The determinants of school district salary incentives: An empirical analysis of,where and why

Most public school districts in the United States use a salary schedule to determine compensation for teachers within the district. However, some school districts have implemented incentive pay schemes that allow flexibility at the school or even individual teacher level. These compensation schemes in some ways may more closely approximate a competitive labor market. This study examines the factors that influence a district's decision to offer incentive pay using districts from the 1999 to 2000 Schools and Staffing Survey. The results suggest that school districts that face barriers to recruitment or retention and districts that face competition from non-sectarian private schools are more likely to offer incentive pay.     

From External Regulation to Self-Regulation: Early Parenting Precursors of Young Children's Executive Functioning

In keeping with proposals emphasizing the role of early experience in infant brain development, this study investigated the prospective links between quality of parent–infant interactions and subsequent child executive functioning (EF), including working memory, impulse control, and set shifting. Maternal sensitivity, mind-mindedness and autonomy support were assessed when children were 12 to 15 months old ( N  =   80). Child EF was assessed at 18 and 26 months. All three parenting dimensions were found to relate to child EF. Autonomy support was the strongest predictor of EF at each age, independent of general cognitive ability and maternal education. These findings add to previous results on child stress-response systems in suggesting that parent–child relationships may play an important role in children's developing self-regulatory capacities.     

The Value of Reanalysis: TV Viewing and Attention Problems

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth ( N  =   1,159), this study reexamines the link between maternal reports of television viewing at ages 1 and 3 and attention problems at age 7. This work represents a reanalysis and extension of recent research suggesting young children's television viewing causes subsequent attention problems. The nonlinear specification reveals the association between television watching and attention problems exists—if at all—only at very high levels of viewing. Adding 2 covariates to the regression model eliminated even this modest effect. The earlier findings are not robust. This study also considers whether its own findings are sensitive to unobserved confounding using fixed-effects estimation. In general, it finds no meaningful relation between television viewing and attention problems.     

The Lived Experiences of Men in a Master's Counseling Program

Using phenomenological methodology, the authors explored the experiences of 11 men in a master's‐level counseling program. Participants described the challenges and advantages of being a minority in number, being in a relational environment, and having an awareness of a patriarchal system. These findings suggest the importance of counselor educator awareness of the unique barriers male students face.     

The role of high school racial composition and opportunities to learn in students' STEM college participation

We analyze longitudinal data from students who spent their academic careers in North Carolina (NC) public secondary schools and attended NC public universities to investigate the importance of high school racial composition and opportunities to learn in secondary school for choosing a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) major. We consider school racial composition and opportunities to learn as contexts that shape students' decisions regarding college majors. Results of cross‐classified hierarchical logistic models indicate that attending schools with predominantly White students is negatively associated with declaring a STEM major and with graduating with a STEM major irrespective of students' own race. The finding suggests that for students in North Carolina, attending racially isolated White high schools is related to a decrease in adolescents' participation in STEM during college.     

Parent and teacher satisfaction with school‐based psychological reports

School psychologists spend a great deal of time translating assessment results into a psychoeducational report. The importance of creating reports that are both useful and understandable to the readers of the report while also being efficient for the school psychologist cannot be overstated. This study examines parent and teacher perceptions regarding the quality, understandability, and usefulness of school‐based psychological reports. Results of the surveys indicate that both parents and teachers perceive psychological reports as focusing more on tests and test scores as opposed to information that helps to understand the child or assists with intervention development. Strategies for upgrading reports to better meet the needs of parent and teacher readers are discussed.     

Charting the development of sport expertise: challenges and opportunities

This review poses three key issues that will progress our understanding of the sport expertise literature and its translational scientific impact. Primarily relying on research conducted in interceptive sport tasks, and to a lesser extent team sports, we review the perceptual-cognitive skills of sports experts and explore the challenge of designing a sufficiently representative task to examine expertise. We focus on the methodological challenges presented by the reciprocal relationship between players’ action capabilities and their perceptual-cognitive skill. Second, we consider the need for a paradigm shift in the experimental approach used when examining the development of sport expertise. In short, a shift from traditional expert-novice designs to more prospective longitudinal designs that cross-sectionally track the development of expertise is discussed. The final issue considers how the volume of in situ data now collected provides a rich source of information that sport expertise researchers have only begun to consider and integrate with more traditional sport psychology research. We demonstrate how statistical approaches that have described the likely trajectories of expert performers on their journey toward expertise coupled with more traditional qualitative experimental approaches can provide useful insights into the development of psychological performance skills and more broadly sport expertise.     

Validating a shortened form of the ARC for special populations

Autonomy describes cognition or behavior that is self-directed, according to personal interests, and free from external influence. This construct is of importance to students who are deaf because it has been shown to be positively related to their post-school transition outcomes, and this population faces unique challenges in this area. To conduct research with this construct, it is necessary to use measures that are valid and reliable for the population of interest. Therefore, a set of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses validated the unidimensionality of a shortened form of the ARC Self-Determination Scale’s autonomy dimension. A three-factor solution, including a social skills dimension, was measurement-invariant across many groups of students, including those with learning disabilities, emotional disturbances, speech and language impairments, and other health impairments. Although the shortened form of this scale was not unidimensional, as hypothesized, the generalizability of its measurement properties may prove useful. Discussion highlights the differences between these three dimensions and Wehmeyer's theory of self-determination.     

低碳发展方案编制指南(第三部分)——制定低碳发展规划

本节介绍制定低碳发展计划常用的核心步骤。本指南侧重城市层面;同样的步骤也适用于企业、市、省和国家等层级。中国自"十一五规划"起,对改善国内能源强度定出目标,包括各经济部门的节能目标。2009年12月中国政府公布了其碳强度目标,重点放在单位GDP用能引发的二氧化碳排放量。为实现该强度目标以及"循环经济"等经济性目标,制定低碳发展规划尤其必要。