Students' experiences of learning in a third-year management accounting class: Evidence from New Zealand

An extensive body of literature in higher education (for example, Marton and Säljö, 1984; Prosser and Trigwell, 1999) explores learning from the perspectives of students. Säljö (1979) formed the basis of Sharma's (1997) first study exploring accountancy students' conceptions of learning. Using an open-ended questionnaire administered to third-year management accounting students, this paper investigates accountancy students' conceptions of learning, and extends Sharma's (1997) study by examining the relationship between conceptions of and approaches to learning, and more specifically students' contextual experiences of learning in lectures and tutorials. Findings indicate that, while some students seek understanding as an outcome of their learning, the majority perceive learning quantitatively in terms of knowledge acquisition, reproduction and application. A new classification of the locus of responsibility for learning as perceived by students suggests that a more distributed concept of responsibility might result in enhanced learning outcomes.     

The Technology Workshops at Oundle

Psychologists have shown that knowledge can be acquired independent of practical action, by observing and imitating others and by extracting knowledge from vicarious experiences coded in text. Yet experiential learning theorists suggest that real learning takes a practical event to embody it. In schools we ask our students to learn through study. This paper examines a concept of learning in which personal experience is the base or framework for learning. Oundle Public School has a tradition of learning through technology workshops. Using the case study and narrative research traditions, the author illuminates the philosophy behind this orientation. The period of history which spawned the orientation has many parallels to the information revolution we are witnessing today. The response by the headmaster then, including the curriculum policy and implementation issues which relate to it, are central to the debates and responses which characterize curriculum change now. The philosophy that gives Oundle its reputation in technological education is visited, the lessons it imparts are reviewed. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The Right Choice at the Right Time: A Herding Experiment in Endogenous Time

Herding describes the phenomenon in decision-making where an economic agent disregards his own private information to follow the actions of his predecessors as in Banerjee (1992). With later decision-makers simply copying earlier decisions their private information cannot be inferred by other decision-makers and will be forever lost. There is some experimental evidence on simple sequential herding of this type in the literature, notably Anderson and Holt (1997). This paper differs by allowing subjects to delay their decision-making in order to benefit from observing others' actions as in more recent herding models such as Chamley and Gale (1994). The results in this paper suggest that subjects will indeed delay when their private information is not sufficiently strong. Despite this ability to wait, as predicted in the theoretical literature, cascades remained ubiquitous and more worrying still, reverse-cascades occurred in which incorrect decisions made by early decision-makers produced informational cascades on the wrong action. In an alternative design, informing subjects that they had made incorrect choices only made matters worse as subjects moved further away from rational behavior.     

The coevolution of firms and their knowledge environment: Insights from the pharmaceutical industry

What are the most effective learning strategies for firms given the characteristics of their knowledge environment? This paper addresses this question by documenting the major changes in the knowledge environment of the pharmaceutical industry, with a particular emphasis on the period since the emergence of biotechnology, and discussing the related changes in the learning strategies of established pharmaceutical firms. Both the historical analysis and a review of the empirical research on organizational learning and knowledge transfer reveal a strong emphasis of firms on external learning through interfirm collaborations and sourcing of external knowledge. This learning strategy seems to be driven by the speed, uncertainty, and dispersion of knowledge developments in the industry. Studying the connections between the knowledge environment and the effectiveness of organizational learning processes is important to understand organizational change and adaptation, and is an area of research that deserves further attention.     

Forecasting U.S. money growth using economic uncertainty measures and regularisation techniques

This paper examines the out-of-sample forecasting properties of six different economic uncertainty variables for the growth of the real M2 and real M4 Divisia money series for the U.S. using monthly data. The core contention is that information on economic uncertainty improves the forecasting accuracy. We estimate vector autoregressive models using the iterated rolling-window forecasting scheme, in combination with modern regularisation techniques from the field of machine learning. Applying the Hansen-Lunde-Nason model confidence set approach under two different loss functions reveals strong evidence that uncertainty variables that are related to financial markets, the state of the macroeconomy or economic policy provide additional informational content when forecasting monetary dynamics. The use of regularisation techniques improves the forecast accuracy substantially.     

赋能型领导对员工创造力的影响：个人学习与成就动机的作用

以创造力理论为基础,探究赋能型领导对员工创造力的作用机制,检验个人学习的中介作用和成就动机的调节作用。通过采用验证性因子分析、层次回归分析和Bootstrap法,对收集的309份问卷进行分析。研究结果表明:①赋能型领导对员工创造力有正向影响作用;②个人学习在赋能型领导和员工创造力之间发挥部分中介作用;③成就动机调节了赋能型领导与员工个人学习之间的关系,且被调节的中介模型得到了验证。     

Unemployment and econometric learning

We apply well-known results of the econometric learning literature to the Mortensen and Pissarides real business cycle model. Agents can always learn the unique rational expectations equilibrium (REE), for all possible well-defined sets of parameter values, by using the minimum-state-variable solution to the model and decreasing gain learning. From this perspective the assumption of rational expectations in the model could be seen as reasonable. But using a parametrisation with UK data, simulations show that the speed of convergence to the REE is slow. This type of learning dampens the cyclical response of unemployment to small structural shocks.     

OECD国家深化教育创新改革的进展与启示

近十年来,OECD国家以多种方式加快推进教育改革,并重视培养学生“解决问题的能力”、鼓励学生使用“信息化技术”、强调“主动式学习”、强调教师专业能力特别是“批判性思考”技能。这些实践是OECD国家教育创新的亮点,对我国深化教育改革,培养21世纪创新型人才具有重要的参考意义。     

识别和培育实践共同体——构建学习型组织的新途径

学习型组织的传统构建途径过于强调个体层面的学习,忽视了团队层面和组织层面的学习。实践共同体能够较好地促进团队层面的学习,进而提高整个组织的学习能力。本文系统地探讨了实践共同体的概念本质、理论渊源及其作用,提出了识别和培育实践共同体的方法,并针对实践共同体可能存在的缺陷提出了一些应对策略。     

Growth and Nongrowth Capital Investments and Future Performance*

Most studies on the impact of capital expenditure on future performance use the aggregate capital expenditure disclosed in the cash flow statement. In this study, however, we distinguish between growth capital investments (that increase production capacity) from nongrowth capital investments (that only maintain or reduce current capacity). For growth capital investments, we document a negative association with year-ahead performance, which becomes positive in the subsequent year. For nongrowth capital investments, we observe a non-negative association with year-ahead performance. For nongrowth capital investments, we document a positive association, suggesting that the divestment is beneficial. That is, firms are likely disposing of nonproductive assets. Our results suggest that disclosing the nature of capital investments is important to better assess the future impact of a firm's investment decisions.