Identifying the Best Buys in U.S. Higher Education

Which U.S. institutions of higher education offer the best value to consumers? To answer this question, we evaluate U.S. institutions relative to a data envelopment analysis (DEA) multi-factor frontier based on 2000?C2001 data for 1,179 4-year institutions. The resulting DEA ??best buy?? scores allow the ranking of institutions by a weighted sum of institutional characteristics per dollar of average net price. The net price is calculated as tuition, fees, room, and board less per student financial aid. Institutional characteristics include SAT score, athletic expenditures, instructional expenditures, value of buildings, dorm capacity, and student body characteristics. The DEA scores indicate the distance of each institution from the ??best buy?? frontier for the chosen characteristics, providing an objective means of ranking institutions as the best values in higher education.     

Electronic Document Delivery: The Ibadan University Library Experience

New information communication technologies, such as the Internet and electronic publishing, not only enhance the range of publications that libraries can provide for their users but also increase the speed with which such requests can be met. This article describes the development of electronic document delivery (EDD) at the Kenneth Dike Library at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. A successful EDD program depends upon good intranet and Internet network systems, document availability, user awareness and training, and ease of use. The major challenge to this service is inconsistent power supply, which the university is addressing with the aid of a grant from the MacArthur Foundation for backup electric generators and a university solar energy project. It is hoped that this will assure better and more reliable power service in support of EDD in future. New information delivery regulations and laws guiding adequate service will also emerge but must be properly applied for effective and positive results.     

Television's value to the American family member

It is difficult to evaluate accurately the values a given medium has to a given audience. It is relatively easy to theorize about attributes, but the subjective nature of values requires recourse to the members of the medium's audience for adequate information. The following report, which is part of a series of studies on leisure time activity and mass media attention, contrasts the various mass media against one another in terms of relative rather than absolute value.     

Problems in Scoring,Agreement among Raters,and Internal Consistency of Selected Marker Tests

Selected Marker Tests, of Educational Testing Service and Sheridan Psychological Services, Inc., were examined in terms of problems in scoring and internal consistency. The tests were administered orally to 116 sixth and seventh grade students. Problems in scoring were discovered and changes were suggested. The agreement between two independent judges on part scores was high. Twenty-one of 28 correlations were .90 and above. Item correlations with part and total scores, using Cureton’s correction, were frequently very low, and many items did not meet the desirable difficulty level for norm-referenced tests. The study suggests that, with the sample used, the problem is not one of agreement among judges but, rather, one of item reliability.     

Differing perspectives of non-native speaker students’ linguistic experiences on higher degree courses

We report a small-scale study investigating the perceptions of postgraduate students who are non-native speakers of English and those of academic staff with regard to those students. Previous research has focused only on the former and identified a number of linguistic and cultural challenges these students face in adapting to Anglophone institution environments. A sample of 43 students in one department at a Russell Group university were surveyed and a sub-sample interviewed. Six members of academic staff were interviewed and some observed in their teaching. Findings suggest that, despite the high linguistic admission requirements set by the university, this group of students faced a range of difficulties in all four language skills but particularly in skills needed for oral interaction in seminars. Students and staff provided differing accounts of the source of these difficulties and students expressed a desire for better integration with native speaker students. There were also differing accounts regarding the amount of linguistic support students should receive, particularly with regard to proofreading written work. The study suggests a need for further research of this comparative kind potentially leading to recommendations for additional support for students and staff development.