Head Start Teaching Center: Outcome Evaluation of 3 Years of Participatory Training

The design and evaluation of the New England Head Start Teaching Center (NEHSTC), one of 14 federally funded programs created to test the efficacy of participatory, hands-on training for enhancing Head Start service delivery is the focus of this article. The unique characteristics of the NEHSTC and the outcome evaluation results from 3 years of training will be discussed. The findings demonstrate the NEHSTC was successful in implementing high quality, participatory training within the context of an ongoing Head Start program. Various Head Start staff who participated in the NEHSTC trainings demonstrated gains in knowledge, skills, and attitudes compared to similar Head Start employees who did not receive training. The positive findings suggest that participatory training should be included in the menu of training options available. Because of the unique size and scope of Head Start, the success of ongoing efforts to improve the quality of its programs and services are particularly significant. Within Head Start, this discussion of quality enhancements via innovative training models is timely given the advent of the new performance standards and the restructuring of the Training and Technical Assistance system. Additionally, the findings are relevant for broader efforts to improve early care and education programs nationwide.     

Teaching Science Effectively With Analogies: An Approach for Preservice and Inservice Teacher Education

Journal of Science Teacher Education -     

Components of Rater Error in a Complex Performance Assessment

Numerous studies have examined performance assessment data using generaliz-ability theory. Typically, these studies have treated raters as randomly sampled from a population, with each rater judging a given performance on a single occasion. This paper presents two studies that focus on aspects of the rating process that are not explicitly accounted for in this typical design. The first study makes explicit the "committee" facet, acknowledging that raters often work within groups. The second study makes explicit the "rating-occasion" facet by having each rater judge each performance on two separate occasions. The results of the first study highlight the importance of clearly specifying the relevant facets of the universe of interest. Failing to include the committee facet led to an overly optimistic estimate of the precision of the measurement procedure. By contrast, failing to include the rating-occasion facet, in the second study, had minimal impact on the estimated error variance.     

Higher education reform in a transitional economy: a case study from the School of Economic Studies in Mongolia

One of the issues to be faced by countries in central and eastern Europe and parts of Asia undergoing transition to a market economy is how to prepare students for the new environment. This article explores the experience from a three year Technical Assistance to the former Commonwealth of Independent States (TACIS) funded project aimed at reforming economics education at the School of Economic Studies (SES) within the National University of Mongolia. The focus of the project was initially on curriculum reform, but it soon became evident that to be effective this would need to be supported by managerial reform.The article therefore commences by briefly outlining the context of the reform process in Mongolia and by describing the nature of curriculum reform within the SES, including issues relating to the learning environment, course content and structure, and learning and assessment methods. That leads to an analysis of consequential reform of institutional management including issues relating to the codification and common ownership of information, conditions of service of staff, financial flexibility and management information systems.The article reflects on achievements and constraints of implementing reform at a sub-institutional (School) level and concludes with a summary of findings which might be of general value to those involved in the management of change as institutions begin to prepare their students to operate within a market economy.     

GENDER BIAS AND THE COLLEGE PREDICTIONS OF THE SATS: A Cry of Despair

This study reviews and extends the considerableliterature demonstrating that the various College Boardexaminations (most importantly the Scholastic AptitudeTests) make a small underprediction of women's college grades relative to those of men in allfields except engineering. This finding persists evenwhen corrections are made for differences in the fieldsthat women and men study and for sample selection bias. Because of this underprediction, womenmost probably are underrepresented relative to theirmerit in freshman classes and scholarship competitionsat selective public universities. The differences in predicted grades are small, but account foran underrepresentation of women by at least 5% of thefreshman classes of the University of California atBerkeley (200 to 300 a year) in the late 1980s. Various solutions to this underprediction by the SATsand the dilemmas they pose for public universities suchas Berkeley are explored.     

FORECASTING CREDIT HOURS

This paper employs Tobit to estimate retentionprobabilities and credit hours at two universities. Theinnovation is that this technique examines credit-hourchoice with the decision to depart the university treated as the choice of zero credit hours.Tobit is appropriate for this problem because itrecognizes the lower bound of zero on credit hours andincorporates this bound into the parameter estimates and forecasts. Models are estimated for credithours in a single year and cumulative hours over asix-year horizon.     

Child Effects on Parental Negativity: The Role of Heritable and Prenatal Factors

This study examined two possible mechanisms, evocative gene–environment correlation and prenatal factors, in accounting for child effects on parental negativity. Participants included 561 children adopted at birth, and their adoptive parents and birth parents within a prospective longitudinal adoption study. Findings indicated child effects on parental negativity, such that toddlers’ negative reactivity at 18 months was positively associated with adoptive parents’ over-reactive and hostile parenting at 27 months. Furthermore, we found that child effects on parental negativity were partially due to heritable (e.g., birth mother [BM] internalizing problems and substance use) and prenatal factors (e.g., BM illicit drug use during pregnancy) that influence children’s negative reactivity at 18 months. This study provides critical evidence for “child on parent” effects.