The design and development of creative instructional materials: the role of domain familiarity for creative solutions

The design and development processes of instructional materials might be considered simple and clear because the pre-established instructional goals can lead the way. However, in practice, there are lots of issues to be considered during these processes. The quality of the material, appropriate visual design, usability, and acceptable amount of cognitive load are some of these issues. On the other hand, an instructional material needs to be as original as possible. In this study, we focused on the creativity of the instructional materials designed and developed by second year students from the Computer Education and Instructional Technologies (CEIT) department. We divided students into two groups: (1) CEIT students designing and developing materials about Information Technology (IT); (2) CEIT students designing and developing materials about Math. The main aim of this study is to understand how CEIT students’ instructional materials differ when they design and develop materials, which are out of their field of experience. In other words, we tried to compare how the creativity of materials change when students create materials with familiar domain (IT) in comparison to unfamiliar domain (Math). Students worked on ten instructional materials such as digital story, animation, and worksheet for 14 weeks. The materials of students were evaluated in terms of creativity, and then they were interviewed. The students worked in groups of 4–5, and during the material development period, we as researchers observed and took notes about the whole process. The findings indicated that materials developed in familiar domain were higher in creativity than those of the unfamiliar. Students’ explanations of creativity and their evaluations about the process helped us to understand the reasons of the produced materials’ creativeness. Technical skills, authentic contributions, material type, and the boundaries of the content or familiarity were found as the primary factors affecting the design and development of creative instructional materials.     

Real interest rates: nonlinearity and structural breaks

Real interest rate is a crucial variable that determines the consumption, investment and saving behavior of individuals and thereby acts as a key policy tool that the central banks use to control the economy. Although many important theoretical models require the real interest rates to be stationary, the empirical evidence accumulated so far has not been able to provide conclusive evidence on the mean reverting dynamics of this variable. To resolve this puzzle we re-investigate the stochastic nature of the real interest rates by developing unit root tests for nonlinear heterogeneous panels where the alternative hypothesis allows for a smooth transition between deterministic linear trends around which stationary asymmetric adjustment may occur. When the newly developed panel unit root tests are applied to the real interest rates of the 17 OECD countries, we were able to uncover overwhelming empirical support in favor of mean reversion in the short-run and long-run real interest rates. Therefore, these results show that the conclusions drawn from a miss-specified test that ignores the presence of either nonlinearity, structural breaks or cross sectional dependence can give quite misleading results about the stochastic behavior of the real interest rates.     

Population growth and per capita income： A panel cointegration analysis

The noteworthy effects of demographic factors on economic development have been well documented. However, the empirical formulation grounds heavily on theoretical framework. Moreover, there is no set agreement on the relationship between population growth and per capita income. This paper retraces the famous pastime relationship for a sample of thirty-two countries classified as developing and developed over the period of 1970-2007. The methodology includes panel unit root tests and panel cointegration analysis. The main conclusion of the study is that population growth is an indicator of per capita income. The empirical findings display the existence of cointegration for both country groups. Moreover, the results support a significantly positive effect for developed countries; whereas a significantly negative effect for developing countries.     

Aiming to connect: the business case for diversity in public organizations in The Netherlands

This paper examines the effectiveness of diversity policy and interventions in the Dutch public sector and shows that business case interventions can affect employees’ commitment to their organization, contributing to staff retention rates and improving overall performance. Leadership style, as well as organizational culture, are shown to play a crucial role in the effectiveness of the interventions that were analysed.     

Re-examining the real interest rate parity hypothesis (RIPH) using panel unit root tests with asymmetry and cross-section dependence

This paper investigates the validity of the real interest rate parity hypothesis (RIPH) using a panel unit root approach. For this purpose, first we estimate the possible nonlinear data-generating processes of the real interest rate differential series and using these estimates determine which panel unit root test is better for analyzing the RIPH. To this end, smooth transition autoregressive and threshold autoregressive (TAR) models are estimated for two different panels of countries: G7 and post-Soviet transition economies. The results show that the data displays both strong asymmetry and high transition speed. Therefore, secondly, we propose a new panel unit root test where the alternative is stationary with asymmetric TAR adjustment, and provide their empirical power properties. Finally, we demonstrate that our newly proposed test is able to provide conclusive evidence in favor of the RIPH in contrast to the other panel unit root tests considered.     

