Abstract The main purpose of this intervention was to measure student’s motivation in English Literature before and after an intervention based Zoltán Dörnyei’s Motivational Self System (2009) and Michael Magid’s (2011) application of the same theory in schools in Singapore. The present intervention was adapted to the students of the Dutch secondary school CLV (Christian Lyceum Veenendaal) in Veenendaal using fragments of English Literature (books, films, poems and songs). The intervention was carried out during eight lessons of fifty minutes where students had to participate in a variety of activities, all registered in a workbook assigned to each student at the beginning of the research project. Prior to and after the intervention, students filled in a questionnaire on motivation and English Literature. The results of these questionnaires were analysed with SPSS running descriptive statistical analysis. Along with these analyses, the timelines and life trees made by the students during the lessons and students’ answers given to the exercises on the workbooks were evaluated and compared. One of the most important conclusions of the intervention was that female students were more motivated, could make action plans and set goals easier and more detailed than male students. Another important result was that students in general had no interest in English Literature, although they realised it can be influential in their future life. The affective attitude of students to- wards the teacher and materials increased after the intervention, as well as students’ confidence in their own effort during class. However, the construct validity between the quantitative and qualitative data could not be established due to the fact that gender was not included as variable in the questionnaire. Gender relevancy became visible after the analyses of the workbooks. Therefore, future research will have to focus on including gender as a variable in the questionnaire in order to establish solid relations between quantitative and qualitative data. Another interesting research question for future interventions could be how to adapt English Literature and the materials that are being used in a way that both female and male students can tap into their own intrinsic motivational current.
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English is increasingly the dominant language of academic scholarship. This means that much research produced in other languages is overlooked, a tendency strengthened by the growing power of global publishers and university ranking systems. This initial scoping study provides an exploratory review of non-English scholarship in the field of event management, drawing on an extensive literature search in Arabic, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Slovenian and Spanish. We find a considerable number of event management publications in these languages, which effectively represent a ‘missing body of knowledge’ for scholars working in English. Only about 10% of these non-English sources are covered by Scopus, for example. Our scoping study indicates that this excludes many scholars and potentially interesting areas of work from the global event management corpus. We suggest several strategies which could be employed to address these issues.
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Innovation is crucial for higher education to ensure high-quality curricula that address the changing needs of students, labor markets, and society as a whole. Substantial amounts of resources and enthusiasm are devoted to innovations, but often they do not yield the desired changes. This may be due to unworkable goals, too much complexity, and a lack of resources to institutionalize the innovation. In many cases, innovations end up being less sustainable than expected or hoped for. In the long term, the disappointing revenues of innovations hamper the ability of higher education to remain future proof. Against the background of this need to increase the success of educational innovations, our colleague Klaartje van Genugten has explored the literature on innovations to reveal mechanisms that contribute to the sustainability of innovations. Her findings are synthesized in this report. They are particularly meaningful for directors of education programs, curriculum committees, educational consultants, and policy makers, who are generally in charge of defining the scope and set up of innovations. Her report offers a comprehensive view and provides food for thought on how we can strive for future-proof and sustainable innovations. I therefore recommend reading this report.
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