Critical issues pertaining to the planning and implementation of E-Government initiatives

E-Government initiatives of varying scope and complexity have been implemented at the municipal and other levels of government throughout the world. These projects have been chronicled in both academic and practitioner journals and the proceedings of various E-Government conferences. As a consequence of this growing body of data, it is now possible to look across the experiences of numerous governments to understand if there are common issues that may impact the probability of success of E-Government programs. This paper examines the literature to search for critical planning and implementation issues that have had significant effects upon the success of E-Government initiatives. A conceptual framework is proposed which contributes to the theoretical understanding of E-Government initiative planning and implementation, and may inform practitioner success with new E-Government initiatives.     

Flexibility in young second‐language learners: examining the language specificity of orthographic processing

This study examines whether orthographic processing transfers across languages to reading when the writing systems under acquisition are sufficiently related. We conducted a study with 76 7‐year‐old English‐first‐language children in French immersion. Measures of English and French orthographic processing (orthographic choice tasks) and standardised measures of English and French word reading (Woodcock and FIAT) were taken, in addition to verbal and nonverbal ability, and phonological and morphological awareness. Analyses reveal significant contributions of orthographic processing to reading both within and across the two languages, despite the inclusion of control variables. Findings of the transfer of orthographic processing skills to reading across languages suggest that orthographic processing may not be as language specific as previously hypothesised. We discuss the several similarities between English and French, such as a shared alphabet and cognates, that may drive transfer across languages in the context of current theories of second‐language reading development.     

Adaptive Comparative Judgment as a Tool for Assessing Open-ended Design Problems and Model Eliciting Activities

We investigated the use of adaptive comparative judgment to evaluate the middle school student learning, engagement, and experience with the design process in an open-ended problem assigned in a technology and engineering education course. Our results indicate that the adaptive comparative judgment tool effectively facilitated the grading of the students’ products and improved the judges’ understanding of the processes the students used to arrive at their solutions. We found the reliability and validity of the tool to be acceptable and the outcomes of our study suggest that there is justification for the use of the adaptive comparative judgment method to assess student learning outcomes at multiple levels of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education.     

A tale of two worlds: the interstate system and world society in social science textbooks, 1950–2011

There is a great and longstanding divide in visions of the international arena. Some assert that states are the most relevant actors in international politics, and others emphasise the importance of non-state actors as vehicles through which shared ideas and identities are enacted. Typically, cross-national scholarship adopts one of these positions and seeks to support the attendant theoretical claims; our approach is entirely different. We treat these varied conceptions of the international arena not as antecedent explanatory frameworks, but rather as outcomes to be explained in their own right. To this end, we draw on data consisting of 539 high-school social science textbooks (history, civics, social studies, and geography) from 73 countries published between 1950 and 2011, coded to shed light on how the international arena is discussed in national education systems. We use multilevel modelling to determine how characteristics of textbooks and countries are linked to different visions of the international arena. Stronger national emphases in books promote a vision of the interstate system, as does a country’s level of democracy. Emphases on world society emerge particularly in recent decades and in books and countries most exposed to educational and social globalisation. Our findings provide initial support for arguments that world society and the interstate system are distinct, leading to multiple forms of inequality in the international arena.