315,220 research outputs found

    Designing Scholarships To Improve College Success: Final Report On the Performance-Based Scholarship Demonstration

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    Performance-based scholarships have two main goals: to give students more money for college and to provide incentives for academic progress. They are designed to reduce the financial burden on low-income students and help them progress academically by offering financial aid contingent upon meeting pre-specified academic benchmarks. The scholarships are intended to cover a modest amount of students' educational costs during the semesters they are offered -- generally between 15 and 25 percent of students' unmet financial need, the difference between students' calculated financial need to attend college and the financial aid they are awarded. The money is paid directly to students, on top of their existing federal and state need-based financial aid, and the students themselves decide how best to use the funds. MDRC launched the Performance-Based Scholarship Demonstration in 2008 to evaluate the effectiveness of these scholarships for as broad a range of low-income students as possible, in a variety of settings, and with varying incentive structures. As such, the evaluation includes more than 12,000 students in institutions across six states to test different performance-based scholarship designs. These results show that even relatively moderate investments in low-income students' education can have modest but long-lasting impacts on their academic outcomes. These findings may be especially relevant to states, institutions, and private scholarship providers seeking purposeful and efficient ways to give low-income students additional financial aid that can also help them succeed academically

    Mentoring Former Prisoners: A Guide for Reentry Programs

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    Few social programs have attempted to provide high-risk adults -- and, particularly, former prisoners -- with mentors. And thus there are few resources that offer practical advice and recommendations for mentoring this population, given its distinct needs, assets and challenges. While much remains to be tested and learned, this manual draws on the experience of the 11 sites involved in P/PV'sReady4Work prisoner reentry demonstration, as well as established best practices in the mentoring field, to provide guidelines for practitioners who are interested in developing a mentoring program to support former prisoners and enhance the effectiveness of other reentry services, such as employment and case management services.The guide was originally published by the US Department of Labor in November 2007 under the title Mentoring Ex-Prisoners: A Guide for Prisoner Reentry Programs. However, because of growing interest in establishing mentoring programs as part of larger reentry efforts around the country, P/PV decided to reissue the guide, along with updated information related to P/PV's evaluation of Ready4Work (particularly findings published in Mentoring Formerly Incarcerated Adults, 2009.

    Designing and Managing a Subaward Program

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    This guide was designed primarily for intermediary organizations that have received Federal funds. However, anyone responsible for developing a grant-making program, including those representing foundations, will find useful information in this guide. The guide takes you through the steps for creating a subaward plan, which is a written document describing the steps you will take to implement your program. A written plan may or may not be required by your program office before you begin implementing your program. However, by following the steps required to write a subaward plan, you will design an effective and thoughtful subaward program that is likely to reach its stated goals

    Design principles for professionalizing primary school teachers on promoting reading motivation

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    Studies show that teachers’ continuing professional development (CPD) is essential for educational quality, and moreover, when it comes to reading, key for students’ success in education and participation in our 21st century society. Most of the research investigating professional development programs on improving teachers’ self-efficacy for teaching reading and in particular on fostering students’ reading motivation, however, fails to include clear and detailed descriptions of the design principles underlying the programs. Therefore, the present study provides a comprehensive description and operationalization of the design principles of a CPD program for primary school teachers focusing on promoting students’ reading motivation combining Desimone’s (2009) framework for effective professional development with Self-Determination Theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000). Consequently, the CPD program’s core features as distinguished by Desimone (i.e., content focus, coherence, active learning, collective participation and duration) and the need for autonomy, competence and relatedness as put central in SDT are analytically described and elaborated on. In view of reporting on the implementation check of the CPD, we further provide insight into whether these operationalized design principles were also perceived as such by the teachers participating in a first iteration of the CPD intervention. information

    em Where do I begin? A problem solving approach to teaching functional programming

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    This paper introduces a problem solving method for teaching functional programming, based on Polya's `How To Solve It', an introductory investigation of mathematical method. We first present the language independent version, and then show in particular how it applies to the development of programs in Haskell. The method is illustrated by a sequence of examples and a larger case study

    gCSP: A Graphical Tool for Designing CSP systems

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    For broad acceptance of an engineering paradigm, a graphical notation and a supporting design tool seem necessary. This paper discusses certain issues of developing a design environment for building systems based on CSP. Some of the issues discussed depend specifically on the underlying theory of CSP, while a number of them are common for any graphical notation and supporting tools, such as provisions for complexity management and design overview

    MCMC-ODPR : primer design optimization using Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling

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    Background Next generation sequencing technologies often require numerous primer designs that require good target coverage that can be financially costly. We aimed to develop a system that would implement primer reuse to design degenerate primers that could be designed around SNPs, thus find the fewest necessary primers and the lowest cost whilst maintaining an acceptable coverage and provide a cost effective solution. We have implemented Metropolis-Hastings Markov Chain Monte Carlo for optimizing primer reuse. We call it the Markov Chain Monte Carlo Optimized Degenerate Primer Reuse (MCMC-ODPR) algorithm. Results After repeating the program 1020 times to assess the variance, an average of 17.14% fewer primers were found to be necessary using MCMC-ODPR for an equivalent coverage without implementing primer reuse. The algorithm was able to reuse primers up to five times. We compared MCMC-ODPR with single sequence primer design programs Primer3 and Primer-BLAST and achieved a lower primer cost per amplicon base covered of 0.21 and 0.19 and 0.18 primer nucleotides on three separate gene sequences, respectively. With multiple sequences, MCMC-ODPR achieved a lower cost per base covered of 0.19 than programs BatchPrimer3 and PAMPS, which achieved 0.25 and 0.64 primer nucleotides, respectively. Conclusions MCMC-ODPR is a useful tool for designing primers at various melting temperatures at good target coverage. By combining degeneracy with optimal primer reuse the user may increase coverage of sequences amplified by the designed primers at significantly lower costs. Our analyses showed that overall MCMC-ODPR outperformed the other primer-design programs in our study in terms of cost per covered base
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