“New” monetary policy instruments and exchange rate volatility

Turkish economy has been suffering from rises in financial flows since the last two decades that these flows have raised financial stability challenges across emerging economies including Turkey. Regarding the ability of the central banks to decrease the financial risks including volatile exchange rate, the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey has designed and implemented a new policy mix. In this study, we investigated the effect of new policy instruments (IRC, RRR and ROM) on the volatilities of US dollar, euro, British pound and basket rate for Turkish economy between January 2, 2002 and December 9, 2014 by using ARMA-GARCH, ARMA-EGARCH and SWARCH models. From the estimation results, we could not reach enough evidence that the IRC and RRR instruments could decrease the volatilities of exchange rates under investigation while the ROM instrument was successful, especially on US dollar and basket rate. We also found strong evidence in favour of asymmetric volatility, indicating that the positive shocks led to greater exchange rate volatility than negative ones.     

Consumer satisfaction and loyalty derived from the perceived quality of individual banking services: A field study in Eskişehir from Turkey

The research project intends to find out the differences in the quality of the services rendered by the national banks of Turkey as perceived by the bank customers. This paper is an academically held field research conducted in May 2000 in the city of Eski?ehir Turkey, covering 1340 respondents who are regular bank customers, that is, who carry out banking transactions more than once in a month. These banks are all well-known, nation-wide financial institutions publicly or privately owned and are classified under three main groups depending on their ownership style and their size. Respondents are selected systematically from different age groups, income groups, and occupations reflecting both sexes. A questionnaire form included ten close-end multiple-choice questions (excluding demographic questions) is designed for the research purpose     

MICRO CREDIT RISK METRICS: A COMPREHENSIVE REVIEW

Default modelling is a general term used for several interrelated fields of risk management. Bond defaults, credit (loan) defaults, firm defaults and country defaults are examples of this kind. The scope and reason for existence of this study is to focus mainly on firm default. The purpose of this review is to shed light on the development and evaluation of the models proposed for predicting bankruptcy in terms of conceptualization, country distribution, sector specification, time dimension, variables used and findings reported. The current review includes firm default studies published in business fields such as accounting, economics, finance and management science. This review is distinct in that it seeks (i) to give a comprehensive examination of the models, (ii) to compare and contrast the features of the models and (iii) to show with a solid argument where future research should be focused. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Border Crossings between Georgia and Turkey: The Sarp Land Border Gate

The Sarp land border gate between Turkey and Georgia has become Turkey’s gateway to the East in recent years. With a large number of individuals crossing every day, it is also a labour gate, where irregular Georgian immigrants cross the border for work in Turkey. In general, border policies are constructed and reconstructed in a dynamic process in which economic, security, ethnopolitical, geopolitical and cultural paradigms interact. The aim of this paper is to observe the complementary and conflicting relationship and negotiation process between economic and security paradigms in particular, with a focus on the perceptions of the officers of the border administration and state bureaucracy at the local level. To this end, field research was carried out consisting of interviews with Turkish state officials responsible for immigration and border crossing in the Sarp gate region. The article sheds light on the interaction between various agencies, actors and stakeholders in border policymaking at the regional level. It also elaborates on the profiles both of incoming immigrants employed as irregular workers and of deportees. The results of the qualitative study show that the dominance of the economic paradigm that underlies the main framework of Georgia-Turkey relations overrides security concerns between the two countries, thus necessitating a more flexible implementation of laws. The field research illustrates that implementation of laws and regulations at the local level varies and while some groups of irregular immigrants are allowed to work, others are not and, what is more, are deported.     

The role of communication in tolerance education

The idea of tolerance, which has a long historical background, has become a necessity rather than a choice for today’s multicultural, pluralistic and democratic society structures. The idea of tolerance in today’s societies is transferred to individuals of the society through family, school as well as the elements of both society and social structure. The way in which the idea of tolerance is transferred to individuals at all three levels is communication. Communication processes are entering the various forms in the family, in the school system and in the social structure and are developing individuals’ understanding of tolerance. This study focuses on the way how communication works at family, school and society levels as a path in the education process and how the communication process can be utilised effectively in order to develop the democratic community. The role and significance of communication in the process of tolerance education was investigated by the literature review method in the case study pattern as one of the qualitative research methods and the findings were evaluated comparatively.