Faculty: Thy administrator's keeper? Some evidence

Colleges and universities face a principal-agent problem. There are information asymmetries over the actions chosen by administrators. Because non-profit constraints limit the financial stake of trustees there may be insufficient monitoring of administrators and, consequentially, shirking. It is conceivable that faculty will serve as “delegated monitors” given the proper incentives. Faculty monitoring will most likely benefit a university when: (1) monitoring costs are low and (2) administrators cannot impose significant punishment costs on faculty. The practices of organized faculty participation in governance and tenure naturally achieve such ends. Empirical evidence from a sample of colleges and universities in the United States supports the hypothesis that features of a faculty's employment have significant effects on a university's financial performance.     

Inter-Parental Violence: The Pre-Schooler’s Perspective and the Educator’s Role

Early childhood educators are likely to encounter youngsters who experience problems at home impeding their abilities to learn and benefit from the program. One such group is children who live or have lived with adult domestic violence. Children yet to begin elementary school are over-represented among groups of young people known to live with inter-parental violence. A qualitative study using clinical interviews of young children was used to develop a model suggesting how key aspects of development among children 3–5 years of age can react to and be affected by inter-parental violence. Focus is on age-appropriate expression of emotions, salience of observations and conflicting messages, a child’s focus on outcome versus process, egocentricity and self-blame, learning of gender roles, and delay or regression in development of independence. Implications for the classroom are outlined, including providing a nurturing environment, supporting child adjustment, and helping caregivers. Special contingencies when families are in shelters are also discussed.     

How effective are working memory training interventions at improving maths in schools: a study into the efficacy of working memory training in children aged 9 and 10 in a junior school?

This study evaluates the validity of claims that Working Memory (WM) training is an effective and legitimate school-based maths intervention. By analysing the current developments in WM in the fields of neurology and cognitive psychology, this study seeks to analyse their relevance to the classroom. This study analyses memory profiles of children and maths performance previous to, and after a 3 week school-based, teacher led, intervention programme. Results indicate that although WM improved, it also improved for the control group, who did not undergo training. No significant far-transfer to maths results were demonstrated during the study.     

Credential disconnection: a Marxist analysis of college graduate underemployment

Despite the world slowly recovering from the 2008 recession and reducing levels of unemployment, the problem of underemployment persists. Underemployment is a problematic work status determined by an array of factors, including hours worked, comparative wages, and various subjective elements. This particular employment condition is affecting a great number of college graduates, specifically in the realms of subjective underemployment where the skills and education obtained in one’s college experiences are not utilized in one’s occupation. In this way, college graduate underemployment (CGU) is the product of a dialectical interplay between higher education institutions and the world of work. A Marxist analysis is utilized here to parse out the nuances of this relation. Marx’s original examination of capitalism illustrates how the forces of capital manipulate labor power as a commodity. Capitalist manipulation, coupled with technological dynamism and automation, gradually appropriate skills from the worker into the larger apparatus of capital. Formerly limited to manufacturing, this formal subsumption has now moved to modes of labor that require a college education, forcing college graduates, across nearly all disciplines, to assume work discordant to their degree. Moreover, with new labor paradigms consisting of disempowered part-time work, CGU will continue to be an obstacle that graduates must navigate, beckoning more critical educational experiences.     

Maori word-processing for indigenous New Zealand young children

We argue that there is an important and as yet unmet need for software that allows each cultural group to express the written word in an indigenous character set. As an example, we present a word-processing system, Ta Kupu, designed for use in teaching the Maori language to children. The program simplifies the input task by taking advantage of the structural features of the Maori language. The system also includes a data logging, evaluation, and analysis tool, Tirohia, that permits teachers to evaluate a child's familiarity with the word-processor. The main features of the evaluation software include: the ability to replay a record of a child's interaction in real time; facilities for summarising a child's consistency of use and level of performance; and the capability of examining interaction log files at a fine-grained level. We also address the application of these data logging and evaluation techniques to the areas of human factors research, interface design and interface evaluation.     

The relationship between term specificity in MeSH and online postings in MEDLINE

Hierarchically structured thesauri--including MeSH--were studied to test the assumption of an inverse relationship between term specificity and the number of postings in online databases. It was suggested that this assumption holds only for peripheral terms and that the opposite is true for the central terms of a discipline. The Environment tree structure of MeSH was used to test the "peripheral" hypothesis, which was supported at a .05 level of significance, but the scattergram on the Endocrine Diseases tree, which was run to test the "central" hypothesis, had an even better level, .02. The commonly held belief that specific terms are added to a thesaurus when more general ones get too many postings was also tested. The relationship between specificity and dates was supported in MeSH (.015). The corollary--that terms with later dates have fewer postings--was supported at a .001 level of significance. The results for MeSH were much more significant than for other hierarchically structured thesauri, which indicates that thesaurus development at NLM involves interaction with MEDLINE to preclude an excessive number of postings to any one term.