Managing the relationship with outside suppliers

Production and manufacturing departments have overseen an extraordinary development in the technologies used to put books together. Until recently they have had little information technology (IT) support in their day-to-day functions. Increasing use of technology, particularly in communication with suppliers, will be essential in the future management of these key external relationships. Address for correspondence     

Together against all odds: towards understanding the identities of teachers of at risk students

This paper describes how a collaborative project engaged teachers and university researchers in an ongoing conversation about teaching students whose learning is considered to be at risk due to a complex of social and economic barriers. Action research was employed to develop understanding of unique teacher identities shaped in classroom settings with large numbers of these students. Teacher stories generated by this research revealed that, as key members of interagency teams, teachers play a strong advocacy role for students at risk.     

Research Findings from the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS) Database: Implications for Educational Evaluation and Research

The Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System determines the effectiveness of school systems, schools, and teachers based on student academic growth over time. An integral part of TVAAS is a massive, longitudinally merged database linking students and student outcomes to the schools and systems in which they are enrolled and to the teachers to whom they are assigned as they transition from grade to grade. Research conducted utilizing data from the TVAAS database has shown that race, socioeconomic level, class size, and classroom heterogeneity are poor predictors of student academic growth. Rather, the effectiveness of the teacher is the major determinant of student academic progress. Teacher effects on student achievement have been found to be both additive and cumulative with little evidence that subsequent effective teachers can offset the effects of ineffective ones. For these reasons, a component linking teacher effectiveness to student outcomes is a necessary part of any effective educational evaluation system.     

Object Properties and Object Kind: Twenty-One-Month-Old Infants' Extension of Novel Adjectives

Three experiments examined the conditions under which infants acquiring English succeed in mapping novel adjectives, applied ostensively to individual objects, to other objects with the same property (color or texture). Twenty-one-month-old infants were introduced to a target (e.g., a yellow object) and asked to choose between (1) a matching test object (e.g., a different yellow object) and (2) a contrasting test object (e.g., a green object). Infants hearing the target labeled with novel adjectives were more likely than those hearing no novel words to choose the matching test object. Infants also revealed an emerging distinction between novel adjectives and nouns. Finally, infants' expectation regarding the extension of adjectives appears to unfold within the support of a familiar basic-level category. Infants extended novel adjectives to the matching test object when all objects were all drawn from the same basic level category; they failed to do so when the objects were drawn from different basic level categories.