Category: News

All latest news on Martin Mulder

WBREN meeting October 2012 Wageningen

On October 8-10, 2012, the WBREN project partners met in Wageningen. ECS hosted the meeting. The basic purpose of the meeting was to get the group of partners acquainted with rural development and the place of education and training in that in the Netherlands. The group reported good progress with the project, but a lot still had to be done. We are fortunate that the EU granted and extension of the project of one year. I am a bit late with this post. But here it is, pictures included.

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Journal of Agricultural Education and Extension

The Journal of Agricultural Education and Extension (JAEE) was analyzed by bibliometricians for possible submission to Thomson and Reuters for inclusion in the Social Science Citation Index. The ‘mock’ 2011 Impact Factor is 0,55, which is just below the middle of the journal list in the field of Education and Educational Research, thus being a Q3 journal. We will wait until this Impact Factor is a bit higher so that the JAEE will be a Q2 journal. This will probably take a year. Then we will resubmit the journal.

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Paper on Inquiry-Based Science Education Competencies printed

The article of Alake-Tuenter, E.; Biemans, H. J. A.; Tobi, H.; Wals, A.E.J., Oosterheert, I. & Mulder, M. (2012).  Inquiry-Based Science Education Competencies of Primary School Teachers: A literature study and critical review of the American National Science Education Standards. International journal of science education, 34, 17, pp. 2609-2640 is now printed and published. For the abstract go to http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09500693.2012.669076?prevSearch=alake&searchHistoryKey=

Pedagogy of interdisciplinary teaching

For many years integral approaches of curriculum development have been popular. The complaint was that school subjects were too isolated, universities suffered from overspecialisation and fragmentation, and that interdisciplinary education was badly needed. Examples of interdisciplinary approaches were social science in secondary and world orientation in elementary education. New subjects like beta and technology and design and research are more recent examples. In higher education there is a lot of attention for interdisciplinarity as problems in reality do not present themselves according to disciplinary lines. There are even a very limited higher education study programs which can be named mono-disciplinary. However, the empirical foundation of the pedagogy of interdisciplinary education is lacking. Elsbeth Spelt was among the first researchers who noted that. She started to study pedagogical rules for interdisciplinary education. Her first publication  Teaching and learning in interdisciplinary higher education: A systematic review (Elisabeth JH Spelt,  Harm JA Biemans,  Hilde Tobi,  Pieternel A Luning,  Martin Mulder) (2009). Educational Psychology Review. Volume 21, Issue 4, Pages 365-378, investigated research on this issue, and concluded with a model for interdisciplinary education analysis. We are waiting to see more from her since she has analysed a course on Food Quality Management at Wageningen University. From this research it is expected that the efficacy of design rules for interdisciplinary education are tested.

Wageningen University best university in the Netherlands – again!

For the 8th time in a row Wageningen University has been chosen the best university of the Netherlands by the Study Guide Higher Education of Elsevier. The programs in the social sciences which score at the first and second place nationally, are the following:

1st place: Applied Communication Science (82/100 points)
1st place: International Development Studies (72/100 points)
Shared 1st place: Health & Society (78/100 points)
2nd place: Economy & Policy (70/100 points)
2nd place Management and Consumer Studies (66/100 points)

All who are involved: congratulations!

Martin Mulder appointed in Scientific Advisory Board of the ITB of the University of Bremen

Martin Mulder is appointed in the Scientific Advisory Board of the Institute Technik und Bildung (ITB) of the University of Bremen.

The ITB (itb.uni-bremen.de/index.php) is an education and research institute within the University of Bremen. The institute offers Bachelor and Master degrees in science and technology teaching and conducts research in the field of 1. labour related learning processes, 2. job performance processes and vocational education, 3. international vocational education, innovation, and industry culture, and 4. learning, teaching and organisation. The ITB is the leading research institute in the field of technology and vocational education in the German language area and runs various international research and development programmes in the field of vocational education.

Education in Finland

Finnish education ranks #1 in Europe. Teachers not only in secondary but also in primary education need university education. The profession of teacher is appreciated very much and there are many more applicants for teacher education than there are places. This is what Erno Lehtinen explained in the VPRO TV programme Tegenlicht. Teacher education is embedded in the university and teachers get a university degree. There is no educational inspectorate. Teachers are autonomous, of course within national regulations.

Entrepreneurship Education and Entrepreneurial Intentions

The paper ‘The Role of Entrepreneurship Education in Developing Students’ Entrepreneurial Intentions’ by Saeid Karimi, Harm Biemans, Thomas Lans, Martin Mulder and Mohammad Chizari (September 27, 2012) (available at SSRN – the Social Science Research Network as: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2152944 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2152944), made it to the top 10 most downloaded papers in its specialisation. Congratulations Saeid Karimi.