The Future of Defunct Religious Buildings: Dutch Approaches to Their Adaptive Re-use

Across the Western world, membership in the established organized churches is on the decline with a concomitant reduction in the need for churches and church halls. As redundant and unused churches are the focus of vandalism and decay, owners and heritage managers are looking for options to adaptively re-use such buildings. This article reviews the literature on the re-use of churches in the Netherlands, which has long history of innovatively addressing the problems. The options available range from re-use for religious purposes by other denominations or faiths, to community use (multi-purpose, sport, music etc.), and private use, which can be either commercial or residential. The attitudes of the community and the original property owners play a major part in successful adaptive re-use. Because of its long history, the Dutch experience in adaptive re-use of religious buildings has much to offer heritage managers in other countries faced with this emergent management issue.     

Curriculum Planning For Training: The State of the Art

This article provides training practitioners with an overview of literature on long-term curriculum planning for training in business and industry. It also summarizes key results of a national survey of corporate business planners and trainers on the current status of curriculum planning for training in their organizations. In general, few respondents of the study indicated that their organizations have established long-term training plans (curricula) to meet the predictable orientation needs of new employees or support implementation of corporate strategic business plans.     

Curriculum Development for Business and Industry

Curriculum development is usually associated with educational institutions. As a result, there are few curriculum development models that have been specifically created for the business and industrial setting. Those that have been published tend to adopt a “let's begin at the beginning” approach. They prescribe starting as though nothing previously existed within the organization to provide personnel training and development. The Professional Development Curriculum (PDC) model presented in this article starts with what already exists organizationally. It adopts a convergence strategy. It begins by systematically matching known needs with known resources and then, over a series of generations, creates closer fits between needs and resources. The model has been applied to two very different settings in General Motors: all GM wholesale divisions and GM's Latin American retail and wholesale operations. The results have been positive in creating coherent curricula tied to career path progressions for all employees in these organizations. Evolutionary and practical, this PDC model can be applied to any business or industry to build competency-based curricula that not only provide personnel development support systems for today's needs, but for tomorrow's as well.     

Correlations between the stanford-binet: Fourth edition and the WISC-R with a learning disabled population

The Fourth Edition of the Stanford-Binet and the WISC-R were compared as instruments for assessing the intellectual strengths and weaknesses of students classified as learning disabled in the primary and secondary grades. Results found only a 3.28-point difference (p≥.0001) between the S-B Composite score and the WISC-R Full Scale score. Correlations between the four broad areas of the S-B and the three scales of the WISC-R ranged from .494 (S-B Abstract/Visual Reasoning with WISC-R Verbal) to .920 (S-B Composite with WISC-R Full Scale). All correlations were found to be significant. Implications of the research findings were discussed.     

The alpha and split-half reliability of the teacher stress inventory

The internal consistency and split-half reliability of the Teacher Stress Inventory (TSI) was investigated based on data provided by 3,478 teachers, representing 22 individual and two aggregate samples from six states. The data indicate for both the strength and frequency dimensions that the TSI is highly reliable in terms of both its regular and short-form length, and that the two short forms are highly correlated with one another.