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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of scaffolded lesson study on the content knowledge, conceptions of curriculum, and classroom practice of 22 elementary and secondary history teachers in four school districts.

Teachers, teacher educators, and historians collaborated to design and test research lessons grounded in a theory-based framework for problem-based historical inquiry (PBHI) practice. The authors sought to support consonance between the reform ideas of the formal, professional development, curriculum, and the curriculum as enacted in participants’ classrooms.

Project participation was associated with significant gains in content knowledge and the conceptualization and implementation of more challenging instruction consistent with the PBHI model and the standards of authentic intellectual work (AIW). Mean AIW instruction scores for research lessons were more than double the scores for participants’ non-lesson study lessons and indicated noteworthy progress in integrating the formal and enacted curricula. Evidence suggested that many teachers developed more nuanced understandings of historical phenomena, gained greater appreciation for the importance of authentic purpose in motivating student engagement in challenging learning, and began to reconsider what is required to facilitate complex learning and to refine their repertoire of learning strategies.

Evidence from the first year of this project offers hope for the potential of collaborative communities of practice to facilitate a shared professional knowledge base of wise practice that brings the formal, intended, and enacted curriculum into greater alignment. These results also emphasize the evolutionary process of conceptual change.

The purpose of this paper is to expand the understanding of the “front end” of innovation by examining the influence of top executives, who allocate the resources and cultivate the culture in which inventions are born, on the innovation process.

This paper suggests that the effect of executives on innovation can be better understood by explicitly separating innovation into the component processes of invention and commercialization. This allows us to consider how executive characteristics might have a different effect on technology development outcomes than they do on the subsequent transformation of those technologies into new products. The theory is tested on a sample of firms from the biomedical device industry.

The findings indicate that top management team (TMT) age and tenure have no effect on the type of technologies a firm develops (radical vs incremental) but do significantly affect the efficiency with which new technologies are turned into new products in some contexts. TMT heterogeneity affects both the type of technologies developed in the firm and also their transformation to new products. Interestingly, the effect of executives on commercialization depends on the type of underlying technologies which the firm has developed.

This paper contributes to the literatures on TMTs and innovation by offering a more granular explanation of how executives differentially impact the disaggregated stages of the innovation process, and thus also contributes to knowledge of the long-term innovation performance implications of executive leadership.

As most teachers realize, classroom discussions have limitations including time restraints, reserved participants, or domineering discussants. With the advent of Web 2.0, the opportunities for class discussion have expanded to include synchronous and asynchronous discussion boards, blogs, and wikis. Discussion forums, as an extension of classroom discussions and activities, allow teachers to target multiple social studies skills while giving students opportunities to expand their own historical understandings via peer interaction. Whether the goal is to address specific historical thinking skills or push students to think about what it means to be an active citizen in a diverse society, discussion forums can play an integral role in the development of students’ understanding of society. I describe the reasons for expanding discussion into these new mediums and provide examples of students’ online discussions. Recommendations are offered for teachers who would like to begin using discussion forums in their own classrooms.

Compared to younger and older generation migrants, middle-aged migrants in the diaspora seem to be more conflicted regarding their belonging. This paper aims to explore how middle-aged migrants in the diaspora define themselves in space and time.

The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork done among Malawian migrants (herein referred to as Lydiatians) settled at Lydiate informal settlement in peri-urban Zimbabwe.

The paper reveals that, while younger migrants have a “radical transnational stance”, and older migrants regard their place of settlement as their final home, middle-aged migrants prefer to maintain a “strategic dual sense of place” regarding their place of settlement in the diaspora. These middle-aged migrants can be entrepreneurs considering their current settlement as a strategic place for petty commodity trading or those who find informal settlements to provide needed opportunities for cheap housing as the migrants pursue work in the nearby towns.

The paper offers a deeper understanding of how middle-aged migrants navigate their sense of place and contribute to host nations by functioning as key resources, dynamizing local economies through entrepreneurial activities and labour provision for various industries. The implications of this research should encourage states to positively interact with migrants, leveraging their potential for societal and economic development.

