Boston College

About: Boston College is a education organization based out in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 9749 authors who have published 25406 publications receiving 1105145 citations. The organization is also known as: BC.

The role of aggregation in the measurement of IT-related organizational innovation

Abstract: The extent of organizational innovation with information technology, an important construct in the IT innovation literature, has been measured in many different ways. Some measures have a narrow focus while others aggregate innovative behaviors across a set of innovations or stages in the assimilation lifecycle. There appear to be some significant tradeoffs involving aggregation: more aggregated measures can be more robust and generalizable and can promote stronger predictive validity, while less aggregated measures allow more context-specific investigations and can preserve clearer theoretical interpretations. This article begins with a conceptual analysis that identifies the circumstances when these tradeoffs are most likely to favor aggregated measures. It is found that aggregation should be favorable when: (1) the researcher's interest is in general innovation or a model that generalizes to a class of innovations, (2) antecedents have effects in the same direction in all assimilation stages, (3) characteristics of organizations can be treated as constant across the innovations in the study, (4) characteristics of innovations can not be treated as constant across organizations in the study, (5) the set of innovations being aggregated includes substitutes or moderate complements, and (6) sources of noise in the measurement of innovation may be present. The article then presents an empirical study using data on the adoption of software process technologies by 608 U.S. based corporations. This study-which had circumstances quite favorable to aggregation- found that aggregating across three innovations within a technology class more than doubled the variance explained compared to single innovation models. Aggregating across assimilation stages also had a slight positive effect on predictive validity. Taken together, these results provide initial confirmation of the conclusions from the conceptual analysis regarding the circumstances favoring aggregation.

Scientific discourse in three urban classrooms: The role of the teacher in engaging high school students in argumentation

Abstract: Argumentation is a core practice of science and has recently been advocated as an essential goal of science education. Our research focuses on the discourse in urban high school science classrooms in which the teachers used the same global climate change curriculum. We analyzed transcripts from three teachers' classrooms examining both the argument structure as well the dialogic interactions between students. Between 19% and 35% of the discourse focused on scientific argumentation in that students were using evidence and reasoning to justify their claims. Yet in terms of dialogic interactions, only one teacher's classroom was characterized by student-to-student interactions and students explicitly supporting or refuting the ideas presented by their peers. This teacher's use of open questions appeared to encourage students to construct and justify their claims using both their scientific and everyday knowledge. Furthermore, her explicit connections to previous students' comments appeared to encourage students to consider multiple views, reflect on their thinking and reflect on the thinking of their classmates. This study suggests that a teacher's use of open-ended questions may play a key role in supporting students in argumentation in terms of both providing evidence and reasoning for students' claims and encouraging dialogic interactions between students. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed94:203–229, 2010

Narrative and vocabulary development of bilingual children from kindergarten to first grade: developmental changes and associations among English and Spanish skills.

Abstract: Purpose Research has identified English oral language proficiency as being critical for bilingual students' literacy development. This study examines developmental patterns and associations among o...