By Ines Lopez Pradas, Mareike Langhoff & Dmitry Trishin

As in any other introduction we would like to start with some points why learning motivation and how to motivate is important at all? According to Cheryl Spaulding the motivation is the key to student learning. Without motivating the kids, teacher cannot really teach them. It plays crucial role in the development of a human cognition. It influences our behavior and actually our behavior is built on motivation.  Knowing how motivation works, and how to motivate, would really help us to make our educational system efficient. Especially in the modern context, when individual approach is being introduced to the education, it requires us to know how to motivate every single student.  Motivation activates our resources, and the better motivation is, the better we can memorize things, the better achievement we get, the more effort we put in our activity.

By Olga Krasilnikova, Elena Kazakova, and Sophie Stahl

Although formal teacher training in most countries includes both theoretical and practical experience, beginning teachers often feel unprepared for their occupation. There are different reasons for that. Besides learning the necessary skills and “tricks of the trade”, novice teachers also have to deal with changing social roles – from a learner to a teacher. To help with this transition, the first steps of teaching are often supported by more experienced colleagues or mentors. Mentoring – not only in the school context – has been defined as an “intense interpersonal relationship where a more senior individual (the mentor) provides guidance and support to a more junior organisational member (the protégé)” (Eby & Lockwood, 2005).

By Lucia Moser & Jovana Pavlovic

In a world of today, we are constantly directed towards future. A highly competitive labour market of new age causes that organizations and companies, of no matter what type, are facing retention challenges. Employees are not anymore likely to spend their working life in one company. But if it is about top performers (top managers, knowledge workers), a head of a company or organization should really be bothered by this fact. If a company intends to stay competitive and successful, there is a huge need for it to keep skilled employees. And this question of retention has been researched a lot in previous years and the research is not yet over. As the world and workforce are developing and changing in all ways, examining these kinds of questions is becoming of more and more importance. When we speak about retention of workers, we should think about topics like job satisfaction, organizational learning, motivation of employees, knowledge management and reasons for turnover.

By Gabriela Rodriguez & Matias Saarni

In the following text we take a closer look at the concept of learning from errors and its potential outcome, negative knowledge, by critically analyzing some operational environments in which the concepts mentioned above manifest themselves. We share two real-life examples from different areas, an elementary school and the military, and discuss them from a critical point of view. We also consider the theoretical approaches behind the phenomena of learning from errors and how earlier research relates to the concepts at issue. To conclude we sum up our findings and learning resulting from the task, and consider further investigations.

By Gabriel U. Ezechukwu & and Sonya Sahradyan

BACKGROUND AND RATIONALE

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are life-long conditions with presumed neurodevelopmental aetiology (Matson & Rivet, 2008). It is classified under The American Psychological Association DSM-IV- TR (2000) as one of the Pervasive Developmental Disorders (PDD). ASD is consists of classical autism, Asperger’s syndrome (AS) and pervasive development disorder not otherwise specified. Persons with autistic spectrum disorder are quite heterogeneous in their characteristics. While some may experience difficulties in learning, others function on the normal intelligence or cognitive skill level of the general population. Others still may possess exceptionally high cognitive abilities especially in the areas of logics and music and visual arts. This last group is often referred to as autistic servants. However, the underlining features of person with ASD are deficits in social interactions and communication, and the presence of stereotyped behaviors interest and activities (DSM-IV- TR, 2000). The focus of this article is on Asperger’s Syndrome (AS), a part of the autism spectrum. The distinguishing features of people with AS is that they do not experience the delayed language development that is typical of persons with classical autism though they still have problems with pragmatic aspects of language. In addition, people with AS have average or above average intelligence; often defined as having intelligence quotient of 85 and above (Pijnacker et al., 2009).

A quick look at the above paragraph may portray this article as being out of place and better suited for Psychology and Special Education journals and audience. However, professionals in workplace learning and the business world will benefit from this.

By Nazli Dirim

Kyriacou (1998) in his book called Essential teaching skills emphasizes how “the art of successful teaching” is related to “developing decision-making skills and action skills” (p.1). He lists the three key characteristics of the nature of teaching skills as follows:

1. They involve purposeful and goal-directed behaviour.
2. Their level of expertise is evidenced by the display of precision, smoothness and sensitivity to context.
3. They can be improved by training and practice (p.2).

Among the key characteristics mentioned above, the third item particularly captures my attention. 

by Emmanouilidis Angelos & Cai Manhua

Introduction

By the end of the 19^th century, together with the first steps of psychology as a separate branch of science away from philosophy and sociology the first theories for learning started to appear. For the following decades behaviorism, one of the first and most important theoretical approaches in psychology which has definitely left its mark to the field, was trying to study, understand and explain how people learn. That legacy of the previous century became the base for many theories which are developed even in our days.

by Tobias Düsterdick & Monique Mey

Due to the process of globalisation it becomes more and more essential for companies of all branches to be adaptive toward the requirements of the markets. A well-known example for this circumstance is the trade rivalry between the famous companies Apple and Microsoft in order to get the predominance at the global operating-system-market. Therefore are employees needed, who are competent and motivated to learn on their workplaces with the aim to improve the competitiveness of their companies. Furthermore the rapid technical progress is a major part of current workplaces, which underline the exigency of workplace learning.

by Fabian Meissner & Stefan Spiess

Does it matter whether you are a man or a woman when it comes to learning at your workplace? How does your popularity influence the process? And: Who really is the person in your company that passes on the important knowledge? These Questions are all asked under one basic premise: Learning is a process of social interaction, and so it is subject to multiple social factors. Workplace Learning is no exception to that, so our task was to take a closer look on how social reality is constructed at a workplace. Since we were especially interested in the questions mentioned above, we decided to focus on two main issues: gender and network structures. At first, however, we want to explain our concept of the term “socio-cultural” in order to prevent misunderstandings and shed a little light on our idea of the social construction of knowledge.

by Agathe Jasinski & Christoph Huschka

The topic of expertise is discussed more and more in our civilization. It isn’t easy to define the area of an expert. A simple way of the development into an expert could in our opinion be explained by regarding pupils, teachers and professors. The majority of people believes that every professor is an expert. In order to become a professor you have to absolve a higher school, then you have to specialize in a specific domain. For some people the teacher’s expertise is between that of a pupil and that of a professor. But is this already expertise? We want to show up different aspects, that might help to regard this discussion from different points of view.