Measuring Hotel Service Quality: Tools for Gaining the Competitive Edge

As the hotel industry grows more competitive, quality guest service becomes an increasingly important part of managers\u27 responsibility measuring the quality of service delivery is facilitated when managers know what types of assessment methods are available to them. The authors present and discuss the following available measurement techniques and describe the situations where they best meet the needs of hotel managers: management observation, employee feedback programs, comment cards, mailed surveys, personal and telephone interviews, focus groups, and mystery shopping

Implementation of the America\u27s Choice Literacy Workshops

Fostering literacy is at the heart of the America’s Choice Comprehensive School Reform Design. Strong reading and writing skills are viewed as cornerstones of successful student performance in all subject areas. The readers and writers workshops, which together we call the literacy workshops, play a central role in moving all children toward high standards of performance. The workshops are designed to provide students with a rich immersion into the numerous skills and habits necessary to become fluent readers and writers. The structures of the literacy workshops are intended to facilitate teachers’ analyses of student skills (as represented by their work) in relation to external standards for performance and to help them to provide students with repeated opportunities to develop the skills necessary to produce work that meets the standards. To effectively teach using the workshop structures requires teachers to adopt a series of specified classroom structures and pedagogical strategies. This report examines the implementation of the literacy workshops in America’s Choice classrooms across the United States. The results are based upon data collected from observations and interviews with a random sample of 42 elementary and middle school teachers in 23 America’s Choice schools during the 2000-2001 school year. At the time of our fieldwork, the schools were either at the end of their first or second year implementing America’s Choice. Our analyses focus on two areas: teachers’ fidelity to the structures of the literacy workshops and their depth of understanding of the instructional philosophy and techniques upon which the workshops are based

Requirements, Resource Planning and Management for Decrewing/Recrewing Scenarios of the International Space Station

Following the failure of 44P on launch in August 2011, and the subsequent grounding of all Russian Soyuz rocket based launches, the ISS ground teams engaged in an effort to determine how long the ISS could remain crewed, what would be required to safely configure the ISS for decrewing, and what would be required to recrew the ISS upon resumption of Soyuz rocket launches if decrewing became necessary. This White Paper was written to capture the processes and lessons learned from real-time time events and to provide a reference and training document for ISS Program teams in the event decrewing of the ISS is needed. Through coordination meetings and assessments, teams identified six decrewing priorities for ground and crew operations. These priorities were integrated along with preflight priorities through the Increment replanning process. Additionally, the teams reviewed, updated, and implemented changes to the governing documentation for the configuration of the ISS for a contingency decrewing event. Steps were taken to identify critical items for disposal prior to decrewing, as well as identifying the required items to be strategically staged or flown with the astronauts and cosmonauts who would eventually recrew the ISS. After the successful launches and dockings of both 45P and 28S, the decrewing team transitioned to finalizing and publishing the documentation for standardizing the decrewing flight rules. With the continued launching of crews and cargo to the ISS, utilization and science is again a high priority, with the Increment pairs 29 and 30, and 31 and 32 reaching the milestone of at least 35 hours per week average utilization

The Heart of the Matter: The Coaching Model in America's Choice Schools

The Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) at the University of Pennsylvania was contracted by the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) in 1998 to conduct the external evaluation of the America's Choice school design. CPRE designed and conducted a series of targeted studies on the implementation and impacts of the America's Choice design. This report coincides with the publication of three separate studies by CPRE on the impact of America's Choice in a number of districts across the country using a variety of quantitative and analytic approaches. Those impact analyses and a stand-alone piece on classroom observations conducted in Cohort 4 schools can be viewed as separate pieces or as complements to the information presented in this report. Another recent CPRE publication from fall 2001 is a widely distributed report entitled, Instructional Leadership in a Standards-based Reform, a companion piece to both the impact reports and this report

The Heart of the Matter: The Coaching Model in America\u27s Choice Schools

The Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) at the University of Pennsylvania was contracted by the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) in 1998 to conduct the external evaluation of the America’s Choice school design. CPRE designed and conducted a series of targeted studies on the implementation and impacts of the America’s Choice design. This report coincides with the publication of three separate studies by CPRE on the impact of America’s Choice in a number of districts across the country using a variety of quantitative and analytic approaches. Those impact analyses and a stand-alone piece on classroom observations conducted in Cohort 4 schools can be viewed as separate pieces or as complements to the information presented in this report. Another recent CPRE publication from fall 2001 is a widely distributed report entitled, Instructional Leadership in a Standards-based Reform, a companion piece to both the impact reports and this report

Shifts in soil microbial community structure, nitrogen cycling and the concomitant declining N availability in ageing primary boreal forest ecosystems

