Shimelis Assefa

A bibliometric mapping of the structure of STEM education using co-word analysis

STEM, a set of fields that includes science, technology, engineering, and mathematics; allied disciplines ranging from environmental, agricultural, and earth sciences to life science and computer science; and education and training in these fields, is clearly at the top of the list of priority funding areas for governments, including the United States government. The U.S. has 11 federal agencies dedicated to supporting programs and providing funding for research and curriculum development. The domain of STEM education has significant implications in preparing the desired workforce with the requisite knowledge, developing appropriate curricula, providing teachers the necessary professional development, focusing research dollars on areas that have maximum impact, and developing national educational policy and standards. A complex undertaking such as STEM education, which attracts interest and valuable resources from a number of stakeholders needs to be well understood. In light of this, we attempt to describe the underlying structure of STEM education, its core areas, and their relationships through co‐word analyses of the titles, keywords, and abstracts of the relevant literature using visualization and bibliometric mapping tools. Implications are drawn with respect to the nature of STEM education as well as curriculum and policy development.

Faculty members’ perceptions towards institutional repository at a medium-sized university: Application of a binary logistic regression model

Purpose – The study aimed to investigate the perceptions of faculty members at a medium-sized university towards self-archiving and participation in institutional repositories (IRs). Design/methodology/approach – The research participants were from a medium-sized university. An online survey was distributed and a total of 217 responses were received which yielded a 40 per cent overall response rate. Faculty perceptions of the IR were measured through nine dimensions, the results of which were later summarised using principal component factor analysis. Findings – Faculty members’ perception of IRs and willingness to contribute to the IRs were closely associated with scholarly productivity rather than prior knowledge of and experience with IRs. Those who possessed scholarly materials were significantly more likely to have a positive perception of IRs and, therefore, were more likely to contribute to IRs than those who did not. Seniority in faculty rank contributed negatively to faculty members’ perception o...

Open access: The global scene

Significant achievements have been scored regarding Open Access (OA) and its worldwide adoption. The increasing numbers in the availability of OA repositories and journals (refereed and otherwise); publishers that embraced OA in different forms; universities and colleges that adopted OA as a matter of policy; and funding agencies that require authors and researchers to deposit their work in openly accessible digital repositories are all clear indications of the widespread adoption of OA practices. However, the practices are not well coordinated, largely project-based, and dictated by institutional circumstances. For the sake of disseminating and preserving scholarly publications and other forms of research outputs well into the future, it is critical that a consistent and uniform policy and technical framework that addresses the needs and concerns of all relevant stakeholders involved be adopted. Members of this panel will review the global OA practices and suggest ideas for the implementation of an international infrastructure that supports and sustains the future of open scholarly communication.

Harnessing social media for promoting tourism in Africa: an exploratory analysis of tweets

This paper investigates the nature of tweets about African cultural heritage and potential strategies for tourism stakeholders.

Content divide: Africa and the global knowledge footprint sponsored by: SIG/III

The purpose of this panel is to discuss the global knowledge output at a macro level with a view to understand key inputs that foster scientific and research performance. Here, knowledge production is limited to scientific and technical journals and patent registrations to gauge the performance of each region and continent the world over. Greater emphasis will be placed to highlight important indicators from the input side that help spur national research and innovation systems in Africa. Defined here as “content divide,” panel members focus on key variables that help build scientific and research capabilities of Africa. Closely interrelated variables that will be discussed include (1) access to the global knowledge base, (2) the role of higher education systems (3) national, regional, and global research and education networks (RENs); and (4) gross expenditure on R&D (GERD).

Coherent knowledge structure and theory-based approach to categorization

How we understand our surroundings is an age old question. The general understanding is that it is through concepts, categories, and relations that we make sense of our world. This study presents a result of a dissertation that attempted to investigate the nexus between human cognition of concepts/categories and the knowledge structure in the unified medical language system (UMLS). In contrast to the classical account that views category as structures organized in terms of similarity, this study takes a new approach that explains categories as structures organized around theories. The findings reveal that humans largely use simplified rules, definition type descriptions, and naive explanations as bases for categorization judgment (coherence criteria). These explanations research participants used to characterize their category formation, after a careful text analysis, created meaningful and coherent interrelationships when plotted in a visual link chart. The performance of the cognitive task also showed a remarkable difference between those with subject background and those without. Using the least restrictive notion of ‘distance’ as a function of relatedness, this study also showed a significant correspondence between human conceptual map (based on the cognitive performance) and the knowledge structure in the UMLS, as shown by the goodness-of-fit coefficient.