Strategically Leveraging Learning Space to Create Partnership Opportunities

The Management & Economics Library at Purdue University began a major physical and conceptual renovation four years ago. The conceptual renovation involves a rethinking of library faculty and staff roles and responsibilities based on the library's and university's strategic directives. The LearnLab space is being used as a springboard to create new partnerships, to implement our new roles, and to transform the perspective of an academic library's present capability. This article will highlight the variety of opportunities that have arisen by leveraging the LearnLab space.     

Conserving and managing animals that learn socially and share cultures

Socially learned behavior can be a crucial factor in how animals interact with their environment and, thus, in conservation and management. For species in which social learning and culture are important determinants of behavior, several factors complicate conservation and management. These include the rapid spread of novel behavior through social learning, the inhibition of adaptive behavior because of cultural conformism, the evolution of maladaptive behavior, and the development of culturally isolated but sometimes sympatric groups. These factors can affect habitat suitability, movements, how animals react to anthropogenic effects, and genetic structures. Social learning and culture may be important factors in translocation success, and should sometimes be considered when delineating population units for conservation and management. We should aim to protect cultural as well as genetic diversity. Unfortunately, clear data on social learning and culture in the wild are scarce. Hence, the ideas and methods outlined in this special issue have great potential.     

运动对骨骼肌收缩蛋白的影响

骨骼肌的发展水平是受收缩蛋白合成与分解的影响,本文以小白鼠为对象研究表明运动刺激能使骨骼肌活性化高的收缩蛋白合成,同时在量上明显增加。肌动蛋白和肌球蛋白的相互收缩反应说明运动刺激可以使骨骼肌对Ca离子感受性生理机能得到明显改善,肌动球蛋白Mg-ATP_(ase°)的活性随Ca离子浓度增加而升高,表明骨骼肌收缩蛋白在质和量的变化,可能是肌动球蛋白Mg-ATP_(ase°)的活性增高而引起。     

Teachers’ agency,efficacy, engagement,and emotional resilience during policy innovation implementation

This multiple case study investigated 143 teachers’ responses to focus group questions about their experiences with the simultaneous implementation of three disruptive innovations as part of the U.S. Race-to-the-Top (RTTT) agenda: the Common Core Learning Standards, data-driven instruction, and annual professional performance reviews. We asked: How do teachers describe their experiences implementing these three RTTT innovations? How do teachers describe supports for their adaptation to these innovations? And, for each of these questions, and since the study purposefully included schools with above-predicted student outcomes (i.e. odds-beaters) as well as a comparison set of typically performing schools, we inquired: In what ways do odds-beating school teachers’ experiences differ from their peers in typically performing schools? Guided by an emergent framework that emphasizes the relationships among teacher agency, engagement, efficacy, and emotional resilience and how these vary in different school contexts, findings suggest that district office innovation leadership and resource allocations, school leadership structures and strategies, and collaborative teams and communities of practice vary and relate to teachers’ experiences of innovation implementation. This study advances an empirically-grounded and theoretically rich framework for investigation of teachers’ performance adaptation during policy innovation implementation and suggests implications for future research, policy, and practice.     

CAUSES OF STUDENT ABSENTEEISM IN COMMUNITY COLLEGE CLASSES

In an era of declining college enrollments it is vital to identify potential causes of absenteeism and implement strategies for reducing it. To accomplish this two open‐ended approaches were used to generate a list of reasons for missing social science classes. The combination of these two ultimately led to 51 reasons for missing class that appeared on the Class Attendance Survey in Likert scale format. This survey was shown to have both internal reliability and validity. The dependent variable on the survey was the number of absences reported by each student for the class in which the survey was taken. It was administered in class on or about the last class day by 24 social science professors to 25 classes. This resulted in 402 usable surveys, of which 351 were complete. A factor analysis of the independent variables yielded six factors with eigenvalues greater than 1.0 and factor loadings higher than .50. Four of the six entered a stepwise multiple regression equation. They combined to produce a highly significant F value. In descending order of their beta weights they were labeled “fatigue associated with excessive socializing,” “low attendance incentives,” “irresponsible pursuit of leisure,” and “external responsibilities.” F values for each of the beta weights were significant. Several recommendations for reducing absenteeism were made.     

Coping with Complexity and Instability in the UK Vocational Training System1

Vocational training systems that take the needs of the word of work seriously and maintain strong and dynamic connections with it are faced to growing complexity and instability. Some countries try to cope with this through creating new mediation mechanisms between the systems of training and work that allow higher level complexity while maintaining appropriate social control over the linkages between these systems. The training policy of the United Kingdom offers an interesting example for this. The key message of this article is that increasing complexity and high level instability may seriously impede the engagement of employers for training and human resource development but reducing it have to be made in a cautious way, so that it does not harm the achievement of the strategic goals of making training more demand-led, making it more responsive to the changing skills needs of companies and letting employers have a decisive role in determining the content of training and the way it is delivered. The skills policy of the United Kingdom is used as an example to illustrate the growing social complexity that characterise modern social systems, including vocational training, and one specific way of devising public policies based on new innovative forms of steering and regulating that enhance coping with complexity and instability.