Classroom Action Research: Using Semantic Mapping in Teaching Descriptive Paragraph

This classroom action research conducted to 38 participants at the seventh grade class D of SMPN 29 in 2011/2012 academic years. It tries to improve their writing skill by applying semantic mapping strategy. The researcher collecting writing tests, observations, field notes, and interview as the instrument. The date reveals that improvement exists after the treatment on the students' writing skill. The data indicates that some factors influenced their improvement. The first was brainstorming process that led them easy to convey and think about the ideas. The second was the categorization process that made them easy to determine kinds of the idea. The third was the mapping process made them easy to write a good descriptive paragraph. The last was the teacher's roles facilitated them to have an effective class

The politicisation of evaluation: constructing and contesting EU policy performance

Although systematic policy evaluation has been conducted for decades and has been growing strongly within the European Union (EU) institutions and in the member states, it remains largely underexplored in political science literatures. Extant work in political science and public policy typically focuses on elements such as agenda setting, policy shaping, decision making, or implementation rather than evaluation. Although individual pieces of research on evaluation in the EU have started to emerge, most often regarding policy “effectiveness” (one criterion among many in evaluation), a more structured approach is currently missing. This special issue aims to address this gap in political science by focusing on four key focal points: evaluation institutions (including rules and cultures), evaluation actors and interests (including competencies, power, roles and tasks), evaluation design (including research methods and theories, and their impact on policy design and legislation), and finally, evaluation purpose and use (including the relationships between discourse and scientific evidence, political attitudes and strategic use). The special issue considers how each of these elements contributes to an evolving governance system in the EU, where evaluation is playing an increasingly important role in decision making

Research on nonlinear optical materials: an assessment

The seven papers making up this assessment are based on the Workshop on Nonlinear Optical Materials held in April 1986

Problematisations of Complexity: On the Notion and Production of Diverse Complexities in Healthcare Interventions and Evaluations

Within the literature on the evaluation of health (policy) interventions, complexity is a much-debated issue. In particular, many claim that so-called ‘complex interventions’ pose different challenges to evaluation studies than apparently ‘simple interventions’ do. Distinct ways of doing evaluation entail particular ontologies and epistemologies of complexity. They differ in terms of whether they define complexity as a quantitative trait of interventions, whether they see evaluation as part of or outside the intervention, and whether complexity can be regarded as an emergent property of the intervention and its evaluation. In practice, evaluators and commissioners of large health care improvement programmes rely on different, sometimes contradictory, repertoires about what it means to conduct a ‘good’ evaluation. This is an ongoing matter negotiated between and among commissioners, researchers, and—sometimes—programme managers. In particular, notions of evaluability, usefulness and distance/independence are problematised in different ways and with diverse consequences, which, in turn, produce other notions and layers of complexity such as temporal, institutional and affective complexities. When (social science) researchers claim that one method or another is better able to grasp complexity, they elide the issue that any methodological choice emphasises some complexities and lets others fade into the background. Analysing the practicalities and emotions involved in evaluation studies opens up the notion of complexity to analytical scrutiny, and suggests a basis for co-theorising between biomedical, public health and social scientists (including Science and Technology Studies scholars)

Policy monitoring in the EU: The impact of institutions, implementation, and quality

Policy monitoring is often seen as a crucial ingredient of policy evaluation, but theoretically informed empirical analyses of real-world policy monitoring practices are still rare. This paper addresses this gap by focusing on climate policy monitoring in the European Union, which has a relatively stringent system of greenhouse gas monitoring but a much less demanding approach to monitoring policies. It explores how institutional settings, policy implementation, and the quality of information may impact the practices and politics of policy monitoring. Drawing on quantitative regression models and qualitative interviews, it demonstrates that policy monitoring has evolved over time and is itself subject to implementation pressures, but also exhibits learning effects that improve its quality. In further developing both everyday policy monitoring practices and academic understanding of them, there is a need to pay attention to their design—specifically, the impact of any overarching rules, the institutional support for implementation, and the criteria governing the quality of the information they deliver. In short, policy monitoring should be treated as a governance activity in its own right, raising many different design challenges

On modified simple reacting spheres kinetic model for chemically reactive gases

Versão dos autores para esta publicação.We consider the modiffed simple reacting spheres (MSRS) kinetic model that, in addition to the conservation of energy and momentum, also preserves the angular momentum in the collisional processes. In contrast to the line-of-center models or chemical reactive models considered in [1], in the MSRS (SRS) kinetic models, the microscopic reversibility (detailed balance) can be easily shown to be satisfied, and thus all mathematical aspects of the model can be fully justi ed. In the MSRS model, the molecules behave as if they were single mass points with two internal states. Collisions may alter the internal states of the molecules, and this occurs when the kinetic energy associated with the reactive motion exceeds the activation energy. Reactive and non-reactive collision events are considered to be hard spheres-like. We consider a four component mixture A, B, A*, B*, in which the chemical reactions are of the type A + B = A* + B*, with A* and B* being distinct species from A and B. We provide fundamental physical and mathematical properties of the MSRS model, concerning the consistency of the model, the entropy inequality for the reactive system, the characterization of the equilibrium solutions, the macroscopic setting of the model and the spatially homogeneous evolution. Moreover, we show that the MSRS kinetic model reduces to the previously considered SRS model (e.g., [2], [3]) if the reduced masses of the reacting pairs are the same before and after collisions, and state in the Appendix the more important properties of the SRS system.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologi

Biological flora of Central europe: Baldellia ranunculoides (Alismataceae)

Baldellia ranunculoides (L.) Parl. (Alismataceae) is a taxonomically problematic aquatic plant with an historically ill-defined distribution and global conservation status. This paper finds morphological, ecological and molecular evidence for two distinct taxa, probably best described as subspecies: (1) B. ranunculoides subsp. ranunculoides and (2) B. ranunculoides subsp. repens and provides detailed distribution data on their overlapping range, in different habitats, across the cool, high rainfall areas of western Europe and west Mediterranean. The two subspecies are amongst the relatively large number of threatened European and north Africa aquatic plants and this paper provides a systematic review of their relative conservation pressures and management needs, with particular emphasis on the status of both taxa in central Europe. Other observations indicate probable evolutionary relationships within B. ranunculoides s.l. and its associated taxa and the review points out where these and other research topics could potentially be pursued

Neoliberalism and the origins of public management

There is a rich literature on the emergence of new public management in the 1980s yet surprisingly little about the historical and social lineages of this movement. The scholarship on public management generally suggests that it was born out of the neoliberal critique of the state. The public sector would have thus borrowed corporate practices concerned with performance in order to instil market-like competition and make efficiency gains. This article challenges this reading by showing that concerns with performance management emerged instead from new planning technologies developed in the US military sector. I argue that these planning practices, initially developed at the RAND corporation, would radically transform governance by changing the way in which decision makers consider data about performance and use it to develop strategies or policies. I then explore the impact of this new approach on both corporate and public governance. I show how these ideas were translated for business studies and public administration in order to radically transform both fields and ‘make them more scientific’. As I show, this process contributed directly to the rise of what became called public management and provided new planning tools that radically transformed how we think about governance