), complementary or independent? To respond to this question, we develop a simple theoretical model based on a CES utility function and estimate simultaneously, using non-linear least squares, demand functions for both audiovisual services. Our results, based on original database covering 17 Latin American countries from 2011 to 2020, suggest no substitution of Pay TV for OTT. However, during the more recent period (2015–2020), we find evidence of gross substitution (i.e., similar enough, although not completely equivalent for consumers) between these audiovisual services. This confirms, although only partially, the existence of the so-called cord-cutting and cord-saving phenomena, due to the expansion of fast internet and the richer OTT offers, and their relatively lower prices. These results suggest regulators should include OTT services in their scope and produce in-depth analysis on the country level to update and optimize regulations, as well as implement regulatory sandboxes to advance towards smart regulation, as shown in the financial industry.     

Willingness to pay for the “Green Food” in China

With use of payment card survey data of willingness to pay (WTP) for the “Green Food”, a unique food certification in China, this study finds that age and income are important for the WTP for the Green Food in China. There are structural differences in consumer preference for Green Food between the large city and the small county. Consumers in China, on average, are willing to pay 47% more for Green vegetables and 40% more for Green meat than for their conventional counterparts. Compared with the real markets and the previous studies, our results are very consistent and reliable.     

Viewpoint: Is the ban on deception necessary or even desirable?

Deception has long been barred from the mainstream experimental economics literature based upon worries that any deception could pollute the participant pool, leading most participants to suspect that researchers are potentially lying about the incentives they face. Nonetheless, debates regarding the definition and acceptability of deception in experimental economics are common. Experimental psychologists have long employed deception as an essential part of their methodology and have studied the impacts of deception on participants in subsequent experiments. I propose the use of experimental economics to determine the impacts of deception, using empirical evidence to guide research norms and practice.     

Is there a pilot in the chain? Identifying the key drivers of change in the fresh pineapple sector

High-value export-oriented agriculture is today considered as a means of integrating smallholders into the world economy. This paper examines the geographic and organisational changes that have taken place in the fresh pineapple sector over the past 50 years. We begin with a historical analysis of the changes in leadership among producer countries, namely the dethroning of Côte d’Ivoire by Costa Rica. We show that this geographical shift has been accompanied by massive organisational changes: the pineapple sector is increasingly driven by large downstream actors who derive their power from the ability to impose their definition of quality to the whole chain, and from economies of scale and scope. Although varietal innovation plays a key role throughout the period, commercial and logistical innovation are of increasing strategic importance. However, because of the constraints imposed by the concerned supply chains, small farmers risk being excluded or marginalized.     

Implementing programming in school mathematics and technology: teachers’ intrinsic and extrinsic challenges

International Journal of Technology and Design Education - The 2017 reform of the Swedish national curriculum requires that all compulsory school mathematics and technology teachers integrate...     

Does knowledge management matter for information technology applications in China?

This study explores the role of knowledge management (KM) in mediating and moderating the relationship between information technology (IT) and firm performance based upon the data collected from 236 firms in China. Through a structural equation model and hierarchical regression analysis, we found that KM capability partially mediated the performance impact of IT resources. Furthermore, KM capability affected the strength of the IT-performance relationship. The theoretical contributions and managerial implications are discussed and limitations of the study are highlighted accordingly.