Measuring Up: Teachers\u27 Perceptions of a New Evaluation System

Teacher appraisal and evaluation systems have increased the level of teacher accountability, resulting in increased pressure to be successful in the classroom (Benedict, Thomas, Kimerling, & Leko, 2013; Derrington, 2011; Glazerman et al., 2011; Papay, 2012). As a result, several states have begun to stray from the traditional methods of evaluating teachers, thus creating their own appraisal systems in an effort to increase teacher quality and teacher accountability of student performance and success (Anderson, 2012). This approach to transform traditional teacher evaluation methods has attracted both teachers and administrators alike (Derrington, 2011)

Improving School Leadership: The Connection of Transformational Leadership and Psychological Well-Being of the Followers

In this current era of public school accountability in the United States, the passage of No Child Left Behind resulted in dramatic changes for public school districts (U.S. Department of Education, 2001). Although the recent reauthorization, entitled Every Student Succeeds Act, allowed greater flexibility on the state and local levels, effective school leadership still remained a critical factor when establishing and maintaining high standards of student learning (Executive Office of the President, 2015). Onorato (2013) noted the federal and state accountability mandates have forced public school administrators to transform the educational environment while serving as instructional leaders for teachers and students. Additionally, Onorato noted as accountability pressures increased, educational leaders were compelled to strengthen student achievement through increased leadership qualities. Furthermore, transformational leadership empowered the followers to strive with higher levels of confidence and motivation while the followers also assumed the traits and actions of transformational leadership (Onorato, 2013). This phenomenological narrative study was designed to describe the transformational leadership components of selected superintendents in the state of Texas, which directly affected a follower\u27s psychological well-being. All seven individuals who participated in the research study were current or recent superintendents with experience in turning around a low-performing campus or district. The leader participants self-identified their own transformational leadership skills using the MLQ SX-Short by Avolio and Bass (2013). The research questions allowed for further investigation into the influence of the four components of transformational leadership on the follower\u27s psychological well-being. Findings indicated idealized influence and inspirational motivation as the most dominant transformational leadership components of the participants. Findings also emphasized the importance of the positive impact of transformational leadership processes on the follower\u27s psychological well-being

Nonequilibrium Steady State of Photoexcited Correlated Electrons in the Presence of Dissipation

We present a framework to determine nonequilibrium steady states in strongly correlated electron systems in the presence of dissipation. This is demonstrated for a correlated electron (Falicov-Kimball) model attached to a heat bath and irradiated by an intense pump light, for which an exact solution is obtained with the Floquet method combined with the nonequilibrium dynamical mean-field theory. On top of a Drude-like peak indicative of photometallization as observed in recent pump-probe experiments, new nonequilibrium phenomena are predicted to emerge, where the optical conductivity exhibits dip and kink structures around the frequency of the pump light, a midgap absorption arising from photoinduced Floquet subbands, and a negative attenuation (gain) due to a population inversion.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, published versio

Hierarchy of integrable Hamiltonians describing of nonlinear n-wave interaction

In the paper we construct an hierarchy of integrable Hamiltonian systems which describe the variation of n-wave envelopes in nonlinear dielectric medium. The exact solutions for some special Hamiltonians are given in terms of elliptic functions of the first kind.Comment: 17 page

Rural Superintendents\u27 Experiences in the Application of Principle-Centered Leadership at the Personal and Interpersonal Levels

Covey ( 1990) suggested that to achieve success in leadership, one must identify core values and principles and ensure that managerial and organizational systems are aligned with these values and principles. These values explained by Covey in principle-centered leadership are built upon the foundation principles of trustworthiness at the personal level and trust at the interpersonal level, which allows for empowerment at the managerial level and alignment at the organizational level. Covey explained that trust or the lack of trust is the foundation of success or failure both in relationships as well as business, industry, education, and government. Combs, Edmonson, and Harris (2013) suggested the premise that trust matters has been confirmed by research findings and trust is often the distinguishing factor between leadership success and failure

The evolution of water control in modern farming systems: a case study of D & S Turner, Brookton, WA

Darrell and Suzanne Turner’s WISALTS journey began after Darrell’s father David became a firm believer of the WISALTS method. Their family’s first introduction to Harry Whittington’s work was in early 1970’s when Harry established a bank from one of their waterholes to the Aldersyde-Kweda road. They witnessed the bank running water and to this day it still does. It was in the mid 1980’s that the first test of major renovations began, Tom Mills (WISALTS Quairading) came and surveyed an 8 kilometre bank. This bank was constructed as a double push dozer bank which had a good result initially, this confirmed to Darrell and his father that they were on the right track. However, over time the clay broke down and the bank began to leak in the sandy areas, which created other problems. To counter this problem, WISALTS decided to test whether lining the sand seams with a plastic barrier would stop the leak. The majority of work began in the mid 1990’s with the installation of banks and plastic in the deeper sand areas. This method proved more effective than the traditional double push method, however, there were still some issues with water moving around the edges of plastic. By the late 1990’s after a WISALTS discussion with Harry and Laurie Adamson (WISALTS Quairading) it was decided that plastic should be used in all the banks as it gave a more effective and durable seal. At this time Darrell began working with Noel Powell, purchasing a shared excavator to make this labour-intensive job more efficient. From 1998 to 2005 Darrell and Noel worked together to install many kilometres of plastic lined banks on their farms and properties throughout the district. Recently Darrell has begun filling in the banks and leaving the plastic lining. This has allowed machinery to operate over the plastic barriers and the paddocks could be worked as normal without the obstacle of the banks. The results from installing Interceptor Barriers (plastic lined trench with-out a surface bank) gave a significant reduction in waterlogged areas and a more even distribution of water over the landscape. It stopped the water accumulating in seepage areas (sand plain seeps) and retained the water higher in the landscape for the crop to use. The recent filling in of banks has also eliminated weed problems caused by the banks. The plastic lined method has also helped to stem water flow from neighbour’s properties (see case study 1). This has allowed areas to remain productive and prevent or slow the spread of salinity. Darrell’s rational for installing Interceptor Barriers are driven by increases in productivity with environmental benefits as a bonus. The vision for the future is a continuation of installing plastic barriers starting at the top of the hill and a program to fill in the old banks to take advantage of GPS technologies and weed control. With knife points, stubble retention and 100% cropping there is no longer a need to manage surface water flow. This publication is part of the WISALTS (Whittington Interceptor Sustainable Agriculture Land Treatment Society Incorporated) Collection

