Diversifying the faculty across gender lines: Do trustees and administrators matter?

Our paper focuses on the role that the gender composition of the leaders of American colleges and universities - trustees, presidents, and provosts - play in influencing the rate at which academic institutions diversify their faculty across gender lines. Our analyses make use of institutional level panel data that we have collected for a large sample of American academic institutions.     

Preliminary Investigation of the Sources of Self-Efficacy Among Teachers of Students with Autism

Teacher self-efficacy refers to the beliefs teachers hold regarding their capability to bring about desired instructional outcomes and may be helpful for understanding and addressing critical issues such as teacher attrition and teacher use of research-supported practices. Educating students with autism likely presents teachers with some of the most significant instructional challenges. The self-efficacy of 35 special education teachers of students with autism between the ages of 3 to 9 years was evaluated. Teachers completed rating scales that represented self-efficacy and aspects of the following 3 of Bandura's 4 sources of self-efficacy: (1) sense of mastery, (2) social persuasions, and (3) physiological/affective states. Significant associations were observed between physiological/affective states and self-efficacy, but no associations were observed for the other sources.     

Private Wealth and Public Education

Review Article—Equal Opportunity and the Mythology of Schooling Review of John E. Coons, William H. Clune HI, and Stephen D. Sugarman, Private Wealth and Public Education .     

Networked feedback control for nonlinear systems with random varying delays

This paper discusses the controller synthesis problem of a nonlinear networked controlled system subject to delays in the measurement and actuation channels. The communication through the network also suffers non-stationary packet dropouts. The bounded nonlinearities in the plant state satisfy Lipschitz conditions. A Lyapunov function is developed for the closed-loop system considering dynamic output feedback and the resulting stabilization conditions are drawn in the form of linear matrix inequalities to ensure that the system is exponentially stable in the mean-square sense. The developed conditions are represented in the form of a convex optimization problem and the results are tested by simulation on a quadruple-tank process.