Abstract The present study examined the effect of language exchange activities on development productive foreign skills primary school pupils. sample comprised a total 392 pupils from German- and French-speaking Switzerland, attending 5th 6th grade. pupils’ speaking writing were longitudinally using quasi-experimental pre-test post-test design with an intervention control group. lasted one year...

There is a debate in the literature as to whether young children’s categorization abilities are more closely related to their general productive vocabulary or their specific word knowledge. The present study examines this relationship in children 18 to 26 months of age. Specifically, it tests the hypothesis that children’s understanding of individual words is more closely related to their categ...

Abstract Innovation is often seen as a crucial factor for regional economic growth. Many strands of literature have investigated the role agglomeration externalities or workers’ skills in innovation capacity territory without ever considering their interaction. Using fixed-effects Poisson regression models on official data 2014–2019 Italian regions, this paper aims twofold. First, by controllin...

Contrary to the fairly established notion in the learning sciences that un-scaffolded processes rarely lead to meaningful learning, this study reports a hidden efficacy of such processes and a method for extracting it. Compared to scaffolded, well-structured problem-solving groups, un-scaffolded, ill-structured problem-solving groups struggled with defining and solving the problems. Their discu...

It’s a truism that innovation has the power to create and destroy jobs. One question is whether more jobs are created than are destroyed by innovation. Historically, more new jobs are created partly as a consequence of a growing population (with its increased demands for products and services) and partly because of new demands. The market for mobile phones exploded especially after the inventio...

This case description focuses on how we have used activity theoretical concepts as analytical tools for improving better pedagogical design regarding a particular course on objectoriented programming. We argue that productive learning environments must be considered as environments where certain pedagogical, communicative, technological conditions are incorporated with the specific knowledge do...

This article describes the communication skills programme of the International Medical University, which adopts an integrated medical curriculum. The programme, implemented in February 2005, is based on a systematic framework aimed at teaching students basic interpersonal communication skills progressively and continuously throughout the pre-clinical phase.