Measuring Effectiveness and Efficiency of an Academic Library's Collection and Services of the Central Library,Allahabad University: Users’ Point of View

The main purpose of this study is to know the users opinion regarding the adequacy of the library's collection and to analyze the level of users’ satisfaction about the library collection, organization, facilities, and services. A well-structured survey was administered to the faculty members, research scholars, and students of the Allahabad University Library to collect data. Data show that the majority of the respondents believess that not only does the library possess an average collection, but the overall library's function, i.e., library collection, organization of collection, attitude of library staff, services, and IT-based services, is also rated average.     

Science Teachers’ Views and Stereotypes of Religion,Scientists and Scientific Research: A call for scientist–science teacher partnerships to promote inquiry-based learning

Despite a growing consensus regarding the value of inquiry-based learning (IBL) for students’ learning and engagement in the science classroom, the implementation of such practices continues to be a challenge. If science teachers are to use IBL to develop students’ inquiry practices and encourage them to think and act as scientists, a better understanding of factors that influence their attitudes towards scientific research and scientists’ practices is very much needed. Within this context there is a need to re-examine the science teachers’ views of scientists and the cultural factors that might have an impact on teachers’ views and pedagogical practices. A diverse group of Egyptian science teachers took part in a quantitative–qualitative study using a questionnaire and in-depth interviews to explore their views of scientists and scientific research, and to understand how they negotiated their views of scientists and scientific research in the classroom, and how these views informed their practices of using inquiry in the classroom. The findings highlighted how the teachers’ cultural beliefs and views of scientists and scientific research had constructed idiosyncratic pedagogical views and practices. The study suggested implications for further research and argued for teacher professional development based on partnerships with scientists.     

Teacher-student development in mathematics classrooms: Interrelated zones of free movement and promoted actions

This paper applies and extends Valsiner’s ‘zone theory’ (zones of free movement and promoted actions) through an examination of an intervention to establish inquiry communities in primary mathematics classrooms. Valsiner’s zone theory, in a classroom setting, views students’ freedom of choice of action and thought as mediated by the teacher. The extension of this theory adds that teachers’ freedom of choice of action and thought is mediated by ‘significant others’ and also by the actions of students with new freedoms. The paper presents necessary theoretical constructs and provides extracts from lessons and from teacher-teacher collaboration to illustrate the theoretical extension.     

DistanceRank: An intelligent ranking algorithm for web pages

A fast and efficient page ranking mechanism for web crawling and retrieval remains as a challenging issue. Recently, several link based ranking algorithms like PageRank, HITS and OPIC have been proposed. In this paper, we propose a novel recursive method based on reinforcement learning which considers distance between pages as punishment, called “DistanceRank” to compute ranks of web pages. The distance is defined as the number of “average clicks” between two pages. The objective is to minimize punishment or distance so that a page with less distance to have a higher rank. Experimental results indicate that DistanceRank outperforms other ranking algorithms in page ranking and crawling scheduling. Furthermore, the complexity of DistanceRank is low. We have used University of California at Berkeley’s web for our experiments.     

Restrictive versus facilitative teacher professional development: a case from three public schools in Indonesia

Asia Pacific Education Review - This paper argues that the professional learning of teachers is shaped and conditioned by the circumstances, arrangements, and specificity of teacher professional...     

Performance contagion and human resource layout: New concepts in performance management

Job performance can be defined as the extent to which one exhibits behaviors that further the goals of the organization, and leaders try to manage the factors influencing the performance in an organization to guide it toward organizational goals. A main factor that influences the performance is emotions and behavior of other people. The influence of people on each other can be divided into physical and metaphysical contagions in the scientific literature. In this article, we introduce a new kind of metaphysical contagion that has a close relationship with individual and organizational performance. We name it performance contagion and introduce two kinds of factors (content and process) and subfactors. We conceptualize a new concept in performance management defined as human resource layout. Tools are suggested for applying the steps of this model to improve both individual and organizational performance.