Disability and Employer Practices: Research Across the Disciplines

[Excerpt] This book has three related purposes: To raise the visibility of the critical issues surrounding equitable employment for people with disabilities, with a focus on workplace policies and practices. To provide evidence of the importance of applying the very best science available to address these issues across all facets of the problem. To illustrate how combining scientific efforts from the different disciplines to work closely on a common purpose, as well as the intimate involvement of key stakeholders, can provide extraordinary results that inform needed changes to policy and practice

Steering Capital: Optimizing Financial Support for Innovation in Public Education

Examines efforts to align capital to education innovation and calls for clarity and agreement on problems, goals, and metrics; an effective R&D system; an evidence-based culture of continuous improvement; and transparent, comparable, and useful data

Developing an Intervention Toolbox for the Common Health Problems in the Workplace

Development of the Health ↔ Work Toolbox is described. The toolbox aims to reduce the workplace impact of common health problems (musculoskeletal, mental health, and stress complaints) by focusing on tackling work-relevant symptoms. Based on biopsychosocial principles this toolbox supplements current approaches by occupying the zone between primary prevention and healthcare. It provides a set of evidence-informed principles and processes (knowledge + tools) for tackling work-relevant common health problems. The toolbox comprises a proactive element aimed at empowering line managers to create good jobs, and a ‘just in time’ responsive element for supporting individuals struggling with a work-relevant health problem. The key intention is helping people with common health problems to maintain work participation. The extensive conceptual and practical development process, including a comprehensive evidence review, produced a functional prototype toolbox that is evidence based and flexible in its use. End-user feedback was mostly positive. Moving the prototype to a fully-fledged internet resource requires specialist design expertise. The Health ↔ Work Toolbox appears to have potential to contribute to the goal of augmenting existing primary prevention strategies and healthcare delivery by providing a more comprehensive workplace approach to constraining sickness absence

Scaling Success: Lessons from Adaptation Pilots in the Rainfed Regions of India

"Scaling Success" examines how agricultural communities are adapting to the challenges posed by climate change through the lens of India's rainfed agriculture regions. Rainfed agriculture currently occupies 58 percent of India's cultivated land and accounts for up to 40 percent of its total food production. However, these regions face potential production losses of more than $200 billion USD in rice, wheat, and maize by 2050 due to the effects of climate change. Unless action is taken soon at a large scale, farmers will see sharp decreases in revenue and yields.Rainfed regions across the globe have been an important focus for the first generation of adaptation projects, but to date, few have achieved a scale that can be truly transformational. Drawing on lessons learnt from 21 case studies of rainfed agriculture interventions, the report provides guidance on how to design, fund and support adaptation projects that can achieve scale

From Ideas to Practice, Pilots to Strategy: Practical Solutions and Actionable Insights on How to Do Impact Investing

This report is the second publication in the World Economic Forum's Mainstreaming Impact Investing Initiative. The report takes a deeper look at why and how asset owners began to include impact investing in their portfolios and continue to do so today, and how they overcame operational and cultural constraints affecting capital flow. Given that impact investing expertise is spread among dozens if not hundreds of practitioners and academics, the report is a curation of some -- but certainly not all -- of those leading voices. The 15 articles are meant to provide investors, intermediaries and policy-makers with actionable insights on how to incorporate impact investing into their work.The report's goals are to show how mainstream investors and intermediaries have overcome the challenges in the impact investment sector, and to democratize the insights and expertise for anyone and everyone interested in the field. Divided into four main sections, the report contains lessons learned from practitioner's experience, and showcases best practices, organizational structures and innovative instruments that asset owners, asset managers, financial institutions and impact investors have successfully implemented

The effectiveness of the project-based learning (PrjBL) approach in undergraduate accounting education

