Assessment Measures: management's yardstick

Nonprofit organizations' constituents, trustees and donors find financial reports confusing and too detailed. Advocates of Service Efforts and Accomplishments and assessment measures suggest that disclosing both financial and nonfinancial indicators will make the reports more useful. With hundreds of possible measures, ratios and data available, the nonprofit manager must select measures that portray the institution's condition and performance. This article presents a process and rationale for determining the measures. Also presented is a set of measures developed from interviews with presidents and administrators which were selected by a quantitative process that models complex decisions. The information selected for display both describes and measures the organization's condition and performance.     

Bat speed, trajectory, and timing for collegiate baseball batters hitting a stationary ball

The aims of this study were to examine whether batters hit stationary balls at the time of peak speed of the bat head and whether the impact occurs at the lowest point of the bat trajectory. Eight university baseball players hit three balls, each hung with a string; each ball was made of a different material and was different in weight. Bat movement was captured by four 240-Hz infrared cameras and analysed three-dimensionally. Time for peak speed of the bat head varied according to the conditions. When stationary balls of standard weight were used, the bat head was at maximum speed at impact with the ball; then, it decelerated drastically owing to the impact. In contrast, maximum speed was obtained after impact when lightweight stationary balls were used. The time-speed profile of the bat head before impact in the lightweight ball condition was identical with that in the standard weight ball condition. Regardless of conditions, the timing of the lowest point of the bat head was nearly identical for each batter and most participants hit the stationary balls at about the lowest point of the bat trajectory.     

基于LMA软件的移动学习资源设计

移动学习是一种新型学习形式,可为学习者带来一种随时随地获取知识的新的学习体验。学习资源的有效开发是影响移动学习开展的重要因素之一。依据移动学习资源的特性,分析了LMA软件的突出功能,探讨了利用LMA软件设计移动学习资源的实施过程。     

Researching the pupil voice: what makes a good teaching assistant?

This article reports on a small‐scale research project concerning the views of pupils on what comprises a good teaching assistant (TA). The study indicates that pupils clearly valued the support given to them by TAs. The pupils outlined the main personal and professional characteristics they wanted to see in, as well as the kinds of support they wanted from, a TA. The implications of these data for schools and for TAs themselves are briefly indicated.     

Leadership in a Performative Context: A framework for decision-making

Abstract

This paper examines a model of decision-making within the context of current and emerging regimes of accountability being proposed and implemented for school systems in a number of jurisdictions. These approaches to accountability typically involve the use of various measurable student learning outcomes as well as other measures of performance to do with teachers and schools in general, often having high-stakes consequences. Given this context of performativity, the paper proposes a model that uses an objective knowledge growth framework, where teachers can engage in their own professional learning through defined structures for solving the problems of their professional practice. The model is both empowering for teachers while being sensitive to the constraints of cultures of performativity.     

Mission impossible? Reflecting upon the relationship between physical education,youth sport and lifelong participation

It is widely believed that school physical education (PE) is or, at the very least, can (even should) be a crucial vehicle for enhancing young people's engagement with physically active recreation (typically but not exclusively in the form of sport) in their leisure and, in the longer run, over the life-course. Despite the prevalence of such beliefs, there remains a dearth of evidence demonstrating a ‘PE effect’. Indeed, the precise nature of the relationship between PE, youth¹1. Youth is defined as a life-stage that in chronological terms can be very broadly mapped onto the latter teenage years, with some leeway at the upper end to include the post-teen years up to young adulthood. Thus, youth is regarded as a period of transition ranging from roughly 15 to 25 years. For the purposes of this article, the emphasis will be on the latter secondary school years. sport and lifelong participation is seldom explored other than in implicit, often speculative and discursive, ways that simply take-for-granted the positive effects of the former (PE) on the latter (youth and adult participation in sport and physically active recreation). Using largely European studies to frame the issue, this article reflects upon the supposedly ‘causal’ relationship between PE, youth sport and lifelong participation and, in doing so, highlights the inherent problems associated with attempts to identify, characterise and establish a ‘PE effect.’ In the process, the article points to a need for more longitudinal and biographical research exploring sports careers and the sporting habituses of young people, not least in order to better understand in precisely what circumstances PE interventions might work to enhance youth involvement in sport and physical activity and, subsequently, lifelong participation.     

