Dropout from Secondary Education: all's well that begins well

Despite the increased attention to students leaving secondary education without a diploma numerous students still dropout yearly. This paper makes a distinction between the ‘individual perspective’ and the ‘institutional perspective’ of dropping out. The former is explored by multinominal logit models. We observe that particularly motivation of the student and interest in schooling of his/her parents are crucial predictors of the individual dropout decision. The institutional perspective is examined by ordered logit models. In particular, we discuss the influence of the first year of secondary education by analyzing the large differences in the number of dropouts in Dutch first year classes. We observe that, more than motivation, the first year of secondary education is crucial in shaping the dropping out decision.     

‘Teaching could be a fantastic job but …’: three stories of student teacher withdrawal from initial teacher preparation programmes in England

Retention in initial teacher preparation (ITP) and the teaching profession, in England and elsewhere, has been the subject of numerous articles in academic and professional journals. Whilst a number of common findings are beginning to emerge from research on this subject, notably on the causes of student teacher withdrawal, studies have tended to neglect the difficulties experienced by the individuals who have lived through the process of embarking upon and withdrawing from ITP programmes. Having conducted in‐depth interviews, the authors attempt in this paper to understand the experiences, emotions and decisions of three people who committed themselves to ITP, invested much energy and time, but in the end withdrew. The reasons for their decision are numerous and complex. The impact on each individual was considerable. The experience was painful.     

The prognostic relevance of psychological factors with regard to participation and success in table-tennis

ABSTRACT

This study examined the prognostic relevance of self-determined motivation, coping, burnout, perceived stress and recovery experienced by 159 youth table-tennis players involved in intensive training centers with regard to their participation and success six years later. Results of ANCOVAs showed that players who still practiced at time 2 (T2; six years later; n = 130) reported lower time 1 (T1; while they were involved in intensive training centers) amotivation (large effect), disengagement-oriented coping, sport devaluation and reduced accomplishment (moderate effects) than their counterparts who dropped out at T2 (n = 29). Results of ANCOVAs also showed that international (n = 18) and/or national players (n = 86) at T2 reported significantly lower T1 amotivation (large effect), disengagement-oriented coping and sport devaluation (moderate effects) in comparison to regional (n = 26) players at T2. Finally results of correlational analyses showed that T2 performance and/or six-year performance progress were significantly and weakly correlated with introjected and external regulations, perceived stress and perceived recovery, and significantly and moderately correlated with amotivation, disengagement-oriented coping, sport devaluation, and reduced accomplishment. Overall, this study provided insights into the role played by self-determined motivation, coping, burnout, perceived stress and recovery in the table-tennis players’ dropout and performance level six years later.     

Cooperative output regulation problem of multi-agent systems with stochastic packet dropout and time-varying communication delay

In this paper, we deal with the cooperative output regulation problem of linear multi-agent systems on a directed network topology subject to both stochastic packet dropout and time-varying communication delay. On the basis of introducing a queuing mechanism, a distributed state feedback control algorithm is proposed. Then the continuous-time multi-agent systems with piece-wise constant control are converted into discrete-time systems. Under some standard assumptions, the necessary and sufficient conditions under which the tracking errors of followers approach to the origin asymptotically are proposed for different exosystems. Finally, the proposed results are verified via two examples.     

Responsive buffers—properties in the fluid flow limit

Responsive buffers are conceived in which the buffer drain rate varies with the buffer backlog. Such buffers offer potential as components of communication, transportation, and manufacturing networks because, unlike in the usual buffer model with fixed drain rate (in which overflow and loss are inevitable with standard input models), responsive buffers may or may not exhibit overflow. A simple condition characterizing losslessness in responsive buffers is given. The stationary buffer backlog distribution of lossless responsive buffers subject to a maximally bursty on-off input process is shown to be related to the beta distribution, and under the same conditions, overflow in lossy responsive buffers is shown generally to be exponentially distributed. An important special case of responsive buffers is considered, a linear filter dubbed the leaky bladder. The linearity of the leaky bladder enables us to determine its mean delay and relative smoothing.     

Returning after taking a break in online distance higher education: from intention to effective re-enrollment

One of online distance learning’s positive attributes is its flexibility. However, the possibility of engaging in periods of non-enrollment (breaks) usually ends in students dropping out. In this paper, the intention to continue of those students who have not enrolled in the second semester is analyzed, adopting a long-term program perspective. This continuance intention is compared with the subsequent restart (or dropping out) in the third semester. This analysis has confirmed that the models of continuance intention and effective re-enrollment are essentially different. Continuance intention is more rational, even logical, and is mainly based on the level of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the educational experience (difficulty of the learning materials or perception of the learning system). Effective re-enrollment is more practical or pragmatic, with more importance given to the effects of student dimension variables, for example, motivations for studying, previous university experience, or environmental variables, such as having a job.     

