We studied the relationships between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial intention among college students, with a focus on the mediating role of an entrepreneurial mindset as well as the moderating roles of learning motivation and prior entrepreneurial exposure. More than 90,000 students from 100 colleges or universities participated in the investigation, the data were subjected to structural equation modeling with Mplus. The results indicated that entrepreneurship education (curriculum attendance and extracurricular activity) significantly enhanced the entrepreneurial mindset of students, which, in turn, strengthened their entrepreneurial intention. In terms of learning, intrinsic motivation positively moderated the relationships between curriculum attendance and entrepreneurial intention/mindset, whereas extrinsic motivation moderated it negatively. Entrepreneurial exposure positively moderated the correlation between extracurricular activity and academic performance. Implications concerning the adjustment of entrepreneurship education to the entrepreneurial climate are discussed.
Authoritarian parenting has long been associated with Western individualism and improved child development. This study examined the relationship between cultural values, parenting styles, and children’s perceived competence in Hong Kong. A total of 48 parents from local Chinese families, 49 parents from South Asian families, and 105 children (24 local Chinese and 81 South Asian) aged 5–6 years participated in the study. Self-report questionnaires on adherence to Asian cultural values and parenting style were administered to parents. The Pictorial Survey on Children’s Perceived Competence was administered to children by trained research assistants. The results contradicted two long-standing assumptions on Asian cultural values and parenting styles. First, higher adherence to Asian cultural values increased the likelihood of having an authoritarian parenting style. Second, authoritative parenting practices were more likely be associated with improved social–emotional competence in children. Multiple regression analyzes revealed a strong positive correlation between Asian cultural values and authoritative parenting style (R2 = 0.597). There was no association between parenting style and the development of competence in young children. However, a positive correlation was found between Asian cultural values and young children’s perceived competence. This study showed that components of collectivism and humility in Asian cultural values could have functional values that are essential for developing competencies in South Asian young children but not in local Chinese young children. This study discussed the implications of cultural values sin the terms of contextualization, functional relevance of cultural values for ethnic minorities, and ideal parenting practices.
Learning to write in a foreign language is a complex cognitive process. The process-genre approach is a common instructional practice adopted by language teachers to develop learners’ writing abilities. However, the interacting elements of procedural knowledge, linguistic knowledge, and generic knowledge in this approach may exceed the capacity of an individual learner’s working memory, thus actually hindering the acquisition of writing skills. According to the collective working memory effect, it was hypothesized that teaching writing skills of English as a foreign language by adopting a process-genre approach in collaborative conditions could lead to better writing performance, lower cognitive load, and higher instructional efficiency. The reported experiment compared learning writing skills of English as a foreign language in individual and collaborative instructional conditions from a cognitive load perspective, a rarely adopted approach in this field. The results indicated that the collaborative instructional condition was more effective and efficient than the individual instructional condition in improving the quality of written products as well as in optimizing the cognitive (working memory) load experienced by the learners. Measures of cognitive load were used to support the cognitive load theory’s interpretation of the results, which is the unique contribution of this research study to the field.