Object play yields enormous benefits for infant development. However, little is known about natural play at home where most object interactions occur. We conducted frame‐by‐frame video analyses of ...spontaneous activity in two 2‐h home visits with 13‐month‐old crawling infants and 13‐, 18‐, and 23‐month‐old walking infants (N = 40; 21 boys; 75% White). Regardless of age, for every infant and time scale, across 10,015 object bouts, object interactions were short (median = 9.8 s) and varied (transitions among dozens of toys and non‐toys) but consumed most of infants’ time. We suggest that infant exuberant object play—immense amounts of brief, time‐distributed, variable interactions with objects—may be conducive to learning object properties and functions, motor skill acquisition, and growth in cognitive, social, and language domains.
The development of more effective rehabilitative interventions requires a better understanding of how humans learn and transfer motor skills in real-world contexts. Presently, clinicians design ...interventions to promote skill learning by relying on evidence from experimental paradigms involving simple tasks, such as reaching for a target. While these tasks facilitate stringent hypothesis testing in laboratory settings, the results may not shed light on performance of more complex real-world skills. In this perspective, we argue that virtual environments (VEs) are flexible, novel platforms to evaluate learning and transfer of complex skills without sacrificing experimental control. Specifically, VEs use models of real-life tasks that afford controlled experimental manipulations to measure and guide behavior with a precision that exceeds the capabilities of physical environments. This paper reviews recent insights from VE paradigms on motor learning into two pressing challenges in rehabilitation research: 1) Which training strategies in VEs promote complex skill learning? and 2) How can transfer of learning from virtual to real environments be enhanced? Defining complex skills by having nested redundancies, we outline findings on the role of movement variability in complex skill acquisition and discuss how VEs can provide novel forms of guidance to enhance learning. We review the evidence for skill transfer from virtual to real environments in typically developing and neurologically-impaired populations with a view to understanding how differences in sensory-motor information may influence learning strategies. We provide actionable suggestions for practicing clinicians and outline broad areas where more research is required. Finally, we conclude that VEs present distinctive experimental platforms to understand complex skill learning that should enable transfer from therapeutic practice to the real world.
PurposeThis study seeks to explore the demand side of the labour market influenced by the digital revolution. It aims at identifying the new composition of skills and their value as implicitly ...manifested by employers when they look for the new labour force. The authors analyse the returns to computing skills based on text mining techniques applied to the job advertisements.Design/methodology/approachThe methodology is based on the hedonic pricing model with the Heckman correction to overcome the sample selection bias. The empirical part is based on a large data set that includes more than 9m online vacancies on one of the biggest job boards in Russia from 2006 to 2018.FindingsEmpirical evidence for both negative and positive returns to computing skills and their monetary values is found. Importantly, the authors also have found both complementary and substitutional effects within and between non-domain (basic) and domain (advanced) subgroups of computing skills.Originality/valueApart from the empirical evidence on the value of professional computing skills and their interrelations, this study provides the important methodological contribution on applying the hedonic procedure and text mining to the field of human resource management and labour market research.
Background & Aim: While hard skills refer to the technical ability and factual knowledge needed to do a job, soft skills allow you to use your technical abilities and knowledge more effectively. ...These two skills are complementary, but soft skills are prerequisites in every profession where human interaction and teamwork are needed to succeed. This integrative review examined the research on soft skills in nursing and made recommendations based on its findings.
Methods & Materials: Whittemore and Knafl’s five-step integrative review framework was carried out using four electronic databases. These databases are the Cumulative Index to Nursing & Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), PubMed, Medline on EBSCOhost, and Scopus. Searches were conducted using keywords: soft skills, non-technical skills, nursing skills, nursing art, and aesthetics. The literature search explored no date ranges, and only the English language was considered. Full texts of relevant studies in both qualitative and quantitative research were retrieved. Critical appraisal was undertaken, and the findings of the relevant studies were analyzed using thematic analysis.
Results: Seventeen studies were included, and the findings suggest an urgent need for soft skills in the nursing domain. Five themes emerged: the meaning of soft skills in nursing, the benefits of soft skills in nursing; the need for soft skills in nursing; the incorporation of soft skills into nursing practice; and the relationship between hard and soft skills. Findings show soft skills are the cognitive and social capabilities that complete the technical skills of the nurse.
