Functional Skills Support Programme: Developing functional skills in modern foreign languages

This booklet is part of "... a series of 11 booklets which helps schools to implement functional skills across the curriculum. The booklets illustrate how functional skills can be applied and developed in different subjects and contexts, supporting achievement at Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4. Each booklet contains an introduction to functional skills for subject teachers, three practical planning examples with links to related websites and resources, a process for planning and a list of additional resources to support the teaching and learning of functional skills." - The National Strategies website

Preparing for Growth: Human Capital Innovations in Charter Public Schools

Examines charter management organizations' strategies for boosting the supply of effective leaders and teachers, including recruiting and retaining talent, growing in-house talent; extending their reach; and importing and fostering management talent

Correlated Equilibria in Competitive Staff Selection Problem

This paper deals with an extension of the concept of correlated strategies to Markov stopping games. The Nash equilibrium approach to solving nonzero-sum stopping games may give multiple solutions. An arbitrator can suggest to each player the decision to be applied at each stage based on a joint distribution over the players' decisions. This is a form of equilibrium selection. Examples of correlated equilibria in nonzero-sum games related to the staff selection competition in the case of two departments are given. Utilitarian, egalitarian, republican and libertarian concepts of correlated equilibria selection are used.Comment: The idea of this paper was presented at Game Theory and Mathematical Economics, International Conference in Memory of Jerzy Los(1920 - 1998), Warsaw, September 200

Multicriteria mapping manual: version 1.0

This Manual offers basic advice on how to do multicriteria mapping (MCM). It suggests how to: go about designing and building a typical MCM project; engage with participants and analyse results – and get the most out of the online MCM tool. Key terms are shown in bold italics and defined and explained in a final Annex. The online MCM software tool provides its own operational help. So this Manual is more focused on the general approach. There are no rigid rules. MCM is structured, but very flexible. It allows many more detailed features than can be covered here. MCM users are encouraged to think for themselves and be responsible and creative

Qualitative software engineering research -- reflections and guidelines

Researchers are increasingly recognizing the importance of human aspects in software development and since qualitative methods are used to, in-depth, explore human behavior, we believe that studies using such techniques will become more common. Existing qualitative software engineering guidelines do not cover the full breadth of qualitative methods and knowledge on using them found in the social sciences. The aim of this study was thus to extend the software engineering research community's current body of knowledge regarding available qualitative methods and provide recommendations and guidelines for their use. With the support of an epistemological argument and a literature review, we suggest that future research would benefit from (1) utilizing a broader set of research methods, (2) more strongly emphasizing reflexivity, and (3) employing qualitative guidelines and quality criteria. We present an overview of three qualitative methods commonly used in social sciences but rarely seen in software engineering research, namely interpretative phenomenological analysis, narrative analysis, and discourse analysis. Furthermore, we discuss the meaning of reflexivity in relation to the software engineering context and suggest means of fostering it. Our paper will help software engineering researchers better select and then guide the application of a broader set of qualitative research methods.Comment: 30 page

The estimation of a preference-based measure of health from the SF-36

This paper reports on the findings of a study to derive a preference-based measure of health from the SF-36 for use in economic evaluation. The SF-36 was revised into a six-dimensional health state classification called the SF-6D. A sample of 249 states defined by the SF-6D have been valued by a representative sample of 611 members of the UK general population, using standard gamble. Models are estimated for predicting health state valuations for all 18,000 states defined by the SF-6D. The econometric modelling had to cope with the hierarchical nature of the data and its skewed distribution. The recommended models have produced significant coefficients for levels of the SF-6D, which are robust across model specification. However, there are concerns with some inconsistent estimates and over prediction of the value of the poorest health states. These problems must be weighed against the rich descriptive ability of the SF-6D, and the potential application of these models to existing and future SF-36 data set