1,720,984 research outputs found
Initial training policies and transferability of skills in Britain and Spain
No full textThis paper analyses the relationship between initial vocational education and training (VET) and life-long learning by looking at the way and extent to which different training policies foster the acquisition of general and transferable skills. General and transferable skills are defined in contrast to specific skills, as not being tied to any particular firm, sector or work process but as being applicable to a wide range of educational and professional situations. The term covers many different skills such as entrepreneurial (creativity, risk-management, responsibility, decision-making skills and initiative), interpersonal skills (flexibility, conflict-handling, team-building capacities), communication skills (reading comprehension, writing, foreign languages, negotiation skills) and other intellectual skills (mathematics, problem-solving, quality awareness and the up-dating of knowledge). General skills or qualifications are broader conceptually and they are usually defined in contrast to firm-specific ones. Both general and core skills have become increasingly valuable in labour markets that are characterised by change and where there is a constant need to adapt to new developments in technology and working methods. Concrete, specific or technical skills may become obsolete very rapidly and in addition the value of overly narrow vocational qualifications is diminishing in the light of technological innovation.
The paper is organised as follows. Firstly, we consider some of the factors that particularly affect the investment in training and the investment in transferable skills. Secondly, we place the training reforms in Spain and in Britain in a contextual framework and give an outline of the direction of these reforms in relation to those intervening factors. We argue that with the reform of their national training systems, which in both cases started in the late eighties, Spain and the UK have followed different routes in order to foster precisely an increase in the investment on the type of transferable or core skills mentioned above. Those pathways differ in two main dimensions: on the one hand, the extent to which policy strategies have aimed at reducing either individual or firms' constraints to receive or invest in transferable training; on the other hand, the extent to which the emphasis for certification focused on "demonstrated learning outcomes" (as opposed to "particular learning processes or places"). Finally, we present some of the policy lessons from the experience of both sets of reforms identifying the characteristics that might contribute and those that might hinder such investment
Extended schools : establishing a baseline methodology to estimate the impact of the extended schools programme on attainment
No full textGoing Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
The incidence and outcomes associated with the late attainment of qualifications in the United Kingdom
No full textThe differential in earnings premia between academically and vocationally trained males in the United Kingdom
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Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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