Using Focus Groups to Study Consumer Understanding and Experiences with Tamper-Evident Packaging Devices

ABSTRACT:  A focus group with an educational component was used to help initiate a new research hypothesis. Early-stage development of a new tamper-evident invention was improved with input from a consumer focus group. The focus group comprised consumers who were shown several tamper-evident devices, including a new color-changing cap under active development. We found that consumers understood tamper-evident food packaging and recognized when devices were triggered. Most said that they always checked tamper-evident food packaging but further query revealed that they only did this for certain products. Consumers were ambivalent about paying more for foods protected by tamper-evident devices, including the color-changing one. None rejected the color-changing device but some recommended changes that would improve the invention. Some mentioned that new devices are unnecessary because current technology is effective in keeping food safe. An educational session conducted in conjunction with the focus group sessions showed that some peoples' initial negative attitude changed to positive support for new color-changing devices after learning about food security concerns. We found that a focus group was useful for shaping academic research and identifying the most practical outcomes. A focus group provided a unique interactive assessment of consumers' understanding of the usefulness and critical research needs in developing a tamper-evident device.     

The Early Childhood Generalized Trust Belief Scale

The study was designed to develop and evaluate the Early Childhood Generalized Trust Belief Scale (ECGTBS) as a method of assessing 5–8-year-olds’ generalized trust. Two hundred and eleven (103 male and 108 female) children (mean age 6 years and 2 months at Time 1) completed the ECGTBS twice over a year. A subsample of participants completed the ECGTBS after two weeks to assess the scale's test–retest reliability. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses confirmed that the ECGTBS assessed the expected three factors: reliability, emotional trust, and honesty with item-pairs loading most strongly on their corresponding factor. However, the ECGTBS demonstrated low to modest internal consistency and test–retest reliability which indicates a need for further development of this instrument. As evidence for the convergent validity of the ECGTBS, the reliability and emotional trust items were associated with the children's trust in classmates at Time 2. Concurrent asymmetric quadratic relationships indicated the importance of midrange generalized trust. Specifically, children with very high generalized trust experienced greater loneliness and children with very low generalized trust had fewer friendships than children with midrange trust.     

Eigentaste: A Constant Time Collaborative Filtering Algorithm

Eigentaste is a collaborative filtering algorithm that uses universal queries to elicit real-valued user ratings on a common set of items and applies principal component analysis (PCA) to the resulting dense subset of the ratings matrix. PCA facilitates dimensionality reduction for offline clustering of users and rapid computation of recommendations. For a database of n users, standard nearest-neighbor techniques require O(n) processing time to compute recommendations, whereas Eigentaste requires O(1) (constant) time. We compare Eigentaste to alternative algorithms using data from Jester, an online joke recommending system.Jester has collected approximately 2,500,000 ratings from 57,000 users. We use the Normalized Mean Absolute Error (NMAE) measure to compare performance of different algorithms. In the Appendix we use Uniform and Normal distribution models to derive analytic estimates of NMAE when predictions are random. On the Jester dataset, Eigentaste computes recommendations two orders of magnitude faster with no loss of accuracy. Jester is online at: http://eigentaste.berkeley.edu     

Creating the “International Mind”: The League of Nations Attempts to Reform History Teaching, 1920–1939

After the First World War, the League of Nations, through its International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, attempted to reshape the teaching of history in its member states. The League's supporters realized that its long‐term success depended in part on supportive public opinion and that this, in turn, had implications for education. Aware of the strength of national loyalties, the League sought not to abolish the teaching of national history but to suffuse it with the spirit of the “international mind.” To this end, the League promoted revision of history textbooks and curricula, retraining of teachers, and rethinking of teaching methods. National governments responded by including some study of the League in history curricula but ignored the League's broader plans. Nonetheless, the League's attempt to internationalize the teaching of history opened up a debate that continues today as schools seek to strike a balance between claims of national and global history.