Conclusion: Incorporating soft skills into the nursing curriculum should be a resuscitative call that requires immediate attention.
The labor market increasingly rewards social skills. Between 1980 and 2012, jobs requiring high levels of social interaction grew by nearly 12 percentage points as a share of the U.S. labor force. ...Math-intensive but less social jobs—including many STEM occupations—shrank by 3.3 percentage points over the same period. Employment and wage growth were particularly strong for jobs requiring high levels of both math skill and social skills. To understand these patterns, I develop a model of team production where workers “trade tasks” to exploit their comparative advantage. In the model, social skills reduce coordination costs, allowing workers to specialize and work together more efficiently. The model generates predictions about sorting and the relative returns to skill across occupations, which I investigate using data from the NLSY79 and the NLSY97. Using a comparable set of skill measures and covariates across survey waves, I find that the labor market return to social skills was much greater in the 2000s than in the mid-1980s and 1990s.
•A model linking visual-spatial and language skills to arithmetic competence is proposed.•Visual-spatial skills predict nonsymbolic and written arithmetic and arithmetic word problems.•Morphological ...skills predict word problems.•Phonological skills predict written arithmetic.•Visual-orthographic skills predict nonsymbolic and written arithmetic.
This study set out to develop and test a pathway model of the relations between general cognitive skills, specifically visual-spatial and spoken and written language skills, and competence in three forms of arithmetic that vary in modes of number representation. A total of 88 Chinese 4-year-olds participated and were tested first in kindergarten second grade (K2) and then in kindergarten third grade (K3). Language skills, including phonological, morphological, and visual-orthographic skills, and visual-spatial skills were measured at K2, and arithmetic outcomes, including written arithmetic, word problems, and nonsymbolic arithmetic, at K3. The results generally supported our model. Specifically, visual-spatial skills contributed to the prediction of all three types of arithmetic outcomes. Morphological skills predicted word problems, whereas phonological skills predicted written arithmetic. Finally, visual-orthographic skills contributed to both written and nonsymbolic arithmetic. These findings underscore the importance of delineating the specificity of cognitive processes in learning diverse forms of arithmetic.
Summary
A common approach to addressing ability bias is to augment the earnings‐schooling regression with proxies for cognitive and non‐cognitive skills. We evaluate this approach using a factor ...model framework, which allows consistent estimation of the returns to schooling without relying on proxies. The factor model estimators may be viewed as implicitly estimating proxy measurement error and/or accounting for omitted dimensions of ability. A bias decomposition quantifies the contribution of the proxies while the estimated latent skills are used to construct direct tests for their viability. Both sets of results confirm the inadequacy of the proxies in capturing the latent skills.
This open access book illustrates a new type of formative intervention for in-service teacher training in entrepreneurship education. The book describes a Change Laboratory and shows how teachers and ...workshop assistants develop the idea of a multidisciplinary project entailing the design of a self-service and parking lot in a dismissed area close to the city centre. The multidisciplinary project is taken as example of how an idea is debated and turned into collective action and change, the very essence of initiative and entrepreneurship. The Change Laboratory thus increases the participation of students, teachers and stakeholders in the school towards a new curriculum through the implementation of a multidisciplinary project connecting school with the world outside and working life. The book features a foreword by Luke Pittaway, USASBE Entrepreneurship Educator of 2018. The manuscript discusses key concepts of Cultural Historical Activity Theory’s Change Laboratory as a formative intervention in a coherent and accessible manner. Beyond that it carefully illustrates how the Change Laboratory and its principles of double stimulation and ascending from the abstract to the concrete can be used as a theory of change to address one of the difficult and new demands of the European Union’s New Skills Agenda. The author takes the reader through the expansive learning journey and uses strong evidence to show how a new object can be developed, and how associated tensions and contradictions can be surfaced and tackled by actors with a partially shared object, and how a new concept can be formed and enriched through implementation and reflection in a manner that generates collective transformative agency. (Reviewer) This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 654101. ; Discusses a new and emerging topic in teacher training For the first time the change laboratory is used for teacher training in entrepreneurship Discusses an example of how the change laboratory can be implemented in a multidisciplinary project
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