Do hours matter? The relationship between motivation and study intensity in learners of English in Scotland

This paper examines the impact of English language learners’ motivation on their choice of study intensity using data from a national survey of learners in publicly funded English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) courses across Scotland. In particular, the motivation of learners attending only a few hours per week (i.e. very part-time learners) is compared with those attending for more hours. Our study found that there are differences in motivation and aspiration amongst very part-time and part-time or full-time learners but also that employment and child care may have as much influence as motivation in causing learners to enrol on very part-time English classes. The findings relating to these learners in our study present a particular challenge to ESOL providers which offer only very part-time courses.     

Converging trend of innovation efforts in high technology firms under paradigm shift—a case of Japan's electrical machinery

Japan's electrical machinery firms are typical high technology firms and have been playing a leading role in Japan's economic development. This is primarily due to the large amount of R&D investment motivated by technoprenuership leading to high level of technology stock. However, such a high level of technology stock has dichotomized the firms resulting in the converging trend over the last two decades.     

A unifying approach to non-inferiority, equivalence and superiority tests via multiple decision processes

Two approaches of multiple decision processes are proposed for unifying the non-inferiority, equivalence and superiority tests in a comparative clinical trial for a new drug against an active control. One is a method of confidence set with confidence coefficient 0.95 improving the conventional 0.95 confidence interval in the producer's risk and also the consumer's risk in some cases. It requires to include 0 within the region as well as to clear the non-inferiority margin so that a trial with somewhat large number of subjects and inappropriately large non-inferiority margin for proving non-inferiority of a drug that is actually inferior should be unsuccessful. The other is the closed testing procedure which combines the one- and two-sided tests by applying the partitioning principle and justifies the switching procedure by unifying the non-inferiority, equivalence and superiority tests. In particular regarding the non-inferiority, the proposed method justifies simultaneously the old Japanese Statistical Guideline (one-sided 0.05 test) and the International Guideline ICH E9 (one-sided 0.025 test). The method is particularly attractive, changing the strength of the evidence of relative efficacy of the test drug against a control at five levels according to the achievement of the clinical trial. The meaning of the non-inferiority test and also the rationale of switching from it to superiority test will be discussed.     

TWO-WAY CHANGE-POINT MODEL AND ITS APPLICATION

Exact null and alternative distributions of the two-way maximally selected x² for interaction between the ordered rows and columns are derived for each of the normal and Poisson models, respectively. The method is one of the multiple comparison procedures for ordered parameters and is useful for defining a block interaction or a two-way change-point model as a simple alternative to the two-way additive model. The construction of a confidence region for the two-way change-point is then described. An important application is found in a dose-response clinical trial with ordered categorical responses, where detecting the dose level which gives significantly higher responses than the lower doses can be formulated as a problem of detecting a change in the interaction effects.