The finding that migrants in the diaspora have a dual, strategic view of their settlements is fascinating, if not new. Before this, scholars presented migrants as transnational figures, successively moving to a better place, which finally becomes home. However, the data presented in this paper suggests that this characterization associating migrants with maintaining a “stable, sedentary, bounded and fixed perception of home” is oversimplified. This is because migrants can sometimes continue to cherish the idea of informal settlements in the diaspora as home, just as the migrants also entertain the nearby established towns as useful places in their life.

Tucked in the back of Venkataraman’s 1997 work on the distinctive domain of entrepreneurship (DDE) lies a pointer to a question each individual must face when choosing to start a new venture; “is entrepreneurship worth it?” Inventorying costs associated with risk, uncertainty, and illiquidity against surpluses from financial and psychological factors unique to entrepreneurship, Venkataraman tempts readers to tally entrepreneurial returns. The authors summarize and integrate an academic study of these various cost and return components over the past 20 years using Venkataraman’s original framework. The authors find the answer to the question of “is entrepreneurship worth it?” varies with time. Researcher’s answer to the question has shifted from an early view that entrepreneurs sacrifice financial gain in exchange for soft psychological benefits to a more positive view that entrepreneurs are rewarded both financially and psychologically for the unique costs borne in the DDE. But the rewards are not immediate. In entrepreneur time, break-even emerges by gradually overcoming an initial deficit. As surpluses accrue, returns to entrepreneurs likely eventually exceed those of their wage-earning peers.

Students in all content areas are almost exclusively presented with text-based instruction that starkly contrasts their experiences outside a classroom. With the advent of sophisticated technologies unknown to earlier generations, modern students are evermore immersed in visual data such as photographs, videos, games, apps. Visual media comprise many of the resources that adolescents use to negotiate understandings of the world. Many teachers and teacher-educators suggest that civic competence requires meeting powerful media with equally powerful analysis tools. In this, the first of two coupled articles — the second to be published in the July issue of Social Studies Research and Practice — I describe the educative potential of employing visual documents, especially historical photographs, in social studies instruction and refer to implications drawn from recent research studies. I also introduce an original lesson demonstrating wise practice teaching strategies for implementing historical photographs in classroom instruction to promote students’ civic competence. The second coupled article will extend the wise practice teaching strategies and feature all of the resources needed to enact the lesson and provide closure to the ideas posited throughout both articles.

Acquisition is one of key corporate strategic decisions for firms’ growth and competitive advantage. Firms: (1) diversify through acquisition to balance cash flows and spread the business risks; and (2) eliminate their competitors through acquisition by acquiring new technology, new operating capabilities, process innovations, specialized managerial expertise, and market position. Thus, firms acquire either unrelated or related business based on their strategic motivations, such as diversifying their business lines or improving market power in the same business line. These different motivations may be related to their assessment of market growth, firms’ competitive position, and top management’s compensation. Thus, it is hypothesized that firms’ acquisition decisions may be related to their industry growth potential, post-acquisition firm growth, market share change, and CEO’s compensation composition between cash and equity. In addition, for the two alternative acquisition accounting methods allowed until recently, a test is made if the type of acquisition is related to the choice of accounting methods. This study classifies firms’ acquisitions as related or unrelated, based on the standard industrial classification (SIC) codes for both acquiring and target firms. The empirical tests are, first, based on all the acquisition cases regardless of the firm membership, and then, deal with the firms acquiring only related businesses or unrelated businesses exclusively.

The type of acquisitions was more likely related to industry growth opportunities, indicating that the unrelated acquisition cases are more likely to be followed by higher industry growth rate than the related acquisition cases. While there were a substantially larger number of acquisition cases using the purchase method, the related acquisition cases used the pooling-of-interest method more frequently than in the unrelated acquisition cases. The firm-level analysis shows that the type of acquisition decisions was still related to acquiring firms’ industry growth rate. However, the post-acquisition performance measures, using firm’s growth and change in market share, could support prior studies in that the exclusive-related acquisitions helped firms grow more and get more market share than the exclusive-unrelated acquisitions. CEO’s compensation composition ratio was not related to the types of acquisition.