PRINCIPALS’ PERCEPTIONS OF THE IMPORTANCE OF TEACHER CERTIFICATION IN RURAL CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS

The literature associated with principals\u27 perceptions of certified/uncertified teachers within private Christian schools is limited, specifically in rural communities. Therefore, little is known about principals’ perceptions of the importance of teacher certification in rural Christian schools. The purpose of the study was to evaluate principals’ perceptions concerning the pedagogical practices of certified teachers as compared to the pedagogical practices of teachers who are not certified. Specific to this study, teacher certification was defined as certification earned through the state or certification through a school-accrediting organization. A total of 82 principals were surveyed and asked to identify their perceptions of the importance of teacher certification and its impact on student achievement in their schools, with 41 private Christian school principals responding to the survey. The study was quantitative and non-experimental by research design, and the specific methodology was a survey research approach. Upon analysis of the study participants’ responses, the conclusion can be drawn that the professional practice dimension of instructional strategies was most associated with and predictive in educational practices that positively impact student achievement

Fast and Efficient Discrimination of Traveling Salesperson Problem Stimulus Difficulty.

The Travelling Salesperson Problem (TSP) is a computationally difficult combinatorial optimization problem. In spite of its relative difficulty human solvers are able to generate close-to-optimal solutions in a close-to-linear time frame, and it has been suggested that this is due to the visual system’s inherent sensitivity to certain geometric properties of TSP stimuli. In the current study we employed a novel experimental paradigm in which we presented participants with sets of four TSP stimuli that varied in terms of their relative solution difficulty and asked them to indicate which of the four stimuli they would prefer to solve. The results indicated that the participants’ choice frequencies followed the same ordering as the stimuli’s empirical solution difficulty; i.e., easy-to-solve stimuli were chosen with a higher frequency than hard-to-solve stimuli. It is suggested that these results provide further evidence of the speed and efficiency of human processing of TSPs, and provide further evidence implicating the role of rapid visuo-perceptual organization in generating TSP solutions. An analysis of the geometric properties of the stimuli uncovered a number of factors that may have influenced the choice preferences of participants in the current experiment, and the performance quality of participants in previous experiments

Light and Temperature Thresholds for Take-Off by Aphids

RESP-624