Conceptual Discovery of Educational Resources through Learning Objectives

Περιέχει το πλήρες κείμενοThis poster reports on current work with the NSF-funded Achievement Standards Network (ASN) to support discovery of educational resources in digital libraries using conceptual graphs of officially promulgated achievement standards statements. Conceptual graphs or knowledge maps of achievement standards reveal the macrostructure of the learning domain modeled by those standards and support higher-level understanding by teachers and students. The work builds on the conceptual framework of the AAAS knowledge maps by providing the means to flexibly define and deploy new relationship schemas to fit the disparate modeling needs of the nearly 740 learning standards documents in the ASN repository. Using an RDF-based, node-link representation of learning goals and the relationships among them, the ASN Knowledge Map Service will provide the framework to correlate educational resources to nodes in conceptual models in order to augment more conventional mechanisms of discovery and retrieval in digital libraries

Highly erosive glaciers on Mars - the role of water

International audiencePolewards of 30 • in each hemisphere, the surface of Mars hosts a suite of landforms reminiscent of glacial landscapes on Earth. Amongst these landforms are: 1) Viscous Flow Features (VFF), which resemble glaciers on Earth and are thought to contain large volumes of water ice, 2) martian gullies which are km-scale features resembling water-eroded gullies on Earth and 3) arcuate ridges thought to be moraines from previous glaciations. Gullies have been long-associated with a surface unit originally called "pasted-on terrain" and now often called the "latitude dependant mantle". Arcuate ridges are often found at the base of hillslopes with gullies, but are also found on hillslopes with pasted-on terrain and no gullies. We have found a systematic lowering of the slope of the bedrock exposure located topographically above the pasted-on terrain whether that same slope hosts gullies or not. The lowered bedrock exposures display a different surface texture from bedrock exposed on other parts of the crater wall and from fresh crater walls-it appears fragmented and has reduced relief. Using 1-m-digital elevation models from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) we compared the slopes of eight "eroded" craters and seven unmodified craters. We estimated their age using the crater size-frequency distribution of small craters on their ejecta blankets. From this information we calculated bedrock retreat rates for the eroded craters and found they were up to ∼103 m Myr-1-equivalent to erosion rates of wet-based glaciers on Earth. This is several orders of magnitude higher than previous estimates of erosion by VFF (10-2-101 m Myr-1), which themselves are roughly equivalent to cold-based glaciers on Earth. Such erosion rates are sufficient to erase previously existing landforms, such as martian gullies. We hypothesise, therefore, that the pasted-on terrain is a glacial deposit, overturning its previous interpretation as an airfall deposit of ice nucleated on dust. We maintain the interpretation of the arcuate ridges as moraines, but further conclude that they are likely the result of glaciotectonic deformation of sub-marginal and proglacial sediment in the presence of sediment pore-water. We do not support the generation of large quantities of glacial meltwater because it would have broken-up and degraded the arcuate ridges and pasted-on terrain an produced a suite of landforms (e.g., hummocky moraine, lacustrine forms, outwash plains, eskers) which are not observed

Mechanics of limb bone loading during terrestrial locomotion in river cooter turtles (Pseudemys concinna)

Studies of limb bone loading during terrestrial locomotion have focused primarily on birds and mammals. However, data from a broader functional and phylogenetic range of species are critical for understanding the evolution of limb bone function and design. Turtles are an interesting lineage in this context. Although their slow walking speeds and robust limb bones might lead to low locomotor forces and limb bone stresses similar to other non-avian reptiles, their highly sprawled posture could produce high bending loads, leading to high limb bone stresses similar to those of avian and mammalian species, as well as high torsion. To test between these possibilities, we evaluated stresses experienced by the femur of river cooter turtles (Pseudemys concinna) during terrestrial walking by synchronizing measurements of three-dimensional joint kinematics and ground reaction forces (GRFs) during isolated hindlimb footfalls. Further, we evaluated femoral safety factors for this species by comparing our locomotor stress calculations with the results of mechanical property tests. The net GRF magnitude at peak tensile bone stress averaged 0.35 BW (body weight) and was directed nearly vertically for the middle 40–65% of the contact interval, essentially orthogonal to the femur. Peak bending stresses experienced by the femur were low (tensile: 24.9±9.0 MPa; compressive: –31.1±9.1 MPa) and comparable to those in other reptiles, yet peak shear stresses were higher than those in other reptiles, averaging 13.7±4.2 MPa. Such high torsion is present despite cooters lacking a large tail, a feature that has been hypothesized to contribute to torsion in other reptiles in which the tail is dragged along the ground. Comparison of femoral stresses to measurements of limb bone mechanical properties in cooters indicates safety factors to yield of 13.9 in bending and 6.3 in torsion, considerably higher than values typical for birds and mammals, and closer to the elevated values calculated for other reptile species. Thus, not only do turtle limb bones seem considerably `over-designed\u27 for resisting the loads that they encounter, but comparisons of bone loading across tetrapod lineages are consistent with the hypothesis that low limb bone loads, elevated torsion and high safety factors may be primitive features of limb bone design