This School Works for Me: A Guide for Data Analysts

Details the data collection, synthesis, and analyses required to identify at-risk students and gauge progress, assess school and program performance, and optimize resource allocation to raise graduation rates. Supplement offers tools, charts, and graphs

Social Links from Latent Topics in Microblogs

Language use is overlaid on a network of social con-nections, which exerts an influence on both the top-ics of discussion and the ways that these topics can be expressed (Halliday, 1978). In the past, efforts t

Make it so! Jean-Luc Picard, Bart Simpson and the design of e-public services

In this paper, we report on a project applying participatory design methods to include people who have experience of social exclusion (in one form or another) in designing possible technologies for e-(local)-government services. The work was part of a project for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister in the UK, and was concerned with ‘access tokens’ that can provide personal identification for individuals accessing public services, based on technologies such as multi-functional smartcards, flash memory sticks, mobile phone SIMs or similar devices. In particular we report on our experience using the ‘pastiche scenarios’ technique recently developed by Mark Blythe. Our findings indicate that the technique can be effective and engaging in helping people to create realistic scenarios of future technology use and highlight some possible pitfalls to consider when using this technique.</p

Customized Employment: Applying Practical Solutions for Employment Success (Volume 1)

[Excerpt] The Customized Employment process is a flexible blend of strategies, services, and supports designed to increase employment options for job seekers with complex needs through voluntary negotiation of the employment relationship with an employer. The job seeker is the primary source of information and drives the process. The Customized Employment process begins with an exploration phase, which lays the foundation for employment planning. Planning results in a blueprint for the job search where an employment relationship is negotiated to meet the needs of both the job seeker and the employer

An operational tool for evaluating poverty outreach of development policies and projects

Development institutions and projects frequently seek to target poorer segments of the population. Yet, existing methods for evaluating their outreach are generally unsuited to most operational settings, since they are either too costly and cumbersome (e.g., detailed income or household surveys), or they produce results that are not comparable between villages or regions within a country (e.g., participatory poverty appraisals). This paper presents a new and operationally suitable method to measure the poverty of clients of development projects in relation to the general population of nonclients. The method was developed in response to demands by donors and development practitioners for a low-cost evaluation instrument that could be used as a regular operational tool for assessing the poverty outreach of a development project or institution. While the method was originally developed for the purpose of assessing the poverty outreach of microfinance institutions (MFIs), we believe the method can be used for any development policy or project that pursues an explicit objective of reaching poorer people. The paper begins by discussing existing methods of poverty assessment. Next, the paper presents heuristic steps for identifying indicators of poverty to be tested in the case studies, including the questionnaire that was field tested in four countries with large differences in poverty-level, socioeconomic, and cultural contexts, and with MFIs that worked either in urban, rural, or mixed areas with different target clientele and financial products. The authors then describe the method of principal component analysis used to construct a poverty score as the measure of relative poverty. The paper concludes with a summary of results from four country case studies (two in Sub-Saharan Africa, one in South Asia, and one in Central America).FCND ,Poverty Research Evaluation ,

Direct Elicitation of Credit Constraints: Conceptual and Practical Issues with an Empirical Application to Peruvian Agriculture

This paper provides a methodological bridge leading from the well-developed theory of credit rationing to the less developed territory of empirically identifying credit constraints. We begin by developing a simple model showing that credit constraints may take three forms: quantity rationing, transaction cost rationing, and risk rationing. Each form of non-price rationing adversely affects household resource allocation and thus should be accounted for in empirical analyses of credit market performance. We then outline a survey strategy to directly classify households as credit unconstrained or constrained and, if constrained, to further identify which of the three non-price rationing mechanisms is at play. We discuss several practical issues that arise due to the use of a combination of “factual” and “interpretative” survey questions. Finally, using a data set from northern Peru, we demonstrate the importance of accounting for all three forms of credit constraints by estimating the increase in farm production that would result from relaxing credit constraints. The inclusion of transaction- and risk-rationed households in the constrained group results in an estimated impact that is twice as large as the impact when only quantity rationed households are considered constrained.Financial Economics,

Final Report-Workshop on Experiences and Options for Priority Setting in NARS, August 12-16, 1996, Nairobi, Kenya

The motivation for this workshop came from two sources. First, under a project funded by USAID (AFR/SD/PSGE/TDT Office), Michigan State University (MSU) has been carrying out various activities to assist African national agricultural research systems (NARS) and regional organizations to improve their capacity for strategic agricultural research planning, including technology assessment and priority setting within a commodity sector framework. Second, recent collaborative work by the International Service for National Agricultural Research (ISNAR) and the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) has focused on the development of a process and methods for program-level priority setting. The objectives of the workshop were (1) to provide a forum for ASARECA member NARS to synthesize their experiences with institute and program-level priority setting and technology assessment; (2) to examine the process and methods developed by KARI/ISNAR and other NARS in commodity program planning; and (3) to develop country-specific frameworks and action plans for a priority-setting/technology assessment study in a focus program area, to be carried out beginning in late 1996.food security, food policy, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies, Downloads July 2008 - June 2009: 11, F0,