Project Hand in Hand

The project “Parents and Teachers Working Hand in Hand : Training Programme for Parents and Teachers of Pupils with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)” was prepared and co-ordinated by Ankara Provincial Directorate for National Education under the European Union Education and Youth Programme, Lifelong Learning Programme within the framework of Grundtvig Learning Partnership. At the planning stage of the project, as the co-ordinating institution, we wanted to prepare a project for pupils with ADHD because we know that, across the world, almost 5% of students suffer from this disorder and they encounter difficulties in their academic life, in their community and in their social relationships. Both parents and teachers encounter difficulties while they are supporting pupils with ADHD in their school lives. As the second biggest local education authority in Turkey, we decided to prepare this project for parents and teachers of pupils with ADHD to make everyone’s life easier. We shared our thoughts with different people and institutions from different countries and we realised that it is not only a problem in Turkey but also for other countries. As a result, we developed project partnerships with various educational institutions, universities and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from different countries. The project development stage was completed after contributions from all partners. Initially we had started with 8 partners but after approval for the project and the agreement of National Agencies of each partner countries, we implemented the project with 6 partners starting from 1st October 2007 to 31st July 2009

THE DECISION TO UNDERTAKE VOCATIONAL HIGHER EDUCATION IN SHIPPING AND LOGISTICS IN THE UK

This work investigates the decision to study shipping and logistics at advanced levels in the UK. Documented evidence reports and analyses the perceptions of students on vocational courses in shipping, transport and logistics and investigates why they chose their particular fields of study. A range of instruments are presented to analyse how students perceived that they had arrived at their study decisions, including national surveys of undergraduates in maritime business, postgraduates in shipping and logistics and professionals contemplating updating short courses. Qualitative, quantitative and mapping methods are presented along with perceptions of relevant professional outcome roles and other factors. Exploratory approaches to proposing and evaluating alternative approaches to teaching aimed at raising the student's perception of the nature of professional skills requirements were predicated by identifying and defining local student schemae and tailoring aids to their specific learning and teaching requirements. A cognitive mapping approach enabled comparisons of perceptions between postgraduates, whose individual beliefs, after being mapped and modelled as a directed network, were analysed, and differences between maps were quantified. Quantitative pairwise map comparisons included 54 individuals generating 1430 synchronal comparisons in one cohort and four diachronal cohort comparisons. These revealed that distance measures constrained by the numbers of transmitters or receivers, and the strength of relationships where appropriate, formed the best discriminators. Empirical and theoretical explanations of maps and attempts to compare particular subgroups and explain differences were often inconclusive. A unified social cognitive theory of career and academic interest, choice and performance generated useful propositions relating to how individuals manage issues of self-efFicacy, expected outcomes from decisions and their personal goals. Substantive work revealed problems of conflicting domains between students' verbatim statements, only weakly coincident with theoretical concepts. Conclusions that mapping is most powerful/when based on qualitative analysis of the richness and diversity of individual perceptions; infer that no simple standard decision process is operating and hence no single recruitment marketing device is apparent. In applying and disseminating findings, where possible, proposals were made to assist organisations promoting careers awareness and recruitment into relevant professions and university based vocational courses, published by relevant professional bodies

NL ARMS Netherlands Annual Review of Military Studies 2020

This open access volume surveys the state of the field to examine whether a fifth wave of deterrence theory is emerging. Bringing together insights from world-leading experts from three continents, the volume identifies the most pressing strategic challenges, frames theoretical concepts, and describes new strategies. The use and utility of deterrence in today’s strategic environment is a topic of paramount concern to scholars, strategists and policymakers. Ours is a period of considerable strategic turbulence, which in recent years has featured a renewed emphasis on nuclear weapons used in defence postures across different theatres; a dramatic growth in the scale of military cyber capabilities and the frequency with which these are used; and rapid technological progress including the proliferation of long-range strike and unmanned systems. These military-strategic developments occur in a polarized international system, where cooperation between leading powers on arms control regimes is breaking down, states widely make use of hybrid conflict strategies, and the number of internationalized intrastate proxy conflicts has quintupled over the past two decades. Contemporary conflict actors exploit a wider gamut of coercive instruments, which they apply across a wider range of domains. The prevalence of multi-domain coercion across but also beyond traditional dimensions of armed conflict raises an important question: what does effective deterrence look like in the 21st century? Answering that question requires a re-appraisal of key theoretical concepts and dominant strategies of Western and non-Western actors in order to assess how they hold up in today’s world. Air Commodore Professor Dr. Frans Osinga is the Chair of the War Studies Department of the Netherlands Defence Academy and the Special Chair in War Studies at the University Leiden. Dr. Tim Sweijs is the Director of Research at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies and a Research Fellow at the Faculty of Military Sciences of the Netherlands Defence Academy in Breda

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Provosts in Building a Student Learning Assessment-Supportive Organizational Culture: A Multiple-Site Evaluation within the California State University System

Although research on cultivating support for student learning assessment at the institutional level points to the necessary involvement of all campus stakeholders, researchers have commented on the particularly important role of institutional administrators. Most research on the role of administrators in building support for assessment to date has not, however, focused on provosts, even though they are critical because of their power to determine the internal allocation of institutional resources. To address this issue, this study used a 27-question, Likert-scale survey to estimate the extent to which provosts in the California State University system have been successful in building an assessment-supportive organizational culture on their respective campuses. All presidents, provosts, associate provosts, deans, and associate deans in the 23-campus system were surveyed using eight Total Quality Management constructs. Based on the opinions of the 195 administrators that responded, provosts within the system were found to be more effective than not with an overall score of slightly more than seven on a ten-point scale (with ten as “very effective”). Provosts were rated as most effective in terms of “shared vision” and “involvement” and least effective in terms of “quality at the same cost” and “collaboration”, although the average scores on all eight of the constructs were fairly tightly bunched. In addition, multivariate analysis revealed that two measures of institutional size, total enrollment and the number of academic affairs administrators, as well as provostial tenure and percent of graduate students were helpful in explaining variation in overall effectiveness; in particular, higher enrollments were associated with greater effectiveness. Beyond its significance at the institutional and university system levels, this study was important in that it explored the extent to which the collegiate student assessment movement has been institutionalized. However, the study\u27s grounding in Total Quality Management was questioned by many respondents; further research might consider a different theoretical approach. Examining perceptions among different strata of academic affairs administrators could assist in this endeavor. Finally, future researchers might examine other large public university systems to begin painting a national picture of the effectiveness of provosts in building a student learning assessment-supportive culture