在困顿与沮丧中艰难前行:电大辍学生的学习体验

高辍学率在远程开放教育领域备受关注,解决好这一问题时今后远程开放教育的健康发展意义重大.为进一步梳理远程开放教育中高辍学率现象背后的原因,本研究采用定量研究和质性研究相结合的方法,以某省级电大2010年春季学期24名辍学生及相关教学人员和班主任为研究对象,通过在线问卷调查、深度访谈和集体访谈的方式收集相关研究数据,并使用统计描述法与内容分析法对研究数据进行分析以寻找具体的辍学原因.本研究的具体研究过程在"远程教育辍学归因框架"指导下围绕四个方面进行,包括辍学生入学前的个人特征与基本能力、外部因素表现、内部因素表现以及在学经历及心理体验.研究结果表明,辍学生与远程教学机构在学术上的低融合、辍学生对在线学习资源的低利用、辍学生对时间管理的无意识等因素对他们终止学习产生了较为重要的影响.研究同时指出,在导致学生辍学的内部因素上,远程办学机构也确有值得反思的责任与进行完善的可作为空间.     

No particular way to go

This article aims to deepen understanding of the trajectories through school and into adulthood of people who did not attain valued qualifications from upper secondary school (‘non-completers’), and explore the fruitfulness of careership theory for such analysis. It is based on interviews with 100 young Swedes: 81 non-completers and 19 who had attended special upper secondary schools catering for young people with mild cognitive disability. Their narratives portray sparse socio-economic resources and difficult family situations, learning problems and marginalisation processes in school. They commonly learned to perceive themselves as failures and ‘different’. Framed by narrow horizons of action, these young people’s careers were mostly characterised by enforced rather than self-initiated turning points. Often leading to unemployment and economic problems, leaving secondary school was less of a turning point than a continuation of failure, even if completing adult education and getting a job were regarded as self-initiated, positive shifts. We conclude that careership theory was useful for analysing and understanding the careers of the young people concerned. However, distinguishing between ‘routines’ and ‘turning points’ became especially difficult when studying lives of these young people hemmed in by sparser resources, fewer choices and less stable career trajectories than their peers.     

A novel dropout mechanism with label extension schema toward text emotion classification

Researchers have been aware that emotion is not one-hot encoded in emotion-relevant classification tasks, and multiple emotions can coexist in a given sentence. Recently, several works have focused on leveraging a distribution label or a grayscale label of emotions in the classification model, which can enhance the one-hot label with additional information, such as the intensity of other emotions and the correlation between emotions. Such an approach has been proven effective in alleviating the overfitting problem and improving the model robustness by introducing a distribution learning component in the objective function. However, the effect of distribution learning cannot be fully unfolded as it can reduce the model’s discriminative ability within similar emotion categories. For example, “Sad” and “Fear” are both negative emotions. To address such a problem, we proposed a novel emotion extension scheme in the prior work (Li, Chen, Xie, Li, and Tao, 2021). The prior work incorporated fine-grained emotion concepts to build an extended label space, where a mapping function between coarse-grained emotion categories and fine-grained emotion concepts was identified. For example, sentences labeled “Joy” can convey various emotions such as enjoy, free, and leisure. The model can further benefit from the extended space by extracting dependency within fine-grained emotions when yielding predictions in the original label space. The prior work has shown that it is more apt to apply distribution learning in the extended label space than in the original space. A novel sparse connection method, i.e., Leaky Dropout, is proposed in this paper to refine the dependency-extraction step, which further improves the classification performance. In addition to the multiclass emotion classification task, we extensively experimented on sentiment analysis and multilabel emotion prediction tasks to investigate the effectiveness and generality of the label extension schema.     

大型企业人才流失问题分析及应对方略

大型企业仅依赖于高额工资或签订劳务合同很难真正留住优秀的人才。人员的流失一方面是由其稀缺性造成的,但更多的是由于其他一些客观或主观原因,如沟通不良、企业的环境不好、对工作本身缺乏兴趣、不认同公司的价值观等。优秀员工的流失往往会给企业带来损失．企业应采取培养员工的自我职业发展能力．加强沟通,提供福利计划等措施来降低人才流失率。