The effects of organizational factors on student ratings and perceived instruction

The objective of this study is to explore a) which dimension of student ratings and which aspects of perceived instruction are affected by the two organizational factors, enrollment size and academic affiliation, and b) the nature of their effect. Two thousand five hundred students participating in 125 courses evaluated their instructors on Q-1 Evaluation of Instruction by Students. The 125 evaluated instructors responded to Q-2 Perception of own Instruction indicating the extent to which they employ various teaching planning and strategy attributes (TPS). Major findings suggest that academic affiliation has no effect on student ratings yet affects abstract aspects of perceived instruction. Instructors of the social sciences, unlike those of the humanities, manifest a vocational outlook in their instruction planning. Data indicate that enrollment size has an effect on the dimensions of student ratings and the perceived instruction, referring to concrete aspects of teaching. Students participating in small classes are more critical of instruction than those in larger classes. The nature of its effect on perceived instruction is mainly in terms of practical solutions of teaching methods and strategies and is hardly manifested in the planning phase of instruction. The relevance of these findings to university administrators is also discussed.     

The Role of Gender-related Information and Self-Endorsement of Traits in Preadolescents' Inferences and Judgments

The major purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a target child's gender typicality on different aspects of preadolescents' inferences and judgments. The secondary purpose of the study was to investigate the relation between children's self-endorsement of traits and their inferences and judgments. Fifth and sixth graders were shown a video film, portraying a child playing either a gender-appropriate game with members of the same sex or a gender-inappropriate game with members of the other sex. In addition, subjects completed an adapted version of the BSRI and were categorized into sex-typed, androgynous, and undifferentiated subjects. Subjects made a number of different types of judgments and inferences about the target, including inferences about traits, popularity, choice of gift and name, and willingness to engage in activities with the target. All types of inferences and judgments were affected by the variations in the targets' gender-related behaviors, whereas self-endorsement of traits was not related to the inferences and judgments. The results suggest that the gender typicality of the target behavior is salient to preadolescents, regardless of their sex-role orientation.     

Principals’ Survival with Parental Involvement

This paper explores the dynamics of purposeful leadership and parental involvement, two central components of effective schools. The results of four cases studies are presented that consider the ways in which principals work with parents in schools that have a shared, consistent mission. The case studies reveal that principal‐parent interactions are the result of unique processes in each school and are negotiated and institutionalized over time.     

Once she makes it,she's there!: a case study 1

Computer science is possibly one of the few remaining disciplines almost entirely dominated by men, especially university staff and in the hi-tech industries. This phenomenon prevails throughout the western world; in Israel it starts in high school, where only 30% of students who choose to take computer science as an elective are women, and continues in university and college, where usually less than 30% of the entire computer science student population is female. In this paper we present data describing women taking the undergraduate computer science program at the Open University of Israel. Covering a period of 10 years, we have examined the enrollment and results of thousands of students on 20 undergraduate computer science courses. An attempt has been made to identify whether there is a specific stage in the undergraduate program which is more difficult for women to pass. The good news is that within the Open University of Israel out of the entire population of computer science students the percentage of female enrolments and the percentage of females graduating is almost the same, and the differences in average final grade between men and women are generally not significant. This study is unique because of the large number of students which served as the study population, covering the entire undergraduate program.     

Building an innovation hub: A case study of the transformation of university roles in regional technological and economic development

Universities have assumed an expanded role in science and technology-based economic development that has become of interest to catch-up regions as well as to leading innovation locales. This paper examines how the role of the university has evolved from performing conventional research and education functions to serving as an innovation-promoting knowledge hub though the case of Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). This case is discussed in the context of state efforts to shift the region from an agricultural to an industrial to an innovation-driven economy. Central to the transformation of Georgia Tech as a knowledge hub is the emergence of new institutional leadership, programs, organizational forms and boundary-spanning roles that meditate among academic, educational, entrepreneurial, venture capital, industrial, and public spheres. Comparisons between Georgia Tech's experiences and those of university roles in selected other catch-up regions in the southern United States highlight the importance to the case of networked approaches, capacity building, technology-based entrepreneurial development, and local innovation system leadership. Insights on the transformation of universities and the challenges of fostering a similar transformation in regional economies are offered.     

An Integrated Spatial Search Engine for Maps and Aerial Photographs on a Google Maps API Platform

A traditional library catalog does not do justice to maps and aerial photographs. Text can never fully describe them and maps' and aerial photographs' geographic coverage or perimeters cannot be displayed visually in the online public access catalog (OPAC), so searching based on their textual metadata without specific spatial reference data used also for display purposes is often not enough to locate relevant items. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem's (HUJI) Geography Department has developed a spatial search engine for their scanned aerial photographs collection that allows users to locate one or more aerial photographs according to the area of the Earth's surface that was photographed and their accompanying metadata. The Humanities and Social Sciences Library, which holds a large unscanned print map collection, has asked to integrate a similar map search mechanism in the Department's existing search engine, and a new website was launched in December 2015 (http://ccg.huji.ac.il/aerialphotos/) showing the aerial photographs' center points alongside the maps' rectangle perimeter. The search engine retrieves maps and aerial photographs that intersect with a user-drawn rectangle. This article discusses the characteristics of these collections, the rationale behind searching for maps and aerial photographs together, and the process of defining and building this spatial search engine. This method allows users to view which items are available in their area of interest side-by-side, on a Google Maps background map.     

Staging peace: Televised ceremonies of reconciliation

ABSTRACT

The visit of Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem was the model for Dayan and Katz’s conceptualization of the genre of media events, as live programs which have the power to transform history. Fifteen years later, a series of televised reconciliation ceremonies, which marked the stages of the peace process between Israel and its Arab neighbors (the Palestinians and the Jordanians), are used to re-examine the model. We demonstrate (1) how the effectiveness of these ceremonies depends on the type of contract among the three participants—leaders, broadcasters and public—each of whom displays different kinds of reservations, and (2) how the aura of the ceremonies draws on the prior status of the participants (Hussein), but also confers status (Arafat).