Desde la década de los 90 organismos profesionales de contabilidad como la American Accounting Association (AAA) o la International Financial Accounting Committe (IFAC) vienen demandando la necesidad de usar metodologías de participación activa en la formación universitaria de la contabilidad que faciliten el desarrollo de competencias y habilidades profesionales. El objetivo del trabajo es analizar la eficacia de ABPrj en la formación universitaria en asignaturas de Contabilidad Superior. El constructo de eficacia se ha formado por la utilidad para el aprendizaje de la materia y el desarrollo de competencias demandadas por la profesión y la mejora del rendimiento. El instrumento de medida es el cuestionario CEMPA (Cuestionario de efectividad del uso de metodologías de participación activa), que mide la percepción de eficacia de las metodologías de participación activa en el desarrollo de competencias técnicas y no técnicas (competencias) y análisis de rendimientos. Los resultados obtenidos confirman que los alumnos implicados en ABPrj perciben su utilidad para el aprendizaje y para el desarrollo de competencias demandadas para la profesión contable. Obtienen mejores rendimientos. Adicionalmente, se observa que la eficacia del ABPrj está relacionada con el tipo de materia; es más eficaz en asignaturas con un perfil creativo y abierto en su interpretación que aquellas más normativas. El estudio presenta limitaciones de carácter interno como externo, basadas en poco reconocimiento del tiempo invertido y la exigencia de prueba final igual para todos los alumnos.Since the 1990s, professional accounting bodies such as the American Accounting Association (AAA) and the International Financial Accounting Committee (IFAC) have insisted on the necessary use of active participation techniques in undergraduate accounting education to facilitate the development of professional skills and abilities. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the effectiveness of project-based learning (PrjBL) in university education in Advanced Accounting courses. The construct of effectiveness was created for its usefulness to learn the subject, develop skills desired in the profession, and improve achievement. The CEMPA questionnaire (Questionnaire Measuring the Effectiveness of Active Participation Techniques, Cuestionario de efectividad del uso de metodologías de Participación Activa) is a tool measuring the perceived effectiveness of active participation techniques in the development of technical and non-technical skills and analysing achievement. The results confirm that students involved in PrjBL perceive it as useful for learning and developing skills desired in the accounting profession. Students perform better. Additionally, it appears that PrjBL effectiveness is related to the type of subject; it is more effective in courses with a creative profile open to interpretation than it is in more prescriptive courses. This study has internal and external limitations based on the limited recognition of the time spent and the requirement of a final test identical for all students

Crisis and Opportunity: Aligning the Community College Presidency with Student Success

In recent years, Americans have awakened to the profound connection between community college student success and the strength of our nation.That community colleges matter deeply is clearfrom a few simple facts:They educate over 7 million degree-seeking students, more than 40 percent of the U.S. college population.They have in recent years been growing at four times the rate of four-year colleges.They enroll a disproportionately large share of the rapidly expanding number of college students of color and first-generation students.Today, though, not enough community college students succeed. This reality was boldly acknowledged in a recent report by the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC): "What we find today are student success rates that are unacceptably low, employment preparation that is inadequately connected to job market needs, and disconnects in transitions between high schools, community colleges, and baccalaureate institutions."?Focusing exclusively on the challenges facing the entire sector, however, obscures an important fact: Many community colleges have been engaged in difficult work on their campus to achieve improved rates of completion, higher levels of student learning and job preparedness, and more equitable outcomes for students of color and others who have historically been left behind in public education.The organizations that prepared this report, Achieving the Dream and the Aspen Institute, work with many institutions that are in fact demonstrably improving student success.What we have learned through our work is that while strong leadership can be exercised by people throughout an institution, every high-performing community college has a first-rate president. The best leaders across the country have a special set of qualities and know-how that enable them to lead institutions to high and improving levels of student success. This report presents a unified vision of who these leaders are and what they do, so that everyone involved in hiring and preparing community college presidents -- trustees and leaders of state systems, universities, and associations -- can consider the extent to which their assumptions and practices ensure that strong presidents are chosen and effectively trained to lead colleges in ways that meet the aspirations of every student as well as the critical goal of significantly improving student outcomes

Information Outlook, February 1998

Volume 2, Issue 2https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_io_1998/1001/thumbnail.jp

Outsourcing: guidelines for a structured approach

Outsourcing is a management approach by which an organization delegates some noncore functions to specialized and ef®cient service providers. In the era of ªglobal marketº and ªe-economyº, outsourcing is one of the main pillars of the new way to conceive the relationships among companies. Despite outsourcing large diffusion, huge business cases and big deals of documentation available on network or press, there is no structured procedure able to support the govern of the evolution of a generic outsourcing process. In accordance with the principles of total quality management, this paper describes a proposal of a new approach for managing outsourcing processes. The model, which can be easily adapted to different application ®elds, has been conceived with the main aim of managing strategic decisions, economic factors and human resources. The approach is supported by different decision and analysis tools, such as benchmarking techniques, multiple criteria decision aiding (MCDA) methods, cost analysis, and other process-planning methodologies. An application of the method to a real case is also provide