AbstractPlant growth in boreal forests is commonly limited by a low supply of nitrogen, a condition that may be aggravated by high tree below-ground allocation of carbon to ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi and associated microorganisms. These in turn immobilise N and reduce its availability to plants as boreal ecosystems develop. Here, we studied a boreal forest ecosystem chronosequence created by new land rising out of the sea due to iso-static rebound along the coast of northern Sweden. We used height over the ocean to estimate ecosystem age and examined its relationship to soil microbial community structure and the gross turnover of N. The youngest soils develop with meadows by the coast, followed by a zone of N2-fixing alder trees, and primary boreal conifer forest on ground up to 560 years old. The young soils in meadows contained little organic matter and microbial biomass per unit area. Nitrogen was turned over at low rates when expressed per area (m−2), but specific rates (per gram soil carbon (C)) were the highest found along the transect. In the zone with alder, the amounts of soil C and microbial biomass were much higher (bacterial biomass had doubled and fungal biomass quadrupled). Rates of gross N mineralisation (expressed on an area basis) were highest, but the retention of added labelled NH4+ was lowest in this soil as compared to other ages. The alder zone also had the largest extractable pools of inorganic N in soil and highest N % in plant foliage. In the older conifer forest ecosystems the amounts of soil C and N, as well as biomass of both bacteria and fungi increased. Data on organic matter 14C suggested that the largest input of recently fixed plant C occurred in the younger coniferous forest ecosystems. With increasing ecosystem age, the ratio of microbial C to total soil C was constant, whereas the ratio of microbial N to total soil N increased and gross N mineralization declined. Simultaneously, plant foliar N % decreased and the natural abundance of 15N in the soil increased. More specifically, the difference in δ15N between plant foliage and soil increased, which is related to relatively greater retention of 15N relative to 14N by ECM fungi as N is taken up from the soil and some N is transferred to the plant host. In the conifer forest, where these changes were greatest, we found increased fungal biomass in the F- and H-horizons of the mor-layer, in which ECM fungi are known to dominate (the uppermost horizon with litter and moss is dominated by saprotrophic fungi). Hence, we propose that the decreasing availability of N to the plants and the subsequent decline in plant production in ageing boreal forests is linked to high tree belowground C allocation to ECM fungi, a strong microbial sink for available soil N

The Heart of the Matter: The Coaching Model in America's Choice Schools

The Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) at the University of Pennsylvania was contracted by the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) in 1998 to conduct the external evaluation of the America's Choice school design. CPRE designed and conducted a series of targeted studies on the implementation and impacts of the America's Choice design. This report coincides with the publication of three separate studies by CPRE on the impact of America's Choice in a number of districts across the country using a variety of quantitative and analytic approaches. Those impact analyses and a stand-alone piece on classroom observations conducted in Cohort 4 schools can be viewed as separate pieces or as complements to the information presented in this report. Another recent CPRE publication from fall 2001 is a widely distributed report entitled, Instructional Leadership in a Standards-based Reform, a companion piece to both the impact reports and this report

Lack of SARS Transmission among Public Hospital Workers, Vietnam

The severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in Vietnam was amplified by nosocomial spread within hospital A, but no transmission was reported in hospital B, the second of two designated SARS hospitals. Our study documents lack of SARS-associated coronavirus transmission to hospital B workers, despite variable infection control measures and the use of personal protective equipment

An exploratory randomised controlled trial of a premises-level intervention to reduce alcohol-related harm including violence in the United Kingdom

<b>Background</b><p></p> To assess the feasibility of a randomised controlled trial of a licensed premises intervention to reduce severe intoxication and disorder; to establish effect sizes and identify appropriate approaches to the development and maintenance of a rigorous research design and intervention implementation.<p></p> <b>Methods</b><p></p> An exploratory two-armed parallel randomised controlled trial with a nested process evaluation. An audit of risk factors and a tailored action plan for high risk premises, with three month follow up audit and feedback. Thirty-two premises that had experienced at least one assault in the year prior to the intervention were recruited, match paired and randomly allocated to control or intervention group. Police violence data and data from a street survey of study premises’ customers, including measures of breath alcohol concentration and surveyor rated customer intoxication, were used to assess effect sizes for a future definitive trial. A nested process evaluation explored implementation barriers and the fidelity of the intervention with key stakeholders and senior staff in intervention premises using semi-structured interviews.<p></p> <b>Results</b><p></p> The process evaluation indicated implementation barriers and low fidelity, with a reluctance to implement the intervention and to submit to a formal risk audit. Power calculations suggest the intervention effect on violence and subjective intoxication would be raised to significance with a study size of 517 premises.<p></p> <b>Conclusions</b><p></p> It is methodologically feasible to conduct randomised controlled trials where licensed premises are the unit of allocation. However, lack of enthusiasm in senior premises staff indicates the need for intervention enforcement, rather than voluntary agreements, and on-going strategies to promote sustainability