Responding to teacher shortages: relationships among mobility experiences,attitudes, and intentions of Dutch teachers

From all over the world there have been calls from governmental institutions to address a shortage of high quality teachers. As changing jobs generates new experiences, job mobility could be a way for teachers to adhere to the government’s call to develop themselves into the teaching force needed. The research question of this study was: How do the experience with mobility and the attitude towards mobility of Dutch secondary school teachers shape their intentions to be mobile? A secondary analysis was conducted on data collected among 1261 respondents. Attitudes towards mobility were found to be linked to past experience with mobility and there is a strong relationship between the attitude towards mobility and the intention to be mobile. The control variables age, experience in teaching, and type of employment seem to have an effect as well. Implications for the teacher shortage issue are discussed.     

Impact and cost-effectiveness analysis of the national school-based sexuality education programme in Estonia

Policy-makers making decisions on the implementation of school-based sexuality education (SE) programmes face two important questions: (1) what are the costs of implementing and scaling up SE programmes, and (2) what are the impacts? This paper responds to these questions by retrospectively assessing costs, impact and cost-effectiveness of the national school-based SE programme in Estonia 1997–2009. The three-year curriculum had been taught to 190,000 students at the end of 2009. The cost of reaching one student was USD 32.90 and the total costs were USD 5.6 million. There has been a remarkable improvement in sexual health indicators in the age groups 15–19 and 20–24 years in Estonia between 2001 and 2009. During this period, annual abortions, STIs and diagnosed HIV infections in the age groups were reduced by 37%, 55% and 89%, respectively. It is difficult to assess to what extent the improvements in these sexual health indicators are attributable to the SE programme. Nevertheless, our conservative threshold analysis indicates that the Estonian SE programme could be considered cost-saving if only 4% of the observed reductions in HIV infections are attributable to the programme. There is strong evidence, therefore, to support that the Estonian school-based sexuality programme has been cost-effective.     

Multiple Copies of Bestsellers in Public Libraries: How Much Is Enough?

How do public libraries develop their collections of high-demand materials for the “I want it now” generation? Ten public libraries’ holdings of fiction and nonfiction bestseller titles were observed over a four-week period. The number of copies rose fairly consistently, with the five fiction titles having roughly about twice the number of copies as the five nonfiction titles. The ratio of holds to copies averaged 2.7:1 and ranged from 0.8:1 to 6.5:1. Demand for e-books was consistently higher than the number of copies available, averaging more than 4:1 across all libraries.     

User interactions with the PDQ cancer information system.

Searches by end users and intermediaries on the online PDQ (Physician Data Query) cancer information system were observed. With the National Library of Medicine (NLM) menu-based interface, end users (physicians) averaged fewer steps per question, while with the BRS command-drive interface, intermediaries appeared to be more efficient. Cancer Information Service (CIS) searchers, who have more PDQ experience than end users or intermediaries, made greater use of command stacking to anticipate menu selections. Retrieval was more complete in the NLM system, where both the menus and predefined print formats assisted the searchers.