Evaluating the Impact and Determinants of Student Team Performance: Using LMS and CATME Data

Practitioners find it difficult to allocate grades to individual students based on their contributions to the team project. They often use classroom observation of teamwork and student peer evaluations to differentiate an individual’s grade from the group’s grade, which can be subjective and imprecise. We used objective data from student activity logs from our Learning Management System (LMS) as well as peer evaluations from the Comprehensive Assessment of Team Member Effectiveness’ website (CATME.org) to determine impacts on team grades and peer evaluations. We found that student activity in our LMS and conflict scores from peer evaluations (CATME) do correlate with grades, as do GPAs and credits earned at the College. We also found that, while the class was in session, we could use the data from the LMS and CATME scores to intervene with those teams that were experiencing conflict to help them learn productive conflict-resolution skills

Industrial Conflict, the Quality of Worklife, and the Productivity Slowdown in U.S. Manufacturing

Productivity analysis generally omits the study of labor performed per labor hour hired. It therefore fails to identify two important determinants of productivity: workplace conflict and industrial accidents. Consideration of the effect of deteriorating work relation s increases the proportion of the variance of productivity growth explained for 1951-80 by 37 percent above technical models; and social-relations variables alone explain almost two-thirds of the productivity slowdown of 1973-80. The seemingly small impact of the energy crisis is also clarified: the labor-effort/labor-hours distinction implies that the energy/labor ratio is subject to measurement error.

Technical and Social Determinants of Productivity Growth in Bituminous Coal Mining, 1955-1980

The severe productivity slowdown in coal mining in the 1970s has been widely attributed to the Coal Mine Health and Safety Act. However, other variables also warrant attention. Increasing unrest in the coal fields and challenges to both the Mine workers Union and coal operators also characterized the period. In particular, strikes over working conditions skyrocketed. New pollution controls and the oil crisis caused structural shifts in the demand for coal, impinging on productivity. This econometric study documents the salience of social determinants of the productivity slowdown controlling for these factors; the conclusion explores implications for how to conceptualize productivity.Bituminous; Coal Mining; Mine; Mines; Mining; Oil; Productivity

A general refutation of Okishio’s theorem and a proof of the falling rate of profit

This is the first published general refutation of the Okishio theorem. An earlier refutation based on a specific example was published by Kliman and McGlone in 1988. Okishio’s theorem, published in 1961, asserts that if real wages stay constant, the rate of profit necessarily rises in consequence of any cost-reducing technical change. It proves this within a simultaneous equation (general equlibrium) framework. This paper establishes that this proposition is false within a differential equation (temporal) approach. In such a framework the denominator of the rate of profit rises continuously, regardless of whether or not there is technical change, unless capitalist consumption exceeds profit, as occurs in a slump. Okishio himself asserts that his theorem is ‘contrary to Marx’s Gesetz des Tendentiellen Falls der Profitrate’ – contrary to Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. This assertion is, within the literature, universally taken to be the substantive content of the ‘Okishio Theorem’. Thus, if Marx’s approach to value is in fact temporal, and not simultaneist, this assertion by Okishio is false, since it applies not to Marx’s own theory, but to the interpretation of that theory subsequently attributed to Marx by a specific school of thought represented principally by Bortkiewicz, Sweezy, Morishima, Seton, and Steedman. The subsequent accumulation of hermeneutic evidence strongly supports the thesis that Marx’s theory is temporalist and not simultaneist. Since the Okishio theorem makes the general assertion that the rate of profit must necessarily rise if there are cost-saving technical changes, and since Kliman and McGlone demonstrate a particular case in which cost-saving technical change leads to a fall in the profit rate, the Kliman-McGlone paper is the first published refutation of the Okishio theorem. The present paper is a generalisation of this refutation which establishes the precise conditions under which the profit rate rise or falls, and establishes the general result that the profit rate necessarily falls as a consequence of capitalist accumulation with a constant real wage, until and unless accumulation ceases in value terms. Consequently the mathematical findings set out in this paper, refute the Okishio Theorem