In-service teacher training in Portugal: objectives, organization and impact on teacher's career

This paper presents a short overview of teacher´s training as considered by the Portuguese legislation: (i) initial teacher education (ITE), (ii) specialized training and (iii) in-service teacher training. A particular emphasis will be given to in-service teacher training. Nowadays, ITE corresponds to level 7 of the European Qualifications Framework (master degree). It is a career-long professional development, where research-based and in context practice are important features. Specialized training is intended to provide qualification in complementary educational functions, such as special education, school administration and inspection activities, socio-cultural animation and basic education for adults. In-service training or continuous training allows teachers to complement, deepen and update their knowledge and professional competences. Its accreditation, in what concerns involved institutions, training actions and evaluation process is centralized in the “Conselho Científico-Pedagógico da Formação Contínua” (Scientific and Pedagogical Council of in-service training) and has a direct impact in teacher’s careers, being one of the factors considered to access mobility and progression

Performance-Based Compensation: Design and Implementation at Six Teacher Incentive Fund Sites

Examines preliminary outcomes for student achievement, stakeholder support, recruitment and retention, and changes in school cultures; success factors; challenges; and the role of states and districts in implementation and financial sustainability

An Evaluation of the Prison Radio Association’s Activity Final Report Year 1 The West Midlands Prison Radio Taster Project

The Prison Radio Association (PRA) was set up in 2005 and achieved charitable status in 2006. The PRA continues to contribute to the reduction of re-offending by capitalising on the opportunity prison provides to stop people offending for good. The Association is committed to the ways in which prison radio can provide a unique and innovative way to engage offenders (regardless of age, ethnic origin, gender or faith) in education; particularly those hard to reach offenders disenfranchised by the educational system. The PRA currently works with over 40 prisons across England and Wales. In 2007, the Prison Radio Association and partners1 developed a two week taster course in radio production for delivery in six prisons across the West Midlands, entitled: the West Midlands Prison Radio Taster Project2. The objectives of this project were firstly, overall project delivery, which consisted of the recruitment of a radio trainer, developing a radio training course which embeds basic skills and the delivery of the taster courses in six prisons. The wider objectives concerned raising awareness of the potential of radio training to embed basic skills and to examine sustainability within prison service education. The findings of the external evaluation conducted by the Hallam Centre for Community Justice are presented in this report

Undergraduate Library Internships at Musselman Library, Gettysburg College

In 2015-2016, Musselman Library at Gettysburg College participated in Cohort 3 of the Association of College and Research Libraries’ Assessment in Action program. This report outlines an assessment completed of former undergraduate library interns in order to explore the impact their internship experience had on the development of career goals, acceptance to and preparation for graduate education, and their early career. Through an online survey (n= 45) and six semi-structured telephone interviews, respondents reported a positive impact on the above areas

The future of technology enhanced active learning – a roadmap

The notion of active learning refers to the active involvement of learner in the learning process, capturing ideas of learning-by-doing and the fact that active participation and knowledge construction leads to deeper and more sustained learning. Interactivity, in particular learnercontent interaction, is a central aspect of technology-enhanced active learning. In this roadmap, the pedagogical background is discussed, the essential dimensions of technology-enhanced active learning systems are outlined and the factors that are expected to influence these systems currently and in the future are identified. A central aim is to address this promising field from a best practices perspective, clarifying central issues and formulating an agenda for future developments in the form of a roadmap

SCOPE: Scalable Composite Optimization for Learning on Spark

Many machine learning models, such as logistic regression~(LR) and support vector machine~(SVM), can be formulated as composite optimization problems. Recently, many distributed stochastic optimization~(DSO) methods have been proposed to solve the large-scale composite optimization problems, which have shown better performance than traditional batch methods. However, most of these DSO methods are not scalable enough. In this paper, we propose a novel DSO method, called \underline{s}calable \underline{c}omposite \underline{op}timization for l\underline{e}arning~({SCOPE}), and implement it on the fault-tolerant distributed platform \mbox{Spark}. SCOPE is both computation-efficient and communication-efficient. Theoretical analysis shows that SCOPE is convergent with linear convergence rate when the objective function is convex. Furthermore, empirical results on real datasets show that SCOPE can outperform other state-of-the-art distributed learning methods on Spark, including both batch learning methods and DSO methods